Five or six centuries seem to have been sufficient for Greece and Italy to raise themselves to the pitch of refinement and culture suggested to us by the names of Pericles, of Alexander and Augustus. At first one is not amazed by this singular phenomenon. One thinks a satisfactory reason has been given for it by a few general statements as to the genius of those gifted races. But criticism has now grown to be more exacting. It has more precise observations and more numerous points of comparison at its command. It knows how slowly, especially in the first steps, collective and successive works are accomplished. It seeks for an explanation of such rapid progress in the duration and importance of the preliminary work carried out with untiring patience by the older societies, the laborious forerunners of the brilliant favourites of history. Without this long preparing of the ground, lasting at least some two or three thousand years, without the countless efforts of invention and the prolific activity that filled up that period, how much longer the nations of Southern Europe would have been in shaking themselves free of the barbarism in which Scythians and Sclaves, Celts and Germans were steeped until they were conquered by Rome. What turn things might have taken we cannot even guess, but of this we may be sure, that the world would not have witnessed when it did the marvellous and almost sudden appearance of the flowers of classic art and poetry. Now the industries of Egypt and Chaldæa won their great prestige, and the works with which they flooded all the countries within their reach awakened the plastic genius of the western races, because behind them there was an art, an art not without faults, but yet with no little originality and grandeur. In both countries architecture had created buildings whose wealth of decoration corresponded to their ample size, and gave point to the significance of their plans. The ambition of Chaldæa was no less high than that of Egypt. For size and general magnificence its great edifices might be looked upon as worthy rivals to those of the Nile valley, and yet we cannot say they deserve to be put quite on the same level. In the vast plains of the Euphrates those staged towers whose restoration we have attempted had a singular importance; they amazed the eye with their size, and pleased it with their brilliant colours; but they fell short of the nobility, the mysterious beauty and dignity of the Egyptian temples. Temples, sanctuaries, or palaces, all the great structures of Mesopotamia seem to us to suffer from a certain heaviness and want of variety, and they had another great fault. They bore in their bosoms the seeds of their own rapid dissolution. Unlike the halls of Carnac and Luxor they had no defences against the action of time and the violence of man.