Who, indeed, can read Sir William Jones’s pleasant abridgement of the Hindoo mythology, his translation of Sacontala, or the hymn to Camdeo, and not perceive that the Indians wanted neither imagination, nor subjects to exercise it upon, in their religion and poetry? But their florid religion, and exaggerated songs, were of later date, in all probability, than that grave and philosophical faith which gave the Brahmins their reputation in Greece and Egypt; and, perhaps, their more natural pieces of sculpture and their pictures belong to that later time rather than to the age of the gymnosophists; or if the Indian arts furnished examples to Egypt or Chaldea, we must seek those examples in the hewn rocks, which represent figures nearly as large as the Egyptian Memnon, with their hands attached to their sides, and their feet planted together, and of which some few still exist, within the Peninsula, and on the Indian side of the borders of Tartary[14]. What do we know of the arts of Chaldea, in very early times[15]? Babylon and Nineveh have, for thousands of years, been buried in utter ruin; and if here and there a bauble, such as the signet of a Satrap, or the breast-pin of a lady, be picked up, however delicately the cornelian or the onyx may be chiselled, the forms are stiff and angular, and nothing displays the freedom and grace that render art valuable. The great sculptured rocks met with in various parts of modern Persia, have everywhere the same character. But, upon the whole however, there is a graver and more majestic air than in the monuments of India, and a much greater dexterity of hand is displayed in the workmanship, but there is less nature in the design. As to painting, in that country, there are neither relics nor memorials, of earlier date than our æra[16]. It is with reverence, not unmixed with awe, that I approach the subject of Egyptian art: and here, as in India and the intermediate countries, I must consider its sculpture as the only satisfactory monument. I am aware that coloured subjects, by courtesy called pictures, have been discovered on the walls of tombs and caverns, by persons well qualified to examine and pronounce, as antiquaries, on their meaning and their merit. But they are, in composition, entirely sculpturesque; and many of them are, in fact, coloured basso-relievos. Belzoni told me he had seen, in Egypt, figures in relief wrought in stucco on the walls of some of the catacombs, which were coloured in simple unbroken colours. To these he ascribed a marvellous effect, and said, they were the grandest _pictures_ he had seen. Such also, I remember, was the language used by my enthusiastic friend Kestner, when, in 1827, he described to me the tombs of Egyptian character, opened the year before at Tarquinii, in the country of the ancient Etruscans.