Instances of this sort might be multiplied; but for the present I have named enough for my purpose, which is, to prove that it is unnecessary to trace the arts from country to country, or from house to house, to give them, as it were, a formal genealogy; but that we may expect to find that, circumstances being tolerably alike, the fine arts will spring up in all nations as they advance in civilization. The progress of art is a separate question, and must have been influenced by many circumstances not naturally connected with it. Hence we see it in one nation beginning in splendour and advancing rapidly for a time; when suddenly it is stopped as by an enchanter’s wand: the handicraft may improve, but the form, character, and spirit, remain for ever fixed. In another, on the contrary, it advances, firm and free: every age improves it: and its career is only cut short when the nation itself sinks before a foreign conqueror! Differently again, but still influenced by the circumstances of society, we have beheld the arts almost touching upon perfection and then withering, by slow and sickly decay, till all that ennobled them has disappeared, and they seem fitted for nothing but to adorn the ephemeral trophies of fashion or caprice. Having thus so far cleared the ground, I will endeavour to collect the scattered notices concerning art, in the most ancient times, and among the most anciently civilized nations; and so prepare the way for more connected details, when we reach the period of common history. The book of Genesis names one of the great grandsons of Cain, as the first who wrought and graved on metal, and another as the inventor of musical instruments,--a proof that the arts were cultivated in very early stages of civilization[5]. Again, within four centuries after the flood, we find that men had made images of wood, and stone, and metal, to worship. They had not only built them cities, but they had tasted of the barbarous civilities of war; they had erected trophies; poets had extolled the exploits of heroes; and sculptors had already fashioned their images, to adore. Constant tradition names Terah, the father of Abraham, as a maker of images; and that the worship of them continued in his family for nearly two hundred years, notwithstanding the call and conversion of Abraham, is proved by Rachel’s theft of the images of Laban, when she left her father’s house to accompany her husband to the land of Canaan. But, if we may believe Greek and Egyptian tradition, more than a century before the call of Abraham, a colony had been planted at Sicyon, by an Egyptian leader, Ægialeus,[6] who brought with him the knowledge of sculpture and painting, and founded the earliest and purest school of Greek art. Another civilized colony, from Egypt, soon settled in Greece. Inachus founded the city of Argos, while Abraham was still an idolater, in Ur.