We may naturally expect that, as long as painting is thus used, convenience alone would require the once admitted forms and colours to be invariable, and that precautions would be taken against innovation, even for improvement, lest the painted pages should become unintelligible. But the Chinese had advanced far beyond that. Their characters approach, even more nearly than hieroglyphics, to alphabetical writing, and yet their art remained stationary and at a very low point. It is very difficult to account for this among so ingenious a people. It was not that the Tartar conquest, by any direct influence, lessened their civilization or stopped their progress. We have undeniable witnesses to the contrary, in the Chinese histories, as interpreted by the missionaries and other learned orientalists; and, what is still more curious and satisfactory, in the writings of Marco Paulo, who accompanied the Tartar conqueror on his expedition. The religion of the Chinese, as Bhuddhists, is assuredly not calculated to call forth the genius of painting. The insipid Goorus do not, like the gods of the Hindoo or Greek mythologies, present subjects for fancy to play with; and the statues of Bhud, while they have all the stiffness, have none of the grandeur of the Egyptian gods. Perhaps, as the Chinese have always been a commercial nation, they contented themselves with cultivating the art of painting, just so far as to decorate their exquisite porcelain and lacquered ware for the market, and sought after nothing more. They had certainly attained to great manual dexterity, and the power of copying servilely whatever inanimate subjects were before them; and they had discovered the method of extracting colours from metallic substances, capable of bearing the furnace, as well as those of more obvious use, in the chalks and earths of their country: besides some of the finest varnishes in existence. We ought not to marvel that they did not attain, in their painting, to common, much less ideal beauty, when we reflect on the general character of form, in their own nation or their Tartar conquerors, which is very far below that of the Indians and their western neighbours. And we have, perhaps, no right to expect better human shapes than that of the portly mandarin and his crimp-footed lady, upon their plates and dishes. But their animals, whether painted, modelled in clay, or cast in metal, are little less distorted than their men: and as to perspective, linear, or aërial, they seem to have no sense of either[10]. In flowers and birds, their pencilling is delicate, and often true to admiration; but, even in these objects, except in treatises on botany or ornithology, their peculiar taste breaks out in monstrous combinations of leaves and flowers, that never grew in the same soil; and of beaks and wings, that were never hatched in the same nest.