=Sculpture.=--[By WHITWORTH WALLIS.]--The history of the birth and growth of sculpture, with no word for its decadence, death, and ultimate renaissance would alone be a subject difficult to compress into the space of a volume, but when there is to be added to that some account of the art in the time of the supremacy of its achievement, before it became tainted with decay, the task is vast indeed. Fortunately such a dissertation is not required in this place. The art of sculpture is not restricted, as most people think, to the carving of mere marble and stone. In its strict meaning it is the art of _cutting_ any material whatsoever into any required shape; but the word is now generally accepted for the art of representing anything by form, no matter what the material may be, or what the method of its making; so that the word “sculpture” applies to Sculpture proper, and to castings in bronze, as well as to the carving of gems, ivories, and to modelling in wax and clay. EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE.--In every part of the world, in modern as in ancient times, savage races have delighted to decorate their weapons with carving, and to make representations of men and animals, which they afterwards worshipped. But it was Egypt, that cradle-land of learning and of art, which seems to be the nation where first the rudeness of savage carving was brought under restraint and nurtured into Sculpture. What had previously been an amusement was changed by their priests into an art. But these very priests who first fostered the art were ultimately the means of stunting its growth and arresting its highest development. The reverence which long ages of worship caused the archaic statues to receive induced the priests, who were the representatives of learning and of wisdom, to make these old types symbolical of divine attributes, and it was considered sacrilegious to attempt to alter what had gradually come to be believed was the true likeness of the god. Thus religion, which was the kind foster-mother of the arts of sculpture and painting, came, later on, to be its most determined enemy. Whilst in Egypt Sculpture was being strangled by Convention, all progress being arrested, and all originality starved out of it by the regulations which bound it to its archaic form, a new race of artists arose along the shores and amidst the islands of the Mediterranean. In Greece Art found a new and happy home. Greek Sculpture, based on Egyptian precedent, and influenced greatly in its growth by Phœnician thought, gradually freed itself from all the trammels of the past, and formed a school of Sculpture, the results of which have never been equalled in all the after ages of art production.