The general conclusion, then, from these remarks, is, that there is but one period of real Egyptian sculpture, and that the genius and character of this indigenous and aboriginal art is to be discovered only in the most ancient monuments, having suffered various changes under the Greeks and under the Romans. In establishing this inference, we have not been guided by the often fanciful, always deceitful, analogies discoverable in the fluctuating style and varying productions of imitation, but have viewed these as directed by the steady operation of the laws and institutions of society, which govern the spirit and tendency of the arts themselves. During an interval of nearly twenty centuries previous to the era of Alexander, though diligently cultivated, sculpture had hardly attained any of the nobler qualities of invention. The system of taste and of government was in fact hostile to improvement in this art beyond a certain limit, or upon any principles, save those fixed on the very threshold of knowledge. The national polity, which will ever be found to guide the national taste, induced a preference of the immense and the durable; hence the grandeur of Egyptian architecture: but in statuary, such a character of design necessarily produced figures rigid and motionless. The essential elements of the grand and the beautiful--breadth and simplicity, are indeed present, but the effect is rarely elicited. The simple is seldom inspired by any feeling of the true, the natural, or the graceful; breadth, unrelieved by symmetry of parts, or expression of details, degenerates into inert magnitude. The colossal forms are the records only of power, of patience, and of labour; not the creations of intelligence and of genius. Sculpture also suffered from peculiar obstacles to its progress. Exclusively attached to the service of religion, its representations were confined to divinities, priests, and kings; personages whose modes and lineaments were unalterably fixed--fixed, too, from types, frequently of the most hideous description, at least ill managed, and little adapted to the objects or spirit of the art. This religion likewise admitted no images of human virtue or sympathy to mingle with its cold obstructions; thus denying to the Egyptian arts a source, which, to those of Greece, proved one of the richest and sweetest veins of ideal composition. The artist, therefore, even had he been allowed to depart from established but imperfect models, possessed no ennobling source whence to create new models of beauty or of grandeur. Imagination wanted materials, which neither the prescribed subject nor living nature, under these restrictions, could supply. Again, sculpture not only laboured under the general disadvantage of hereditary and unchanging professions; a national regulation which repressed every fortunate predilection of genius, but as a security against the possibility of innovation, slaves, educated under the immediate care of the priests, were