is replete with complicated details, and of pretension above the means of the artist. Now, judging according to the natural inferences from these facts, and according to the acknowledged precepts of imitative art, this latter style, with its defects in keeping, has evidently arisen in consequence of superinducing a laboured and injudiciously aspiring taste upon the more severe and simple conceptions of a primitive composition. Similar principles may be obviously traced in the farther progress of the arts eastward. China is admitted, on the most learned authorities, to have been planted by colonists from the banks of the Indus and the Ganges; and in the unchanging modes of that country, we seem almost to catch glimpses of the aboriginal knowledge of our race. Yet how striking the difference between the ornate and the frittered labours of the Chinese compared with the works either of India or of Egypt! Even their great wall is but the accumulation of petty exertions--an evidence of numerical, not of scientific energy. CHAPTER II. IN the previous chapter, Egypt has been exhibited as the centre of intelligence in the history of ancient art; and having explained the connexion which can still be traced in the few remaining monuments of the East, we now turn from the parent source to trace the progress of refinement in the West, where, first in Greece, the human mind awoke to the full consciousness of its capacious grasp, and of its exquisite sensibilities. The universal origin of sculptural representation, already noticed, in the alliance which man forms with natural objects as shadowing forth the affections or the regrets of the heart, is nowhere so conspicuous as in Greece. Here art was poetry from the beginning; her consecrated groves, her winding streams, her flowery plains, the azure depths of her mountains, became at once the residence and the representatives of those beings, whether divine or heroic, who constituted her theology. By a people, simple in their habits, yet ardent in their feelings, this early faith was long remembered,--such reminiscences deeply tincturing much of what is most exquisitely descriptive and sentimental in Grecian poetry. But a belief so abstract, so untangible in its forms, and so remotely addressed to the senses, would soon prove insufficient to maintain effectual empire over the passions. Attempts were speedily made to secure, as it were, the more immediate presence and protection of the objects of veneration or of worship. Men's desires in this respect, however, as in all other instances, would necessarily be limited by their knowledge and their powers. In the primitive ages, accordingly, objects rude and unfashioned as we learn from history, were adored as representing the divinities of Greece. Even to the time of Pausanias, stones and trunks of trees, rough and uninformed by art, were preserved in the temples: and though replaced by forms almost divine, still regarded with peculiar veneration, as the