The most natural course for the student of architectural history is to limit himself mainly and firstly (though not eventually, perhaps) to those styles from which our own architecture, whether native or borrowed, whether living or revived, is lineally descended--“to look to the rock whence we were hewn.” And truly it is a right glorious genealogy which we can boast. The history of architecture is the history of civilisation, for architecture unites and embraces the sister arts, and art is the visible exponent of civilisation. Our more Western civilisation is distinct from that of the far East; and, without disparagement to the latter, its study may be viewed as separate from it. Our own branch of civilisation and art may be said to have arisen on the banks of the Euphrates, of the Tigris, and of the Nile, and to have moved westward with a quiet course along the genial shores of the Mediterranean; while the Eastern branch took a contrary direction by India and China, reaching Japan, and perhaps the opposite continent of America. Let us, however, confine our attention to our own branch. Though the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris were the nursery of our traditions, and though recent discovery has made us in some degree familiar with their architectural monuments, we, nevertheless, fail to trace them back to a period which will compare with the antiquity of the remains on the banks of the Nile. In studying the one we long for relics carrying us back to a date even approaching that of the known history of the inhabitants, while in the other we are perplexed to find chronological room for works stretching back into such unknown regions of the past. Egypt must, we may fear, ever remain a land of mystery. Its chronology seems inscrutable; its painting, its sculpture, and its architecture alike wonderful and mysterious. One flash of historical light shines upon its early days--like the lightning upon the midnight landscape--in the Scriptural history of those three centuries during which the people of Israel sojourned there, and helped in their slavery to prepare materials for its structures. After this it seems again involved in indistinctness till the period of its decline. Its monuments seem continuous through all these ages, and even onwards to the days of the Roman Empire; but how early they commenced no antiquary has yet been able to show; while the earliest and latest monuments--those preceding Greek architecture by, perhaps, fifteen hundred years, and those erected when that art was in decay--as clearly belong to one and the same style as do the earlier and later of our own Mediæval buildings.