trees form a fitting background to the picture. The purport of the four-lined cuneiform inscription in front of the king is that Sennacherib, king of hosts, king of Assyria, sat upon his throne of state, and the spoil of the city of Lachish passed before him. But magnificent as is the throne upon which Sennacherib is here seated, it must have been far surpassed in splendour by his royal throne at Nineveh; the latter was apparently made of rock crystal, some of the fragments of which are still preserved. Sennacherib was succeeded after some intestine feuds by his son Esarhaddon; Esarhaddon carried on the traditions of his predecessors in warring against Phœnicia, and reducing Babylonia, but the distinguishing feature of his reign was the occupation of Lower Egypt by the Assyrians in 672 B.C. Unfortunately we have very few sculptural monuments of this king, though it must not be assumed from this that he was a whit less proud of his feats than his father, but his reign has practically no interest for the student of art and affords us little material for the pursuit of our present subject. This remark, however, is very far from applying to Ashur-bani-pal, his all-glorious son, whose triumphs in the field of art were as great in their way as those achieved in the battle-field. Ashur-bani-pal came to the throne in 668 B.C. and ruled some forty-two years, during which he raised the power of Assyria to a point never reached before and never reached again. The more noteworthy events of Ashur-bani-pal’s reign as well as the consequential effects of his taste for literature have been treated of elsewhere; suffice it to say here that this outburst of military, intellectual and artistic activity was but the supreme effort of an empire whose strength was exhausted and whose vitality was impaired, and even before the death of Ashur-bani-pal the meteoric splendour of her glory had begun to pale. It was as it were the final sickness of an aged man who had weathered many storms and whose recuperative power had hitherto risen to every occasion, at last however the final crisis comes and all is over. But that golden era of Assyrian art, so brief and short-lived, has nevertheless been immortalized by the artists of that day in those stone slabs which now form one of the most precious possessions of the British Museum. Ashur-bani-pal’s exploits in the hunting field have been already referred to, and it is these that he chose to record pictorially upon his palace-walls rather than his victories on the field of battle, and it is to this choice that we owe those masterpieces of animal representation, which otherwise might never have been crystallized into concrete and permanent results.