same, they discerned equally the one truth bound up in the old creed and the new, and expressed it with equal skill and conviction in these twin litanies of stone--so the workers wrought and the work was perfected by them. The decorators in charge of the finishing touches, embellished this city of temples with a wealth of ornament which in the quivering glare of day, despite ravage of time and pillage, clothes sanctity in robes of encrusted winsomeness. The sculpture of the _chandi_ Sewu, says a visitor of a century ago, is tasteful, delicate and chaste. Much of what he based his judgment on, has since been carried off or demolished, but what remains fully bears him out: foliage and festoons, garlands and clustered flowers, distributed over facings divided into lozenges and circles by pilasters and fantastically curved lines, with lions, tigers, cattle and deer in ever varying abundance, awaken reminiscences of the carvings which excited our admiration at Prambanan and lead to the question: Did the richly framed panellings of the twenty-four external wall-spaces of the central temple exhibit scenes from the epics and fable-books, besides this sumptuous adornment, to match the almost uniform bas-reliefs of the lesser structures? If so, they must have rivalled the artistic excellence of the _Ramayana_ reliefs which beautify the shrines of Siva, Brahma and Vishnu. And a second question arises: Was the central temple the depository of a relic? In connection with this query it deserves to be noticed that, generally speaking and excepting statuary, the internal wall-spaces of the _chandi_ Sewu lack ornament, evince a soberness in marked contrast to the extravagant representations of the abode of bitterness, as if sign- or house-painters had been entrusted with the illustration of Dante’s _Inferno_, repulsive attempts à la Wiertz minus the talent to be admired in the Rue Vautier at Brussels, nightmares of crude drawing and cruder colouring to depict perverse torture, I found in eastern edifices raised to satisfy priestly conventions, even in Ceylon, the island of the doctrine that the Buddha next to dwell on earth is the Metteya Buddha, the Buddha of Kindness. More in harmony with the soul’s yearning for his kingdom to come, is the lotus motive happily adapted to the decoration of the _chandi_ Sewu, especially in one of the partially preserved small temples of the outer file, to the east of the southern entrance: from a strong stem which separates into three branches, on three of the sides, the entrance taking up the fourth, three lotus-flowers spring from the soil to carry, in a finely chiselled niche, the (vanished) image of the expected one, the gone-before and coming-after. A few of the outlying buildings have plain facings without any ornament at all, from which it has been concluded that here too something happened to stop the labour in progress. Where completed, the plump-bellied flowerpot, a familiar