Bearing in mind that the Assyrians were never a statue-making people, and never attempted to follow the example of the Egyptians—do we find them influencing the sculptural art of any other people in work like that of the Assyrians? This question is answered at once by the remains found at Persepolis, where there are to be seen similar winged and human-headed lions and bulls, and sculptured slabs, but no statues either in the round or in alto-relievo. The ruins of the palaces of Cambyses, Darius, and Xerxes, the date of which is from 560 B. C. to the conquests of Alexander the Great (331 B. C.), show only sculptural remains left, after all the soft brick walls and the wooden beams and rafters have long perished. Persian sculptural art since those days never advanced to the dignity of statuary, but like its Assyrian predecessor stopped short where Greek art began to develop. The same is to be observed of that ramification of the Assyrian arts which is to be traced in the building of the temple of Jerusalem under Solomon, which, however, was some five centuries before the time of Cambyses, and about the same length of time after the settling of the Israelites in the Delta of the Nile (1550 B. C.). The law of Moses was sufficient to prevent any sculpture in the likeness of living things; but the cherubim, with their wings, seem to have been borrowed from the Assyrians. The temple was, no doubt, built of stone and cedar-wood after the manner of the Assyrians, and with a profusion of ornament in carving, of valuable marbles, wood, and embossed work in precious metals. The colossal sculptures in the rock-cut temples of India, whether taken as derived from the Assyrian centre or not, may be classed with that style as semi-barbaric and naturalistic, with a superadded symbolism which only led to the most extravagant deformities of the human figure to express the power and attributes of a deity. Statuary proper never existed in any shape of beauty like the human form, throughout Persia, India, and China, and there is no sign of any disposition amongst the Asiatics to learn the art from their European conquerors; it is not in their nature. SELECTIONS FROM AMERICAN LITERATURE. MODERN STATE OF ANCIENT COUNTRIES. By GEORGE SANDYS.