The humble gravestone of the village churchyard is received as legal evidence of death,--it speaks a name, a date, and burial,--the Acropolis, as the tomb of Athens, can do no more, save that it is the record of a nation's downfall, and not a peasant's. Sculpture can speak even of the Religious mind of the deceased,--bring it to memory, and instruct us as to the means whereby the departed attained his hope of Salvation,--it presents the transparent medium through which he gazed upon futurity, and believed in his approach to God: for the Cross or Crescent upon a tombstone, needs no other language to inform the passer-by, that the departed was a follower of Christ or Mahomet! If then the mind of a solitary corpse can, as it were again be vivified, by merely contemplating the sculptured emblem of the dead, and that from a single gravestone, may not entire nations be historically resuscitated, when the human eye and mind are brought to gaze upon, and investigate whole Cities of Ruins, with their sculptured Temples, Tombs, and Palaces? Yes! though they should be found amid the darkened forests of the Western Continent, where the panther and beasts of prey were thought alone to dwell. Yes! Palenque, Copan, Chiapas, and their muraled sisters, have historic voices for posterity from their "cities of the dead," the Pompeii and the Herculaneii of the Western Hemisphere,--yet more aged and venerable than even those victims of Vesuvius! Architecture and Sculpture then claim the right to be received as undeniable evidences of historical record; and, as such, those two branches of the Fine Arts will be admitted by the reader in support, and in illustration of the Epoch now under investigation. Ictinus, Phidias, and Praxiteles,--Bramante, Jones, and Wren,--Canova, Chantrey, and Greenough, may justly be regarded as historians; for from the volumes of their art, events and æras can be traced and established. SECTION II. PAINTING. Painting,--the most beautiful in the triumvirate of the Arts, proudly follows Sculpture in her classic path,--the precedence only yielded as to one of elder birth, who attired in her snow-white raiment marches forward with majestic step, casting her shadow to the confines of History; while her graceful follower, clad in the rainbow-tinted garments, and having no shadow of herself, receives her coloured brilliancy from the glowing Sun of Genius, and thence in gratitude reflects back her pictorial light to illuminate the mind! This delightful art may be defined to be a species of poetic and historic writing, and subservient to the same ends--the expression of ideas and events--of Nature and her children. It bears resemblance to the diamond in the dark recesses of the earth, which by its own innate quality emits sparkling rays of light, thereby not only discovering its own splendour, but giving a lustre to obscurity.