The impression made on him by the mixture of general grandeur of outline and dimension with profuse richness of detail was never effaced. It seems at this time to have kindled in his mind an intensity of devotion to his art hitherto unknown, and to have stirred him up to extraordinary labour and study. Temple after temple opened upon him till the view of Philæ crowned the magnificence of the whole. Sketching for Mr. Baillie, copying sketches, where possible, for himself, elaborately describing in his journal what was then an almost unknown treasure-house of ruins, “in comparison with which even those of Greece and Rome sink into insignificance, although the Parthenon and the Pantheon still keep their places as models of architectural excellence"--he drank in deeply the influence of the scene, and seemed in three months to have lived through whole years of study. Esneh, their next halting-place, appeared then less striking than Dendera; but his second visit corrected the impression, and led him to think the great portico “the finest of all he had seen in Egypt,” half concealed though it was by rubbish and by modern excrescences. Both at Esneh and at Dendera he gives an elaborate description of the remarkable zodiacs, which appeared to show a knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, and which were then little known except from the Memoirs of the French Institute, a work of which he remarks elsewhere that he found it “full of glaring and unpardonable errors.” Edfou was then being excavated by M. Drouetti, sufficiently for examination; the sculpture appeared to be of a high order, but the general effect of the temple with the grand peristyle of columns (enclosing an area of 146 ft. by 108 in front) unsatisfactory in spite of its size, for want of due proportion and symmetry in its parts. On the other side of the river they visited the ruins of the temples at Eleithias, some half-excavated in the rock, and the famous tombs, which had then recently been opened, and had given by their hieroglyphics and painting a new glimpse of the life of the ancient Egyptians.