Architecture is the metaphysics of the fine arts, and should be made the basis of all researches in this department, since it is the oldest and bears the most comprehensive type. It teems with the oracular inscriptions of entombed empires, and either affords information where other testimonies are silent, or confirms the facts which more dubious history asserts. Within its ruined temples yet linger the echoes of cycles long since departed, and which symbolized on their track the mightiest impulses of emulative nations in those monuments which inventive genius, coalescing with constructive skill, stamped with the attractions of beauty and strength. Egyptian civilization was thoroughly exclusive, and possessed no disposition to diffuse itself. On the contrary, the Indo-Germanic race rapidly assimilated surrounding nations to itself, and with that energetic spirit of propagandism which was its primary element, made the reservoir of its accumulated worth the fountain of all subsequent culture. The great Surya people of northern India are supposed to be the original Cyclopœans who reared the gloomy grandeur of Egyptian Thebes, and the magnificence of Solomon's temple, who constructed the Catabothra of Bœotia, drained the valleys of Thessaly, constructed the canals of Ceylon, and left the venerable walls of Mycenæ on their westward course. The monuments of the East attest the unreasoning submission of thousands to despotic power, and teem with the reminiscences of gloomy superstition, but both in outline and execution, the spirit of the beautiful is wanting. Vestiges of Assyria, like an earlier Pompeii, have lately been disinterred, and we are permitted to look upon, perhaps, the identical figures on which the prophets gazed, and which so moved Aholibah, when "she saw men portrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans portrayed with vermilion, girdled with girdles upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look to, after the manner of the Babylonians of Chaldea, the land of their nativity." Ezek. xxiii. 14, 15. Persian art, judging from what has recently been brought to light, combined much of Egypt and Assyria in its manner. The types of wisdom and power, and even the Persian alphabet, were of Assyrian character.