the principles which direct it, the vicissitudes it experiences; for these are subjects in which the theory and example of the ancients can be a useful and practical lesson to us, or at least an instructive and interesting spectacle.
The first question which shall present itself to our meditations, is to inquire, whether Grecian art arose and was developed under foreign influence, or whether it was indebted alone for its first essays and its ultimate form to its own powers alone, and to its own inspiration; a question indeed far less important than is generally thought, and which in the manner in which it is generally introduced, presents a subject matter for curiosity rather than any real utility. That in the first ages in which art was as yet but a rude handicraft, in which rude idols, fashioned for the necessities of religion, received the more readily the homage of superstition, inasmuch as they presented scarcely any feature of imitation, the Greeks may have followed and copied the Egyptians, is of little consequence to the history of art. Art commences in reality but where imitation begins; and if the Greeks had never done but what the Egyptians always did, that is, reproduce eternally figures which figures never had any type in the world, no existence in nature, in other words, only constantly repeat objects without reality, it might be sustained with some foundation, that the one had imitated the other; but it can be said with still greater certainty of one and the other, that they never had any art. In thus reducing the question to its genuine terms, we shall say, as long as the Greeks produced nothing but figures devoid of all imitation, it is of little consequence whether they did so through instinct or incapability, as infant nations do everywhere, and as children also in civilised nations do everywhere, or whether they followed a foreign impulse, that of Egypt or any other country. This question, thus stated, is foreign to the history of art, and under this view it is, to speak the truth, of slender interest; but there is something else in this question which may suggest more serious considerations and lead to a more complete solution which I shall now dwell on. If there is a fact well authenticated by the attestation of history, by all the monuments of antiquity, it is this, that art, considering it here only in a technical and natural view, I mean the power of producing images of men more or less resembling men, remained constantly in Egypt at the same point, and that, on the contrary, in Greece, it was