intention of imitation; this is what I purpose to unfold here. Three principal causes for this stationary state of the arts in Egypt may be assigned; a physical conformation but little favourable to art, and uniform in its nature among all the individuals of the same caste; the nature of the government identified with religion; the conditions of the artists. As to the first point, it is not doubtful that at this primitive period, when the artists, I shall not say created, but received, in some way, the type of these idols, but that they sought to copy what they had before their eyes, what they saw in nature; this is what the instinct alone of man would lead one to believe, independently of historical testimony.

Children are seen in every country attempting to imitate, though imperfectly, what they see around them: and it is well known that savage nations, which are to mankind what children are to civil society, cannot conceive any other images of form, of colour, and of beauty, than those which are familiar to them. If the devil is black for white children, it is white for negroes; and it has been said with justice, that the Venus of the Hottentots would be a monster in Europe, as the Venus de' Medici would be a monster in Africa. The Egyptians, therefore, could not differ on that point from other men. Now, what idea of beauty could be conceived by artists, who had no other objects presented to their view than those in which the African conformation prevailed the thick lips, the sloping and depressed profile, the retreating and small chin, the prominent cheek-bones, the eyes on a level with the brow, the nose flattened, the complexion dark, the last feature attested by an expression which has become proverbial in antiquity? It results from the anatomical observations lately made on the skulls of mummies, that their conformation varied in Egypt, by reason of the different castes into which this nation was divided. Thus it is proved that the skulls of the mummies of the most common order, belong to quite a different race to those of the mummies expensively prepared. A conclusion was necessarily drawn from this fact, that the primitive population of Egypt was of two kinds; the people or the subject and enslaved part, originally from Ethiopia, and the caste of kings and priests, or the conquering or ruling caste, of Asiatic race, and probably of Indian extraction. The extreme narrowness of the figure above the hips, which is remarked in the greater number of statues of Egyptian women, has also been

justly considered as a feature of Indian conformation, which is in fact to be found at the present day among the Bayaderes. Lastly, all the testimonies of ancient and modern travellers agree on this point, that the configuration of the Egyptians was infinitely less beautiful and less favourable to art than that of the Greeks. Add to this that the absolute rigour with which the separation of the castes in ancient Egypt was maintained, must have powerfully contributed to perpetuate. that peculiar conformation, the type of the nation, and consequently to render art uniform, like its model. If, among our modern nations, where the increase of races is neither forbidden by the laws nor by customs, there is nevertheless to be remarked a sort of common physiognomy, of type, in some manner, national and domestic in families which are ever forming alliances among themselves and among nations who spread but little beyond their own country, what must it then have been in ancient Egypt, where the population was divided into two grand classes, which could never be connected one with the other, and these subdivided into several particular castes, in which each profession, hereditary in each family, invariably maintained, with the original type of the race, the impress and the physiognomy of the trade? We must therefore infer, what is corroborated by the observation of monuments, that art, already deprived in Egypt of a favourable model, did not even possess the resource of variety in the numerous individuals of this model. From the manner in which religion and policy had shaped man in Egypt, all individuals of a same family, all members of a same caste, must have so resembled one another, that almost all individuality had disappeared among them. The peculiar physiognomy of each of them was as if erased beneath the universal impress; the man of nature, the man of Egypt, must have disappeared under this kind of artificial man, created by institutions, so that we may say that in all Egypt, there was but one, or at most two Egyptians, multiplied a certain number of times; in the same manner, we may say, with the greatest strictness, that all Egyptian statues can be reduced to one indefinitely repeated.

This observation is further corroborated by the Egyptian monuments which represent animals. There can be remarked, in fact, a freedom of workmanship, a choice and a variety of forms, a truthfulness, and even what deserves to be called imitation, which contrast with the uniformity, the rigidity, the

absence of nature and of life, which human figures present. The reasons, independently of religious and political reasons, which probably rendered the representation of an animal, whatever it may be, less important, as it is in fact less difficult than that of a man, were, that the different races of animals, wild or domestic, could not be classed like the different castes of men, masters, or subjects; that thus the artist, being always able to study his model in freedom, could also give to its image greater variety of motion, and by imitating animals in nature, indemnify himself from the constraint he experienced when he represented kings and priests. With regard to the second reason of the little progress which art made in Egypt, derived from the nature of the government, it will be sufficient to cite the famous law mentioned by Plato, and so often quoted from that writer; a law which forbade the artists to depart in the slightest degree, in the execution of images, from the type consecrated by public authority. And in fact, Plato adds, that all works of art executed in his time, that is, at the period of the domination of the Persians in Egypt, were absolutely similar to those which had been produced thousands of years before. Hence this uniformity, in reality prodigious, between productions which are separated by a long series of ages, and which differ but little, with the exception of the emblems of the symbols or attributes varied for each divinity, in proportion, workmanship, and material. The impression which one cannot prevent one's-self from receiving, on beholding so many figures exactly identical, is how, in a work which is not entirely mechanical, the hand of man could reproduce so often the same image, with similar care, and with equal fidelity; how art, cultivated by so many different individuals in so long a space of time, could have remained at that uniform point, that a thousand statues make but one-that fifteen centuries seem but a day; lastly how this art, which we cannot conceive otherwise than free and varied, as nature, could be reduced to the precision and regularity of a machine. And let no one say that religion and the government could have made the law, of which Plato speaks, imperative on the authors of the figures of the gods, but not on all the others; in the first place, because Plato does not make this distinction, and speaks of every kind of figures without exception: in the second place, because the faculty of representing figures under the human form seems to have been confined among the

Egyptians to the gods, to the kings, and priests, three orders of persons, which in reality made but one, for the gods were considered as so many kings of the nation, and the kings themselves were but priests; at least there is nothing to my knowledge, among ancient traditions, which would induce us to believe that statues were erected to any other than a god, a king, or a priest; and in that crowd of works of Egyptian art which we possess at present, and on which are inscriptions which inform us of their subject, not one has been hitherto discovered which could not be classed in this triple category, or which presents a genuine individual representation of a personage out of the privileged caste.

The art being thus enlisted in the exclusive service of religion and the government, two things which in reality made but one, art being at once a privilege and a trade, a manufacture of sacred objects reduced to a mechanical operation, how could this art have been raised to that degree of perfection which exacts all that freedom of hand, all that independence of thought, which can never be attained but by a concurrence of emulation and exertion? Do we not indeed know, by our own experience, that in those statues offered to public veneration, the more rude the work is, the more it is stamped with the seal of antiquity, the more it inspires respect, the more readily it receives homage; consequently, the more important it is that all objects which are connected with its worship should be impressed with the same character, in order that it should participate in the same veneration? In Greece itself, during the most flourishing period of the art, the Cupid of Thespiæ, the masterpiece of Praxiteles, never obtained as much respect as the rude stone which was supposed to have fallen from heaven; modern Italy presents at each step facts corroborative of this. The painting which in each church attracts the greater crowds, the homage and the gifts of the faithful, is not that in which is conspicuous in the highest degree all the charms of art, or whose author is mentioned in its annals; it is the painting the most Gothic, the most darkened with smoke, the most strongly impressed with that Byzantine type which is to modern art what the Egyptian type was to the art of the Greeks; above all, the image the most richly decorated, the most covered with jewels, necklaces, diadems, in a word, a Madonna of the pretended St. Luke, and not a Virgin of Raphael. It seems that those ancient images

are raised and become ennobled in the belief of the people, in consequence of the centuries which have passed over them, and the rust of ages which has been imprinted on them. They receive from time a sort of consecration, which the hand of man, however skilful it may be, could never give. The less art is visible in it the greater is the disposition to believe in it; and it seems, in a word, that the less the artist appears so much the more is the divinity manifested in it. Hence the necessity of changing nothing, of making no innovation in everything which is connected with the worship of these privileged images; it is in these matters that it is of special importance to perpetuate the idol, in order to preserve the faith. If it were permitted to mingle the sacred and the profane, or to compare small things with great, I would say that the idol in blackened wood which is venerated at Loretto, must bear a great resemblance to the ancient idol of Diana of the Ephesians. The maxim of the Egyptians not to admit nor to tolerate any deviation from the consecrated type, any infraction of the established principles, was therefore conformable to the nature, to the very necessity of things, in a theocratic government, where everything was founded on the veneration bestowed on divine objects, and on men who assumed themselves to be so, when the slightest alteration of the sign might lead to that of the dogma, and the contempt of the idol bring about the downfal of the system. In every society modelled by religion and governed by its ministers, it follows as a necessary consequence that everything should remain in the manner in which everything has been regulated; there, where everything proceeds in small things as in great, by virtue of a revelation, it is evident that the slightest innovation was an excessive audacity, since it tended to substitute the action of man for the will of a god. Any change in the object of worship supposes an almost inevitable one in belief, and consequently in the constitution; and for myself I am convinced that a man capable of making in Egypt a Greek statue, would have been capable of causing there, by that alone, a political revolution. The third reason which I have pointed out of this stationary state of art in Egypt, is in the very condition of the artists, that is to say, in the law which included all industrial professions, comprising those which are connected with the fine arts, in the third and last class of the people. By this classification, and in consequence of the