ghest
excellence of which their intellect was capable. Their outlines, though
in general excessively mean, are very firmly drawn; and they represent
details with a laborious ingenuity worthy of the Chinese. Some
enthusiastic antiquarians describe with great animation the scenes of
public and domestic life which occur in such profusion; and, book in
hand, we have admired and wondered at--not the genius of the artists,
but that of their historians. How, in fact, do the Egyptians really
proceed? They want to represent a hunt, for example: so they sketch a
man with his legs extended like compasses, armed with a huge bow, from
which he is in the act of discharging a monstrous arrow. Then close by
they draw, without any attempt at perspective, a square enclosure, in
which they set down higgledy-piggledy a variety of animals, some of them
sufficiently like nature to allow their species to be guessed at. In one
corner, perhaps, is a sprig of something intended for a tree, and
intimating that all this is supposed to take place in a wood. This
hieroglyphical or algebraical method of 'taking off' the occurrences of
human life is applied with almost unvarying uniformity. Such was high
art among the Egyptians; whom it is now the fashion to cry up at the
expense of those impertinent Grecians, who presumed to arrive at
excellence, almost at perfection, in so many departments.

However, the vast size of the figures on the front of the propylaea of
Edfou does certainly, in spite of their awkwardness, produce an imposing
effect, especially at the time we first beheld them, when the gray
twilight had descended upon the earth, and night was already thickening
beneath the heavy portico. We walked, or rather slid, down into the
great court. It was surrounded with massive columns loaded with
ornament, and looked grave in the extreme, in spite of the heaps of
rubbish that encumbered it, and enabled us to ascend to the summit of
the colonnade at one corner. The architecture of the Egyptians was
certainly sublime. Their style anticipated and surpassed the Gothic in
majesty, though certainly not in beauty. Their massive walls, Cyclopean
columns, dim porticos, gloomy chambers, produce even now all the
terrific impressions they could have desired. Perhaps the crumbling
ruins which encumber the roof, the wretched remains of Christian
buildings once erected on this temple as on a rock for security, rather
heighten than diminish its effect. We walked