time, painting, where
not purely ecclesiastical, was applied to the decoration of palaces, and
besides representing royal personages, was almost wholly devoted to
sacred legends. Only in quite recent times have painting and sculpture
become entirely secular arts. Only within these few centuries has
painting been divided into historical, landscape, marine, architectural,
genre, animal, still-life, etc., and sculpture grown heterogeneous in
respect of the variety of real and ideal subjects with which it occupies
itself.

Strange as it seems then, we find it no less true, that all forms of
written language, of painting, and of sculpture, have a common root in
the politico-religious decorations of ancient temples and palaces.
Little resemblance as they now have, the bust that stands on the
console, the landscape that hangs against the wall, and the copy of the
_Times_ lying upon the table, are remotely akin; not only in nature, but
by extraction. The brazen face of the knocker which the postman has just
lifted, is related not only to the woodcuts of the _Illustrated London
News_ which he is delivering, but to the characters of the _billet-doux_
which accompanies it. Between the painted window, the prayer-book on
which its light falls, and the adjacent monument, there is
consanguinity. The effigies on our coins, the signs over shops, the
figures that fill every ledger, the coats of arms outside the carriage
panel, and the placards inside the omnibus, are, in common with dolls,
blue-books, paper-hangings, lineally descended from the rude
sculpture-paintings in which the Egyptians represented the triumphs and
worship of their god-kings. Perhaps no example can be given which more
vividly illustrates the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the products
that in course of time may arise by successive differentiations from a
common stock.

Before passing to other classes of facts, it should be observed that the
evolution of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous is displayed not
only in the separation of Painting and Sculpture from Architecture and
from each other, and in the greater variety of subjects they embody, but
it is further shown in the structure of each work. A modern picture or
statue is of far more heterogeneous nature than an ancient one. An
Egyptian sculpture-fresco represents all its figures as on one
plane--that is, at the same distance from the eye; and so is less
heterogeneous than a painting that represents the