site subtlety and of irresistible force, to which Art, and Art
alone amongst human forms of expression, has a key; these then, and
no others, are the chords which it is her appointed duty to strike; and
form, colour, and the contrasts of light and shade are the agents
through which it is given to her to set them in motion. Her duty is,
therefore, to awaken those sensations directly emotional and indirectly
intellectual, which can be communicated only through the sense of sight,
to the delight of which she has primarily to minister. And the dignity
of these sensations lies in this, that they are inseparably connected by
association of ideas with a range of perception and feelings of infinite
variety and scope. They come fraught with dim complex memories of all
the evershifting spectacle of inanimate creation and of the more deeply
stirring phenomena of life; of the storm and the lull, the splendour and
the darkness of the outer world; of the storm and the lull, the
splendour and the darkness of the changeful and the transitory lives of
men."

In his third Discourse, which was delivered on the 10th December, 1883,
the President entered on his exhaustive discussion, continued in many
subsequent Discourses, of "The relation of Artistic Production to the
conditions of time and place under which it is evolved, and to the
characteristics of the races to which it is due." In this Discourse he
briefly and suggestively reviews the Art of Egypt, Assyria, and Greece,
endeavouring to account for the main characteristics of each. In Egypt
he shows how a nation securely established in a peace and pre-eminence
lasting for ages, blessed beyond measure in a fertile and prospering
climate, a nation beyond all things pious and occupied in reverential
care of the dead, should give birth to an art serene, magnificent, and
vast. "Those whose fortune it has been," he eloquently said, "to stand
by the base of the Great Pyramid of Khoofoo, and look up at its far
summit flaming in the violet sky, or to gaze on the wreck of that
solemn watcher of the rising sun, the giant Sphinx of Gizeh, erect,
still, after sixty centuries in the desert's slowly rising tide; or who
have rested in the shade of the huge shafts which tell of the pomp and
splendour of hundred-gated Thebes; must, I think, have received
impressions of majesty and of enduring strength which will not fade
within their memory."

After old Egypt, and the account of Chaldaean and Assyrian