e the external contour of the body from the armpits to
the ends of the feet. Two more determined the outlines of the legs, and two
the arms. The details of costume and ornaments, at first but summarily
indicated, were afterwards taken up one by one, and minutely finished. We
may almost count the locks of the hair, the plaits of the linen, the
inlayings of the girdles and bracelets. This mixture of artless science and
intentional awkwardness, of rapid execution and patient finish, excludes
neither elegance of form, nor grace of attitude, nor truth of movement.
These personages are of strange aspect, but they live; and to those who
will take the trouble to look at them without prejudice, their very
strangeness has a charm about it which is often lacking to works more
recent in date and more strictly true to nature.

[Illustration: Fig. 167.--Funerary repast, tomb of Horemheb, Eighteenth
Dynasty.]

[Illustration: Fig. 168.--From a wall-painting, Thebes, Ramesside period.]

We admit, then, that the Egyptians could draw. Were they, as it has been
ofttimes asserted, ignorant of the art of composition? We will take a scene
at hazard from a Theban tomb--that scene which represents the funerary
repast offered to Prince Horemheb by the members of his family (fig. 167).
The subject is half ideal, half real. The dead man, and those belonging to
him who are no longer of this world, are depicted in the society of the
living. They are present, yet aloof. They assist at the banquet, but they
do not actually take part in it. Horemheb sits on a folding stool to the
left of the spectator. He dandles on his knee a little princess, daughter
of Amenhotep III., whose foster-father he was, and who died before him. His
mother, Suit, sits at his right hand a little way behind, enthroned in a
large chair. She holds his arm with her left hand, and with the right she
offers him a lotus blossom and bud. A tiny gazelle which was probably
buried with her, like the pet gazelle discovered beside Queen Isiemkheb in
the hiding-place at Deir el Bahari, is tied to one of the legs of the
chair. This ghostly group is of heroic size, the rule being that gods are
bigger than men, kings bigger than their subjects, and the dead bigger than
the living. Horemheb, his mother, and the women standing before them,
occupy the front level, or foreground. The relations and friends are ranged
in line facing their deceased ancestors, and appear to be talking one with
anoth