the hands of Zeuxis and Apelles.

The interest that attaches to Egyptian art is from its great
antiquity. We see it in the first attempts to represent what in after
times, and in some other countries, gradually arrived, under better
auspices, at the greatest perfection; and we even trace in it the germ
of much that was improved upon by those who had a higher appreciation
of, and feeling for, the beautiful. For, both in ornamental art, as
well as in architecture, Egypt exercised in early times considerable
influence over other people less advanced than itself, or only just
emerging from barbarism; and the various conventional devices, the
lotus flowers, the sphinxes, and other fabulous animals, as well as
the early Medusa's head, with a protruding tongue, of the oldest Greek
pottery and sculptures, and the ibex, leopard, and above all the
(Nile) "goose and sun," on the vases, show them to be connected with,
and frequently directly borrowed from, Egyptian fancy. It was, as it
still is, the custom of people to borrow from those who have attained
to a greater degree of refinement and civilization than themselves;
the nation most advanced in art led the taste, and though some had
sufficient invention to alter what they adopted, and to render it
their own, the original idea may still be traced whenever it has been
derived from a foreign source. Egypt was long the dominant nation, and
the intercourse established at a very remote period with other
countries, through commerce of war, carried abroad the taste of this
the most advanced people of the time; and so general seems to have
been the fashion of their ornaments, that even the Nineveh marbles
present the winged globe, and other well-known Egyptian emblems, as
established elements of Assyrian decorative art.

[Illustration: ANCIENT ART AND LITERATURE.]

While Greece was still in its infancy, Egypt had long been the leading
nation of the world; she was noted for her magnificence, her wealth,
and power, and all acknowledged her pre-eminence in wisdom and
civilization. It is not, therefore, surprising that the Greeks should
have admitted into their early art some of the forms then most in
vogue, and though the wonderful taste of that gifted people speedily
raised them to a point of excellence never attained by the Egyptians
or any others, the rise and first germs of art and architecture must
be sought in the Valley of the Nile. In the oldest monuments of
Greece, the slo