in
some of the earliest Assyrian sculptures. Two other features must also
be noticed. Near the top of the tablet, towards the left, five figures
standing in a boat seem to be clapping their hands in order to drive the
pigs towards the monarch; while in the right centre of the picture there
is another boat, more highly ornamented than the rest, in which we seem
to have a second representation of the king, differing from the first
only in the fact that his arrow has flown, and that he is in the act of
taking another arrow from an attendant In this second representation the
king's head is surrounded by a nimbus or "glory." Altogether there are
in this tablet more than seventy-five human and nearly 150 animal forms.
In the other, the human forms are about seventy, and the animal ones
about a hundred.

[Illustration: PLATE XLIV.]

The merit of the two reliefs above described, which would require to be
engraved on a large scale, in order that justice should be done to them,
consists in the spirit and truth of the animal forms, elephants, camels,
stags, boars, horses, and in the life and movement of the whole picture.
The rush of the pigs, the bounds of the stags and hinds, the heavy
march of the elephants, the ungainly movements of the camels, are well
portrayed; and in one instance, the foreshortening of a horse, advancing
diagonally, is respectably rendered. In general, Sassanian sculpture,
like most delineative art in its infancy, affects merely the profile;
but here, and in the overturned horse already described, and again in
the Victories which ornament the spandrels of the arch of Chosroes, the
mere profile is departed from with good effect, and a power is shown
of drawing human and animal figures in front or at an angle. What is
wanting in the entire Sassanian series is idealism, or the notion
of elevating the representation in any respects above the object
represented; the highest aim of the artist is to be true to nature; in
this truthfulness is his triumph; but as he often falls short of his
models, his whole result, even at the best, is unsatisfactory and
disappointing.

Such must almost necessarily be the sentence of art critics, who judge
the productions of this age and nation according to the abstract rules,
or the accepted standards, of artistic effort. But if circumstances of
time and country are taken into account, if comparison is limited to
earlier and later attempts in the same region, or even in ne