ent elevation and civilization. Whatever
nation had succeeded Egypt in power and knowledge, after having had
communication with her, must necessarily have taken up art at the point
where Egypt left it--in its turn delivering the gathered globe of
heavenly snow to the youthful energy of the nation next at hand, with an
exhausted "a vous le de!" In order to arrive at any useful or true
estimate of the respective rank of each people in the scale of mind, the
architecture of each must be compared with the architecture of the
other--sculpture with sculpture--line with line; and to have done this
broadly and with a surface glance, would have set our author's theory on
firmer foundation, to outward aspect, than it now rests upon. Had he
compared the accumulation of the pyramid with the proportion of the
peristyle, and then with the aspiration of the spire; had he set the
colossal horror of the Sphinx beside the Phidian Minerva, and this
beside the Pieta of M. Angelo; had he led us from beneath the iridescent
capitals of Denderah, by the contested line of Apelles, to the hues and
the heaven of Perugino or Bellini, we might have been tempted to
assoilzie from all staying of question or stroke of partisan the
invulnerable aspect of his ghostly theory; but, if, with even partial
regard to some of the circumstances which physically limited the
attainments of each race, we follow their individual career, we shall
find the points of superiority less salient and the connection between
heart and hand more embarrassed.

29. Yet let us not be misunderstood:--the great gulf between Christian
and Pagan art we cannot bridge--nor do we wish to weaken one single
sentence wherein its breadth or depth is asserted by our author. The
separation is not gradual, but instant and final--the difference not of
degree, but of condition; it is the difference between the dead vapors
rising from a stagnant pool, and the same vapors touched by a torch. But
we would brace the weakness which Lord Lindsay has admitted in his own
assertion of this great inflaming instant by confusing its fire with the
mere phosphorescence of the marsh, and explaining as a successive
development of the several human faculties, what was indeed the bearing
of them all at once, over a threshold strewed with the fragments of
their idols, into the temple of the One God.

We shall therefore, as fully as our space admits, examine the
application of our author's theory to Architecture,