of the Written evidence. Palæography is the true guide of the historian of Art.

It is this third branch of our whole subject-matter, the Monumental, which we have now to consider.

Monuments are either works of Art or works of Handicraft. Art is either Constructive or Imitative; Handicraft either Useful or Decorative.

I must recall you for a moment to the point from which I started in treating of the history of writing. I said that man was the only animal that imitated in a material external to himself; who, in other words, practised painting and sculpture. To draw and to carve are natural to man; speech, gesture, and music are his transient, sculpture, painting, and writing, his permanent means of utterance. There is hardly any race that has not produced some rude specimens of sculpture and painting; there are a few only who have brought them to perfection.

Now, there is a point of view in which we may regard the imitative art of all races, the most civilised as well as the most barbarous-in reference, namely, to the power of correctly representing animal or vegetable forms such as exist in nature. The perfection of such imitation depends not so much on the manual dexterity of the artist as on his intelligence in comprehending the type or essential qualities of the form which he desires to represent. One artist may make the figure of a man like a jointed doll, because he discerns in human structure no more than the general fact of a head, trunk, and limbs. Another may perceive in nature and indicate in art some traces, however slight, of vital organisation, of bones and muscles, and of their relation to each other as pulleys and levers. A third may represent them in their true forms in action and repose.

This is real, intellectual art, because it represents not the forms merely, but the life which animates them. This difference between one artist and another in the mode of representing organic life is the most essential part of what is called style. As the styles of individual artists differ in this respect, so it is with the art of races.

If we compare the representation of a man in Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Medieval, Chinese, Indian, and Mexican sculpture, we shall see that the same bones and muscles, the same organisation and general type, have been very diffe

rently rendered in different ages and countries; and that the examples I have cited may be ranged in a scale from the Greek downward to the Mexican, according to the amount of essential truth embodied in these several representations of nature. Here then we get a common measure or standard of the art of all races and ages, whether it be painting or sculpture, whatever be the material in which it is executed; whether the work of which we have to judge be one of the statues from the pediment of the Parthenon, or an Otaheitan idol; a fresco of Michael Angelo, or a Dutch picture; a painted window, or a picture on a Greek vase; a coin, or the head of Memnon; the Bayeux tapestry, or the cartoons at Hampton Court.

All these are works of imitative art; some more, some less worthy of being so called.

Now, the artists who executed these works had this in common, that they all tried to imitate nature, each according to his powers and means, but they differed very widely in those powers and means. Some painted, some carved; some worked on a colossal, others on a minute scale. For the solution of the problem they had proposed to themselves, a very varied choice of means presented itself. Thus by the word painting we may mean a fresco painting, or an oil painting, or an encaustic painting, or a painted window, or a vase picture. Sculpture may be in wood, in ivory, in marble, in metal. Each material employed by the sculptor or painter imposes on him certain conditions which are the law under which he ought to work. He may either turn the material he uses to the best account, master its difficulties, and atone for its deficiencies, or he may in turn be mastered by them.

The difference between artist and artist, or school and school, in this respect, constitutes what has been justly called specific style, as opposed to general style. The Archaeologist must take cognisance not only of general, but of specific style. He must compare the art of different races as much as possible in pari materiâ; he must ascertain as nearly as he can the real conditions under which the artist wrought before he can appreciate his work; he must observe how similar necessities have in different ages suggested the trial of similar technical means; how far the artist has succeeded or failed in the working out these experiments.

In this, as in every other branch of archaeological research, he will be led to remark great original differences between races, and certain resemblances, the result of the influence of school upon school by tradition or imitation.

By this study of external characteristics he will obtain the true criteria for arranging all art both chronologically and ethnographically, and will also be able to form some kind of scale of the relative excellence of all that he has to classify.

Thus far his work is analogous to that of the Palæographer, who acquaints himself with the systems of writing of all races, traces their tradition and the changes they undergo, and assigns them to their respective periods and countries.

But, as we have already pointed out, the Palæographer has not only to acquaint himself with the handwriting, but to bestow more or less of study on the words written; and in some cases, as in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the work of deciphering and of interpretation compel him to be deeply versed in history and philology.

So it is with the Archaeology of Art. We must not only know the mere external characteristics of the style, we must know the meaning or motive which pervades it; we must be able to read and to interpret it.

It is only a knowledge of the meaning or motive of art that enables us to appreciate its most essential qualities. The highest art is thought embodied and stated to the eye; hence it has been well defined as "mute poetry."

Now, when we survey all the remains of art of which Archaeology has cognisance, we shall perceive that it is only a certain portion of these remains that can be said to embody thought.

It is those works of Imitative Art which embody thought, which have the first claim on the attention of the Archaeologist, and, above all, those which express religious ideas.

The most elevated art which the world has yet seen has been devoted to the service of Religion. Art has stereotyped and developed that Figurative and Symbolic language, of which we find the partial and transient expression in the Oral Symbolism of rituals.

When I speak of a Figurative and Symbolic language, I include under this general term all idols and visible emblems, all productions of the painter and sculptor, which have been

either themselves objects of worship, or have been associated with such objects,-have been designed to address religious sympathies, to teach religious doctrines, or to record religious traditions.

There is, perhaps, hardly any race, which has not at some period of its history possessed some sort of Figurative and Symbolic language for religious uses. The utterance of this language is feebler, or more emphatic; its range of expression narrower, or more varied, according to the character of the religion, and the genius of the race. Some religions are pre-eminently sensuous, such, for instance, as the Egyptian, the Greek, the Hindoo, in fact, all the great systems of polytheistic worship; in other cases, the nature of the creed warrants and requires a much narrower range of Figurative and Symbolic language, as in the case of the ancient Persian fire-worship, or interdicts the most essential part of it, as the Mahommedan interdicts all representation of animal forms.

Now, as in Philology, we lay the foundation for a general comparison of articulate languages by the study of some one example more perfect in structure, fuller and richer in compass than the rest, such a type, for instance, as the Greek or the Sanscrit; so, if we would acquaint ourselves with the Figurative and Symbolic language of Art generally, we should study it in its finest form.

When we survey the monuments of all time, we find two perfectly developed and highly cultivated forms of utterance, the language of Greek Art, and the language of the Art of Medieval Christendom; in almost all other races the expression of religious ideas in art seems, in comparison, like a rude dialect, not yet fashioned by the poet and the orator. Of the idolatrous nations of the ancient world, the Greeks were, as far as we know, the first to reduce the colossal proportions of the idol, to discard monstrous combinations of human and animal forms, and to substitute the image of beautiful humanity. The sculptor and the poet shaped and moulded the mythic legends; as the Figurative language of Art grew more perfect, as the mastery over form enabled the artist to embody thought more poetically and eloquently, the ancient hieratic Symbolism became less and less prominent.

As the Greek myth gradually absorbed into itself the

earliest theological and philosophical speculations of the race, blending religious tradition with the traditions of history, personified agencies with the agencies of real personages, the record of physical phenomena with poetic allegory,-so the Figurative Language of Art expanded to express this complex development. Mythography, or the expression of the Myth in Art, moved on, pari passu, with mythology, or the expression of the Myth in Literature: as one has reacted on the other, so is one the interpreter of the other.

It is impossible till we have studied both conjointly, to see how completely the religion of the Greeks penetrated into their social institutions and daily life. The Myth was not only embodied in the sculpture of Phidias on the Parthenon, or pourtrayed in the frescoes of Polygnotus in the Stoa Poicile; it was repeated in a more compendious and abbreviated form on the fictile vase of the Athenian household; on the coin which circulated in the marketplace; on the mirror in which the Aspasia of the day beheld her charms. Every domestic implement was made the vehicle of Figurative language, or fashioned into a Symbol.

Now, to us this mother tongue of Mythography, these household words, so familiar to the Greeks, are a dead letter, except so far as the Archaeologist can explain them by glosses and commentaries. His task is one of interpretation-he is the Scholiast and the Lexicographer of Art.

The method of interpretation which the classical Archaeologist has applied to Greek Art is well worthy the attention of those who undertake the interpretation of Christian Medieval Art.

As the Greeks have bequeathed to us not only a Mythology, but a Mythography, so in the painting and sculpture of medieval Christendom we find an unwritten Theology, a popular, figurative teaching of the sublime truths of Christianity, blended with the apocryphal traditions of many generations. The frescoes of the great Italian masters, from Giotto to Michael Angelo, the ecclesiastical sculpture of medieval Europe generally, are the texts in which we should study this unwritten theology.

It is in these continuous compositions, designed by great artists, that we can best study the Figurative and Symbolic language of Christian Art as a scheme, and seek the key to its interpretation. This key once obtained, we learn to read