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is a development of the Egyptian and Assyrian, the same deities 

 being worshipped under various names, but with the same symbols 

 and attributes. This is so well known that I will not further dwell 

 upon it, but rather direct attention to the wide difference of 

 artistic treatment between the two schools. It is this : — In the 

 parent school, artistic treatment was kept subservient to the 

 symbolic. In the Greek school, beauty, is the great aim of the 

 artist ; the symbolic meaning, where it exists, being kept subordinate 

 to the study of the beautiful, and more frequently discarded 

 altogether. It is to this fact that the world owes those glorious 

 productions of Greek statuary, in which the genius of man seems 

 to find its culminating development. Indeed, gazing on those 

 marvellous forms, where the majesty of the Creator seems stamped 

 on the divine image, it is difficult to imagine the lives of those 

 producing those works as other than pure and holy. The light of 

 Christianity had not yet dawned, and could the teaching of 

 paganism have been maintained as here symbolized, the soil would 

 indeed have been ready for the seed, and the harvest sure and 

 abundant. This could not be, however, and the weakness of 

 Pagan philosophy was apparent in the voluptuous degeneracy of 

 its mythology. If symbolism disappearing from Greek sculpture 

 is kept subservient to artistic treatment, or utterly abandoned, as 

 some say, it is still more true of decorative ornament. We have 

 here the Egyptain symbols re-produced for their beauty alone, and 

 this is but natural amongst a people to whom their meaning would 

 be a mystery : the conditions of their daily existence being so 

 different. In architecture and in ornament the world gained greatly 

 by the change. The Lotus and Papyrus caps of pillars, the 

 symbolic Caryatides and Isis heads and other deities, give place 

 to the succeeding developments of the three great orders of the 

 Greek schools — the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian ; but in 

 the friezes and other decorative features, we find Egyptain 

 ornament distinctly perpetuated. 



The Roman school of ornament is merely a development of 

 the Greek, adding to Greek details a gorgeous magnificence of 

 treatment peculiar to itself. It consequently claims no originality 



