472 



SCIENCES AND SOCIAL AETS. 



[PART IT. 



pronunciation, sa, ri, ga, me, qa, de, ni. 1 At the 

 present day, harmony is still superseded by sound, 

 the singing of the Singhalese being a nasal whine, not 

 unlike that of the Arabs. Flutes, almost insusceptible 

 of modulation, chanks, which give forth a piercing 

 scream, and the overpowering roll of tom-toms, con- 

 stitute the music of the temples ; and ah 1 day long the 

 women of a family will sit round a species of timbrel, 

 called rabani, and produce from it the most monotonous, 

 but to their ear, most agreeable noises, by drumming 

 with the fingers. 



Painting. -Painting, whether historical or imaginative, 

 is only mentioned in connection with the decoration of 

 temples, and no examples survive of sufficient antiquity 

 to exhibit the actual state of the art at any remote 

 period. But enough is known of the trammels imposed 

 upon all art, to show that from the earliest times, imagi- 

 nation and invention were prohibited by the priesthood ; 

 and although execution and facility may have varied at 

 different eras, design and composition were stationary 

 and unalterable. 



Like the priesthood of Egypt, those of Ceylon regu- 

 lated the mode of delineating the effigies of their divine 

 teacher, by a rigid formulary, with which they com- 

 bined corresponding directions for the drawing of the 

 human figure in connection with sacred subjects. In 

 the relics of Egyptian painting and sculpture, we find 

 "that the same formal outline, the same attitudes and 

 postures of the body, the same conventional modes of 

 representing the different parts, were adhered to at the 

 latest, as at the earliest periods. No improvements 

 were admitted; no attempts to copy nature or to give 

 an air of action to the limbs. Certain rules and certain 

 models had been established by law, and the faulty con- 

 ceptions of early times were copied and perpetuated by 

 every succeeding artist." 2 



1 JoiNVILLE, 



vol. vii. p. 488. 



Asiat. Researches, 



z Sin GARDNER WILKIXSOX'S An- 

 cient E(/i/ptia)i*, vol. iii. ch. x. p. 87, 

 204. 



