An Historical Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty in Art - More Especially with Reference to Architecture (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1849 edition. Excerpt: ...In Asia, too, they never seem to have cared much for the bodies of their dead, and neither judged them after death in this world, nor dreamed of allowing three thousand years between their decision and the appeal to the final judgment of the gods. No such immense periods of time ever seem to have occurred to an eastern imagination, and they did not, in consequence, think of erecting buildings that were to last for ever, and to give their founders a mundane eternity, which seems to have been the fundamental idea of Egyptian ambition. Nor did they in Asia dream of continuing one race, one religion, and one form of art, unchanged for thousands of years; on the contrary, forms, and dynasties, and races succeed each other there with a ceaseless ebb and flow, as perplexing to the chronologer as it is to the ethnographist. In Egypt we can just detect such differences as enable us to classify their forms with more or less distinctness;--here the differences are generic, and people of totally different origin and race pass and repass before us, and succeed one another, without our being able to say whence they came or whither they went; yet each, when before us, has features so distinctly marked as to be easily recognised. We have, first, the great Semitic race, which seems to have been as indigenous and as early settled on the banks of the Euphrates and the plains of Shinaar as the Egyptian on the banks of the Nile. We are familiar enough with two of its branches--the Arabs and Jews, who retain their nationality even to this day, though singularly sunk in importance from the time when their Chaldaean ancestors inhabited the largest city of the ancient world. We have, on the other hand, the sons of Japhet, or the great IndoGermanic race, gradually...