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groves of columns extended, culminating in the holy of holies, in which all that was most mysterious seemed to be guarded with an almost awful secrecy.

Already we find amongst the Egyptians some sense of that principle which the Assyrians in their architectural arrangements carried to its very utmost limit, viz. that of making the walls of their temples their "books of chronicles."

The Egyptians carved and painted their structures externally and internally with creatures of their imagination, and occasionally with matters of fact and historical interest of the highest importance.

It is singular that in the group of monuments to which I shall next invite your attention, those of Assyria, there should exist, in the substructure of the south-eastern palace at Nimroud, a pointed-arch construction, covering a great drain, no less perfect than some of the arches discovered in Egypt; nor indeed were these the only ones of the kind disinterred by the indefatigable energy of Mr Layard. To his exertions, and those of M. Botta, we stand indebted for having revealed to us a "city of the dead" hitherto almost entirely hidden from our cognizance otherwise than through the scanty allusion of Holy Writ.

One of the most interesting of the anomalies which meet us on the threshold of any comparison between Egyptian and Assyrian architecture is the fact, that in spite of the subjection of Assyria to Egypt (if we may believe the Egyptian records) for no less than five centuries—from the 19th to the 14th b.c.—the Egyptians have left no evidence upon the soil of Assyria of the long period of their ascendancy.

The art of Assyria is neither like that of Egypt nor that of India, and serves to demonstrate, what we may readily believe, that intercourse between great nations in those ages consisted of little else than invasion of one another's territories, and by no means extended (save in certain excep-