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endless legends and endless ornaments in the highest possible relief, every square foot of the surface of which may be suggestive of a man's labour for many months, and to multiply such works to infinity, must unquestionably have conveyed to the barbaric mind an overwhelming sense of power.

The great remains of Persepolis, especially those of the [[w:Persepolis#The Hadish Palace|palace of Xerxes}}, have many points of coincidence with their great prototypes at Nineveh; and it is precisely the loftier structural features of the early Persepolitan remains which enable us to supply and complete much that is wanting in the ruins discovered in Assyria.

While Assyria and Egypt no doubt concurred to give the vast strength and solidity which characterize that group of architectural remains which, spread over many lands, we have been accustomed to designate as Cyclopean, they failed to influence Asia Minor to the extent that might have been apprehended.

In the principal monuments of that land, as mainly revealed to us through the researches of Sir Charles Fellowes—and confirmed by the monuments brought by him to this country, and now in the British Museum—we may recognize the distinct reproduction, in durable materials, of wooden structural forms. It is in those remains that we meet with the best possible confirmation of the Vitruvian story of the derivation from wood of all the features of importance which ultimately distinguished at least the Doric temples of Greece.

The division which exists, in fact as well as in theory, between the orders of architecture which have been designated Doric and Ionic, in all classical monuments, derive their origin distinctly from the two races who inhabited Greece, and the fusion of which upon its soil led to much of the power and greatness of that God-like people.

These races were, on the one hand, the Pelasgic, believed to be aboriginal, spreading, even before the war of Troy,