truly as Homer inspired Phidias.  The artists of the age of Phidias were encouraged and assisted by the great poets, historians, and philosophers who basked in the sunshine of Pericles, even as the great men in the Court of Elizabeth derived no small share of their renown from her glorious appreciation.  Great artists appear in clusters, and amid the other constellations that illuminate the intellectual heavens.  They all mutually assist each other.  When Rome lost her great men, Art declined.  When the egotism of Louis XIV. extinguished genius, the great lights in all departments disappeared.  So Art is indebted not merely to the contemplation of ideal beauty, but to the influence of great ideas permeating society,—­such as when the age of Phidias was kindled with the great thoughts of Socrates, Democritus, Thucydides, Euripides, Aristophanes, and others, whether contemporaries or not; a sort of Augustan or Elizabethan age, never to appear but once among the same people.

Now, in reference to the history or development of ancient Art, until it culminated in the age of Pericles, we observe that its first expression was in architecture, and was probably the result of religious sentiments, when nations were governed by priests, and not distinguished for intellectual life.  Then arose the temples of Egypt, of Assyria, of India.  They are grand, massive, imposing, but not graceful or beautiful.  They arose from blended superstition and piety, and were probably erected before the palaces of kings, and in Egypt by the dynasty that builded the older pyramids.  Even those ambitious and prodigious monuments, which have survived every thing contemporaneous, indicate the reign of sacerdotal monarchs and artists who had no idea of beauty, but only of permanence.  They do not indicate civilization, but despotism,—­unless it be that they were erected for astronomical purposes, as some maintain, rather than as sepulchres for kings.  But this supposition involves great mathematical attainments.  It is difficult to conceive of such a waste of labor by enlightened princes, acquainted with astronomical and mathematical knowledge and mechanical forces, for Herodotus tells us that one hundred thousand men toiled on the Great Pyramid during forty years.  What for?  Surely it is hard to suppose that such a pile was necessary for the observation of the polar star; and still less probably was it built as a sepulchre for a king, since no covered sarcophagus has ever been found in it, nor have even any hieroglyphics.  The mystery seems impenetrable.

But the temples are not mysteries.  They were built also by sacerdotal monarchs, in honor of the deity.  They must have been enormous, perhaps the most imposing ever built by man:  witness the ruins of Karnac—­a temple designated by the Greeks as that of Jupiter Ammon—–­with its large blocks of stone seventy feet in length, on a platform one thousand feet long and three hundred wide, its alleys over a mile in length lined with