[Illustration:  ANCIENT EGYPTIAN AND MODERN SINGHALESE TOM-TOM BEATERS.]]

[Footnote 2:  Mahawanso, ch. xvii, p. 104.]

[Footnote 3:  B.C. 161. Mahawanso, ch. xxv, p. 154.]

[Footnote 4:  B.C. 20. Rajavali, p. 51.]

[Footnote 5:  Mahawanso, ch. xxv. p. 157.]

[Footnote 6:  Mahawanso, ch. xxvi. 186.]

[Footnote 7:  Mahawanso, ch. xxx. p. 180.  The following passage in UPHAM’S translation of the Mahawanso, ch. lxxii. vol. i. p. 274, would convey the idea that the AEolian harp was meant, or some arrangement of strings calculated to elicit similar sounds:—­“The king Prakrama built a palace at the city of Pollanarrua; and the stone works were carved in the shape of flowers and creeping plants, with golden networks which gave harmonious sounds as if they were moved by the air.”]

[Footnote 8:  JOINVILLE, Asiat.  Researches, vol. vii. p. 488.]

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, imagination 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 regulated the mode of delineating the effigies of their divine teacher, by a rigid formulary, with which they combined 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 conceptions of early times were copied and perpetuated by every succeeding artist."[1]

[Footnote 1:  SIR GARDNER WILKINSON’S Ancient Egyptians, vol. iii. ch. x. p. 87, 264.]

The same observations apply, almost in the same terms, to the paintings of the Singhalese.  The historical delineations of the exploits of Gotama Buddha and of his disciples and attendants, which at the present day cover the walls of the temples and wiharas, follow, with rigid minuteness, pre-existing illustrations of the sacred narratives.  They appear to have been copied, with a devout adherence to colour, costume, and detail, from designs which from time immemorial have represented the same subjects; and emaciated ascetics, distorted devotees, beatified simpletons, and malefactors in torment are depicted with a painful fidelity, akin to modern pre-Raphaelitism.