talent for brutalisation to a system and a science, somewhere in the East, in Egypt, or in Asia Minor, or, more probably in Syria, in Mesopotamia, or even Persia, the new leaven was at work.  That power which was to free the world was in ferment.  The religious spirit was again coming to birth.  Here and there, in face of the flat contradiction of circumstances, one would arise and assert that man does not live by bread alone.  Orphism, Mythraism, Christianity, many forms of one spirit, were beginning to mean something more than curious ritual and discreet debauch.  Very slowly a change was coming over the face of Europe.

There was change before the signs of it became apparent.  The earliest Christian paintings in the catacombs are purely classical.  If the early Christians felt anything new they could not express it.  But before the second century was out Coptic craftsmen had begun to weave into dead Roman designs something vital.  The academic patterns are queerly distorted and flattened out into forms of a certain significance, as we can feel for ourselves if we go to the textile room at South Kensington.  Certainly, these second century Coptic textiles are more like works of art than anything that had been produced in the Roman Empire for more than four hundred years.  Egyptian paintings of the third century bear less positive witness to the fumblings of a new spirit.  But at the beginning of the fourth century Diocletian built his palace at Spalato, where we have all learned to see classicism and the new spirit from the East fighting it out side by side; and, if we may trust Strzygowski, from the end of that century dates the beautiful church of Kodja-Kalessi in Isauria.  The century in which the East finally dominated the West (350-450) is a period of incubation.  It is a time of disconcerting activity that precedes the unmistakable launch of art upon the Christian slope.  I would confidently assert that every artistic birth is preceded by a period of uneasy gestation in which the unborn child acquires the organs and energy that are to carry it forward on its long journey, if only I possessed the data that would give a tottering support to so comforting a generalisation.  Alas! the births of the great slopes of antiquity are shrouded in a night scarcely ruffled by the minute researches of patient archaeologists and impervious to the startling discoveries by experts of more or less palpable forgeries.  Of these critical periods we dare not speak confidently; nevertheless we can compare the fifth century with the nineteenth and draw our own conclusions.

In 450 they built the lovely Galla Placidia at Ravenna.  It is a building essentially un-Roman; that is to say, the Romanism that clings to it is accidental and adds nothing to its significance.  The mosaics within, however, are still coarsely classical.  There is a nasty, woolly realism about the sheep, and about the good shepherd more than a suspicion of the stodgy, Graeco-Roman, Apollo.  Imitation still