The walls on all sides were covered with gigantic figures, quite wonderful to behold in their serene ugliness; but awakening no more human sympathy than the singular figures we saw on the Chinese-patterned plate stuck over the doorway in Nubia.  The exaggeration that is usually indulged in with reference to Egyptian art is such, that if we were to attempt to describe these sculptured ornaments according to our own impressions, we should run the risk of being accused of caricature.  We do not mean on this temple only, but on all the temples of Egypt.  Now and then a face of beautiful expression, though still with heavy features, is met with; but in general both countenance and figure are flat, out of proportion, and stiff in drawing, whilst the highest effort of colouring consists of one uniform layer, without tints or gradation.  Perhaps amidst the many thousand subjects found in tombs and temples between Philoe and Cairo, one or two may be treated with nearly as much skill as was exhibited by the Italian painters before the time of Cimabue—­except that scarcely an attempt even is made at grouping or composition.  Nor must it be supposed that the Egyptian school was in course of development.  They seem to have arrived at the highest excellence of which their intellect was capable.  Their outlines, though in general excessively mean, are very firmly drawn; and they represent details with a laborious ingenuity worthy of the Chinese.  Some enthusiastic antiquarians describe with great animation the scenes of public and domestic life which occur in such profusion; and, book in hand, we have admired and wondered at—­not the genius of the artists, but that of their historians.  How, in fact, do the Egyptians really proceed?  They want to represent a hunt, for example:  so they sketch a man with his legs extended like compasses, armed with a huge bow, from which he is in the act of discharging a monstrous arrow.  Then close by they draw, without any attempt at perspective, a square enclosure, in which they set down higgledy-piggledy a variety of animals, some of them sufficiently like nature to allow their species to be guessed at.  In one corner, perhaps, is a sprig of something intended for a tree, and intimating that all this is supposed to take place in a wood.  This hieroglyphical or algebraical method of ‘taking off’ the occurrences of human life is applied with almost unvarying uniformity.  Such was high art among the Egyptians; whom it is now the fashion to cry up at the expense of those impertinent Grecians, who presumed to arrive at excellence, almost at perfection, in so many departments.