be regarded as a wonderful affectation, reminding one of the medieval legend about the young lions, who, it would seem, are born dead and so remain till on the third day their father comes and startles them into life by his roaring; for by some such prefatory roar it is the habit of an author to set his dead bantlings upon their legs. But the above form of preface is not peculiarly strange nor peculiarly affected; it is rather a truism which ought never to be repeated, which ought mercifully to be taken for granted. Necessity is laid upon the artist to compose in the first instance for himself: to compose for the eye or ear of another is an afterthought.

While these feelings more or less influence the artist of every epoch, and at every period of his life, it is to be observed that they chiefly prevail in the earliest, that is to say, in the Lyrical era. Lyrics are the firstfruits of art, the early figs; and, as already has been shown (p. 119), the idea of a Lyric is Immortality. Such also is the governing idea of that Oriental art and life, in the midst of which the Lyric has ever sprung up in the greatest perfection. Of this perhaps no proof could be afforded more striking than the fact that, in proportion to the whole of the known remains of Eastern art, a vast number connect themselves with the tomb. Almost all that we know of Egyptian art is derived from the monuments of the dead; and although probably we are indebted in like degree to the sepulchres of no other people, unless to those of the Etruscans, a

race of Lydian descent and of the true Eastern type, still in this, as in so many other points, the Egyptian fact is but the extreme instance of a peculiarity common to most Oriental nations. Deep and full of interest as is the mystery of life and death to every child of Adam, none have gazed upon it so wonderingly, none have brooded over it so earnestly, as those who dwell in the great nursery of the human race. There was mother Eve tempted to eat of the tree of life; there the Chaldean shepherds, in attempting by astrology to learn from the stars the secrets of life, laid the foundations of a new science; there the Arabic sages founded another great science in endeavouring by alchymy to discover the elixir of life. And under the eye of heaven there is not a more touching sight than is presented by the Oriental artists when they so often enter the tombs to protest against dissolution. The Etruscans arranged the houses of the dead as if they were houses of the living, with panelled walls and fretted ceilings, elbow-chairs, footstools, benches, wineflagons, drinking-cups, ointment-phials, basins, mirrors, and other furniture; and the Orientals generally, by painting, by sculpture, by writing, have this habit of, as it were, chalking in large letters upon their sepulchres, No Death.

But the moralists of a certain school will exclaim with horror that, at this stage of its development, art must be very selfish. And so it is in the sense in

which it may also be said that the Lyric is egotistic, and that the Orientals are remarkable for their egotism; but not in a bad sense. When the egotism of the Lyric and of Oriental life generally takes a reprehensible form, it appears not simply nor chiefly as opposed to that disinterestedness which is the charm of social intercourse, although in many cases it does thus show itself; it appears rather in making a God of self. The egoism of philosophy comes at last to this, Ego=GOD; and such, the merely speculative result, the reductio ad absurdum of subjective idealism, is often the practical result of Eastern egotism. This may be seen in their theocracies. There has been a great deal of disputing in our day as to the nature of the relationship that ought to subsist between Church and State. Only under Christianity, only under a religion that, asserting the freedom of the will, insists upon individual responsibility, could it for a moment be supposed that the one might be wholly independent of the other. In ancient Greece the Church and State were one, and the question whether the former might ever wield the power of the sword, or the latter the power of the keys, would to a Greek seem as trifling as to us would be the question whether a man might ever use a knife with his left hand or a fork with his right. Unlike the Christian as unlike the Greek, the Oriental not seldom lived under a theocracy in the strictest sense of the term: that is to say, the State was not

simply the Church, it was the Deity; the King was more than a high priest, he was very God, or the vicar of God. Nor is this the only way in which the Orientals have signalized themselves by the assumption of Divinity all sacred writings are of the East. Whether truly or not, and whether it be in the Bible, in the Koran, in the Shasters, in the Vedas, or in other books, the wise men of the East have put forward the most remarkable claims; they profess to utter divine oracles, and this, not simply by revealing the will, but even in some cases by repeating the words of the Most High. Nay, there was one sect of Mohammedans, the Sonnites or orthodox, who, in opposition to the Motazalites and Schiites, maintained to the death that the Koran is uncreated and eternal. Finally, is there not a world of meaning in that story of Psapho who, in the Libyan desert, taught the birds to say and thus to spread a report that Psapho is a God?

II. This leads us to the second, a higher stage of artistic progress. For the deifying of self above mentioned is but the premature development of a great truth; the lyrical anticipation of an epic idea. That Immortality, through which alone Good is possible, is the dream of the lyric. But in striving after this it very soon and naturally becomes a question, How is Immortality itself possible? and it is readily perceived that to God alone belongs in any strict sense and as an

essential attribute Everlasting life. This truth is perceived by the lyrical as well as by the epic artist; but the former in the mingled blindness of haste and egotism leaps to a wrong conclusion. He willeth his own immortality; then, discerning how alone it is possible, he willeth his own Divinity. Such was the tragedy of Eden. Yearning after immortality, our first parents would be as Gods possessed of the secret of immortality. Or, if not to this, the Oriental goes to the other extreme, and looks forward to the abolition of his own individuality, when at death his life shall return to God who gave it, and he shall be swallowed up and for ever lost in the Divine.

Not so does it fare with the Greek or epic artist. He too has a craving for immortality, and to him also comes in due time the query, Is it possible? and how is it possible? With him, however, the result is, that he is content to deny self, content to be naught, content to die that he may thus truly live. Even when, in his most lyrical mood, the Greek displays so much of self-seeking as to pant for deathless renown, he is clearly willing so far to deny himself as to merge his own immortality in that of his race. For, rightly understood, does not the desire of fame amount to this: : Though I, an individual, go hence, yet my race will survive-survive perhaps for ever; and, content to die, since death is inevitable, I hope in the remembrance of that race to live everlastingly. But, in