no longer to be excused for neglecting architectural details, the
configuration of the country, the drawing of rare plants, and, in fact,
all those accessories which had been previously omitted altogether or
merely indicated. The necessity of covering such vast surfaces as the
pylons offered had accustomed them to arrange the various scenes of one
and the same action in a more natural and intimate connexion than their
predecessors could possibly have done. In these scenes the Pharaoh
naturally played the chief part, but in place of choosing for treatment
merely one or other important action of the monarch calculated
to exhibit his courage, the artist endeavoured to portray all the
successive incidents in his campaigns, in the same manner as the early
Italian painters were accustomed to depict, one after the other, and on
the same canvas, all the events of the same legend. The details of these
gigantic compositions may sometimes appear childish to us, and we may
frequently be at a loss in determining the relations of the parts, yet
the whole is full of movement, and, although mutilated, gives us even
yet the impression which would have been made upon us by the turmoil of
a battle in those distant days.

The sculptor of statues for a long time past was not a whit less skilful
than the artist who executed bas-reliefs. The sculptor was doubtless
often obliged to give enormous proportions to the figure of the king, to
prevent his being overshadowed by the mass of buildings among which the
statue was to appear; but this necessity of exaggerating the human form
did not destroy in the artist that sense of proportion and that skilful
handling of the chisel which are so strikingly displayed in the sitting
scribe or in the princess at Meîdûm; it merely trained him to mark out
deftly the principal lines, and to calculate the volume and dimensions
of these gigantic granite figures of some fifty to sixty-five feet high,
with as great confidence and skill as he would have employed upon any