THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

out in such laborious fashion; their delicate essence would have disappeared. All such trifling with the thistledown of fancy .had to wait until the medium united to such ephemeral conceits was invented—the stylus and wax-tablets, that could be scrib­bled on and the writing erased in a moment. The stylus and tablets soon became highly ornamented, and had their fashions like our lizard-skin note-books and ivory tablets have.

But the medium that lent itself so painfully to literature, lent itself to another art—sculpture—with far more satisfactory results, no less painfully to the artist, per­haps, because all good art is brought out in discomfort. There is no such thing as ease in art. It is effort, mental and bodily, all the time, and the huge figures of the ancient Egyptian kings, priests, doorkeepers, and so on, remain to awe us with their grandeur and an earnestness which we seem to have altogether lost. After all, the greatest artist is Time. I knew of a colossal lion that lay for ages at length on a promontory and looked out over the blue seas, while the suns of centuries burnt his gigantic hide into very nearly the color of the living one, and into his raised and watchful visage grew an expression and a pathos that was most assuredly beyond the power of his sculptor to produce. There is a something about the Egyptian art that appeals to our human sympathies more than the more modern, and the much more materially perfect Greek art, whose most splendid statues leave us plunged in wonder at their knowledge and correctness and beauty of form, but seldom prompt us to wish we knew more of the individual and his thoughts and fancies. Of course this doesn’t hold good for such statues as are portraits — of the Caesars, or the great philosophers, for instance. About such people the ordinary rank and file of the world must always feel a vivid curiosity. In pictorial art, the earliest known specimens are all of coarse frescoes, mural decorations. We have some very interesting ones of about the time of Moses, before or since, and they give us a very good idea of how the Egyptian of that period lived his life. We see the farmer among his cattle or driving his geese, the hunter going after game, the warrior returning from battle with his captives, and we see the society functions of the time. One especially perfect fresco shows us an entertainment devoted to the ladies, who are seated in rows, in an elegant hall, and are listening to probably the best orchestra to be had. The ladies fan themselves with the peculiar palm-leaf. They are much draped, and appear to feel the heat, while, gliding about among the company, offering trays of cakes and fruits, are very young girl attendants, whose black ringlets are kept in place by a fillet of white or gold, with a blue lotus lily stuck through it, an effective costume and their only one.

While touching upon dress I only mention that we have a little Egyptian figure whose dress is “ accordion-pleated ” from throat to feet ; it also wears a little “ accordion-pleated ” cape. So the fashions and arts of dress come round.

The frescoes that cover the walls of the exquisite little houses of Pompeii are wonderfully elegant and fanciful in device and brilliant in coloring, exquisitely fine and finished as everything in that jewel-box of a city was even to the delicate mosaics that co'vered its floors. It is a whole education in art to wander alone through the deserted streets of Pompeii toward sunset, when the purple and red shadows begin to sweep over Vesuvius, that wonderful background to that wonderful town; that mount­ain, that still roars and threatens and shoots up its fiery column, as it did of old, un­heeded, until at last it poured its fiery lava over the town and preserved to us those gems of its arts by which we are now profiting. Here we can see where the Italians acquired their sense of color. It was in the nature around them, in the translucent skies, the glowing light, the sun-mellowed marbles of their homes, the garments dyed with indigenous pigments that could never clash with their native surroundings.

Portraiture seems to owe its origin to various motives besides the vanity to which it is most generally ascribed. We all know the pretty fable of the young Ionic girl who parted from her lover in the sunset, and as he went from her she saw his shadow thrown on the wall near by, she took a piece of charcoal and ran it over the shadow’s outline, and so kept a faint image of him till he came again—a pretty story that em-