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THE ANCIENT ABBEY OF A J ANT A 125 it nevertheless captured Buddha, and through his Hfe and his disciples elaborated a religious type for the West. From the moment when Constantine established his new capital at the ancient site on the shores of the Bosphorus, that is to say, from about A.D. 335, the influence of the East on the art of the younger faith would become as energetic as the sculptural capacities of the artisans of Byzantium had already shown themselves in the Gandharan monasteries.

Magadha has produced symbols whose dignity Gandhara was never able to approach. But in complex composition, in power of architectural story-telling, in dignity of the decorative synthesis, it is difficult to feel that the ultimate achievements of Gandhara and her posterity had ever before been approached, even at Sanchi.

It must never be supposed, however, that Gandhara was Europe. In spite of the Western elements, whose existence its art demonstrates, Gandhara was pre-eminently Asiatic. And never again perhaps will the actual facts be better or more comprehensively stated than in the memor- able words of Havell, in his Indian Sculpture and Painting: —

"Indian idealism during the greater part of this time was the dominating note in the art of Asia which was thus brought into Europe; and when we find a perfectly oriental atmosphere and strange echoes of Eastern symbolism in the mediaeval cathedrals of Europe, and see their structural