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 39 8 DRAVIDIAN STYLE. BOOK III. of its pillars, and his costume and the shape of his arm are exactly those we find in contemporary pictures of the wars of Aurangzib, or the early Marathas in the beginning of the 1 8th century. As shown in Woodcut No. 234, the bracket shafts are there attached to the piers as in Tirumalai Nayyak's buildings, and though the general character of the architecture is the same, there is a coarseness in the details, and a marked inferiority in the figure-sculpture, that betrays the distance of date between these two examples. Slight as the difference may appear to the unpractised eye, it is within the four centuries that include the dates of these two buildings (1350 to 1750) that practically the whole history of the later Dravidian temple architecture is included. For it is safe to assert that nine-tenths, at least, or more, of those which are now found south of the Tungabhadra, were erected or largely extended and rebuilt between these dates. The earlier works of the seven centuries that elapsed between the carving of the rocks at Mamallapuram and the erection of the Vellor pagoda have almost totally perished. But during that period, a style was elaborated and so fixed that it should endure for five centuries afterwards, with so little change, and with only that degradation in detail, which is the fatal characteristic of art in India. It seems impossible that the horsemen, the Vyalis, and above all, the great cornice of double curvature, shown in the woodcut (No. 232), could have been brought to these fixed forms without long experience, and the difficulty is to understand how they could ever have been elaborated in stone at all, as they are so unlike lithic forms found anywhere else ; yet they are not wooden, nor is there any trace in them of any of their details being derived from wooden architecture, as is so evidently the case with the Buddhist architecture of the north. One suggestion that occurs to me is that they might be derived from terra-cotta forms. Frequently, at the present day, figures of men on horseback larger than life, or of giants on foot, are seen near the village temples made of pottery, their hollow forms of burnt clay, and so burnt as to form a perfect terra - cotta substance. Most of the figures also on the gopurams are not in plaster as is generally said, but are also formed of clay burnt. The art has certainly been long practised in the south, and if we adopt the theory that it was used for many ornamental purposes along with wood or stone, it will account for much that is otherwise unintelligible in the arts of the south. But we may further suppose that the broad sloping slabs of the earlier temples having no level bed to rest on the wall head, and being apt to slide down,