Page:Repository of Arts, Series 1, Volume 01, 1809, January-June.djvu/96

70 : and pleasure has gone hand in hand with philosophy."

Prompted by an amiable sentiment of gratitude towards the past benefactors of the human race, we indulge with pleasing anxiety in such enquiries as tend to develope the sources of the advantages that we enjoy; and as we hope to live ourselves in the memory of the good, we willingly grant the sublunary immortality that mortals can bestow to the discoverers and inventors of those arts and sciences, to which we are indebted for the comforts and the innocent luxuries of life.

Which then (we may laudably enquire) was the first-born of the imitative arts? and what country had the honour of giving birth to these chaste and charming sisters? Did they travel from India to Egypt? or vice versa, from Egypt to the peninsula of Hindostan? or from the plains of Shinaar to both? These are questions upon which much learned ingenuity has been expended; not fruitlessly, for many useful discoveries and much pleasure has attended the research; but, perhaps, too generally by mere men of letters, and without sufficient advertence to the works of genius and of persevering industry, which those distant ages and countries have transmitted to modern observation. If critical historians have not looked too much at the records of antiquity, they may possibly have looked too little at the means of recording; and hence battles and massacres may have stained some pages on which science and art might have shed a fairer renown, and a lustre more worthy of perpetuity, if not more brilliant.

In prosecuting the enquiries which we have sketched out, frequent reference will be had to such of the existing remains of the arts of antiquity as may now be accessible to our view; but much will still be involved in obscurity, for much is unfortunately lost of the early arts, which the historians of Rome and of the middle ages might have examined; and much more will be dimly seen by the glimmerings of fables and analogy: yet some interesting truths will doubtless arise to view, with which the less learned part of our readers may be pleased to be made acquainted.

Indigenous to every soil, the imitative arts have expanded with superior vigour in the more genial climates, with the expanding faculties of man. We are not to suppose that the several modes of art migrated, like man himself (according to the Mosaic accounts), from country to country. The imperishable nature of the substances on which some of them were anciently exercised, concurs with the testimony of history, the discordant pretensions of the great nations of antiquity, and the observations of modern discoverers, to persuade us that more nations than one may justly claim the honour of having invented the arts of, and. The first of these, as we shall shew, was practised in many centuries before it was invented in ; and perhaps, , and , may with equal justice assert their claims to the spontaneous production of engraving and sculpture; and  may contend with them all for the palm of early painting.

The human mind, under similar