ans knew or felt of art
was borrowed directly or indirectly from Greece,[57] first through
Phoenician and perhaps Etruscan sources, and finally by conquest.
Everything we have of their art shows their imitation of Grecian
models. Their embroideries would certainly have shown the same
impress.

Greece--herself crushed and demoralized--even as late as the Eastern
Empire gave to Rome the fashion of the Byzantine taste, which she at
once adopted, and it was called the Romanesque. This style, which was
partly Arab, still prevails in Eastern Europe, having clung to the
Greek Church. In her best days, Roman poetry, architecture, and
decorative arts were Greek of Greece, imitating its highest types, but
never creating.

It is surely allowable to quote here one of Virgil's Homeric echoes,
which touches upon our especial subject,--

"Mournful at heart at that supreme farewell,
Andromache brings robes of border'd gold;
A Phrygian cloak, too, for Ascanius.
And yielding not the palm in courtesy,
Loads him with woven treasures, and thus speaks:
'Take these gifts, too, to serve as monuments
Of my hand-labour, boy; so may they bear
Their witness to Andromache's long love,
The wife of Hector:--take them, these last gifts
Thy kindred can bestow; in this sad world
Sole image left of my Astyanax!'"[58]

It is sad to mark how not only the refinements of taste, but even the
guiding principles of art, were gradually lost in the humiliation of a
conquered people, the dulness and discouragement which followed on the
expatriation or destruction of their accumulated treasures, and the
deterioration of the Greek artist and artisan, carried prisoners to
Rome, and settled there because it was the seat of luxury and empire.
As the captive Jews hung their harps on the willow-trees by the waters
of Babylon, and refused to sing, so Greek genius succumbed, weighed
down by Roman chains. It sickened and died in exile.

Late Roman art reminds us of the art of Etruria in its archaic days,
except that the freshness and promise are wanting, and that the one
was in its first, the other its second childhood.

Before entering on the subject of Christian art, I must again refer,
however briefly, to the Eastern origin of all art. It is evident that
this had always flowed in streams of many types from that high
watershed of Central Asia, where our human race is said to have been
created, and whence all wisdom an