much more to a satisfactory rendering of the objects
intended, than the outlines of the human body. This inducement to seek
for resources of ornament in the lower fields of creation was powerless
in the minds of the great Pagan nations, Ninevite, Greek, or Egyptian:
first, because their thoughts were so concentrated on their own
capacities and fates, that they preferred the rudest suggestion of human
form to the best of an inferior organism; secondly, because their
constant practice in solid sculpture, often colossal, enabled them to
bring a vast amount of science into the treatment of the lines, whether
of the low relief, the monochrome vase, or shallow hieroglyphic.

Sec. XXXIX. But when various ideas adverse to the representation of
animal, and especially of human, form, originating with the Arabs and
iconoclast Greeks, had begun at any rate to direct the builders' minds
to seek for decorative materials in inferior types, and when diminished
practice in solid sculpture had rendered it more difficult to find artists
capable of satisfactorily reducing the high organisms to their elementary
outlines, the choice of subject for surface sculpture would be more and
more uninterruptedly directed to floral organisms, and human and animal
form would become diminished in size, frequency, and general importance.
So that, while in the Northern solid architecture we constantly find the
effect of its noblest features dependent on ranges of statues, often
colossal, and full of abstract interest, independent of their
architectural service, in the Southern incrusted style we must expect to
find the human form for the most part subordinate and diminutive, and
involved among designs of foliage and flowers, in the manner of which
endless examples had been furnished by the fantastic ornamentation of
the Romans, from which the incrusted style had been directly derived.

Sec. XL. Farther. In proportion to the degree in which his subject must
be reduced to abstract outline will be the tendency in the sculptor to
abandon naturalism of representation, and subordinate every form to
architectural service. Where the flower or animal can be hewn into bold
relief, there will always be a temptation to render the representation
of it more complete than is necessary, or even to introduce details and
intricacies inconsistent with simplicity of distant effect. Very often a
worse fault than this is committed; and in the endeavor to give vitality
to the s