PREFACE. THE design of the author of this volume is to render some assistance to those who desire to acquire a knowledge uf the principles of taste as exhibited in the peat productions of ancient and modern Art. An acquaintance with those principles is now getting to be regarded as a necessary part of polite education but a great hindrance to obtaining such knowledge has been the want of a test-book in which those principles are concisely ancl intelligibly discussed, and illustrated by reference to particular esamples in the painting, sculpture, and architecture of the past and the present. Attempts have been made to remedy this evil, but nerer with much success first, because the authors of them liacl no practical knowledge of art and second, because, like most critics of these subjects, they gave a transcript merely of the emotions which morks of art arakelled in themselves, and not the reasons why they were worthy of the admiration of the beholder, or, at best, stating the rules of art, but v-holly omitting the reasons for those rules, or that which constitutes the Philosophy of Art. In the present volume the attempt has been made to discover those reasons or requiremeits of the human constitution and, if success has attended the effort, all will have been accomplished in that direction that could have been reasonably expected, for human inquiry cannot be estended beyond it. Of course, the writer of this volume does not claim to have discovered any new principle of Art, but sinply to have brought within the reach of the common intellect truths ordinarily unobserved by the mass, ever unvailing himself of the better knowledge