and is but a part of a greater whole.  The intentional irregularity of the windows in the Doge’s Palace at Venice enhances the effect of the marvellous facade.  By comparing the Parthenon at Athens, with its curves and inclinations, with the Madeleine at Paris, we see how far short the copy comes of the original in beauty and expressiveness, because of the exact formality of its right angles.  The ancient Egyptians understood this well; and in their architecture they sought to rise to a higher symmetry through irregularity; and we can see in their frequent departure from upright and parallel lines in the construction of their temples, an effort to escape from formal exactness, and a longing for the nobler unity which is realised to the full in the rich variety of the Gothic.  We may be sure that “every attempt in art that seeks a theoretical completeness, in so doing sinks from the natural into the artificial, from the living and the divine into the mechanical and commonplace.”  The Egyptian obelisk is thus but a type of a great law of nature.  In this simplest and most primitive specimen of architecture we have an illustration of the principle which gives its expressiveness to the human face, beauty to the flowers of the field, and grandeur to the highest triumphs of human art.

The obelisks that remain to be described are the two which to us are the most interesting; the pair of “Cleopatra’s Needles” which so long stood side by side at Alexandria, and are now separated by the Atlantic Ocean; one standing on the Thames Embankment in London, and the other in Central Park, New York.  They were both set up in front of the great temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, about fifteen centuries before Christ, by Thothmes III., and engraved by Rameses II., the two mightiest of the kings of Egypt.  After standing on their original site for fourteen centuries, witnessing the rise and fall of many native dynasties, and the establishment of the Greek dominion under the Ptolemies, they were, when Egypt became a province of Imperial Rome, transferred by Caesar Augustus to Alexandria.  There they adorned the Caesareum or palace of the Caesars, which stood by the side of the harbour, was surrounded with a sacred grove, and was the greatest building in the city.  What Thebes and Heliopolis were in the time of the Pharaohs, Alexandria became in the time of the Ptolemies.  And though, being a parasitical growth, it could not originate works of genius, like its ancient prototypes, it could appropriate those which Heliopolis and Thebes had created.  The tragic death of Cleopatra, the last of the dynasty of the Ptolemies, had taken place seven years before the setting up of these obelisks at Alexandria; so that she had in reality nothing to do with them personally.  For about fifteen centuries the two obelisks stood in their new position before the Caesareum.  They saw the gradual overthrow, by time’s resistless hand, of the magnificent palace which they adorned;