With a gracefully fluent delivery, a heap offsets, novel, striking,
and fit, and poetical illustration uncommon in the majoritEof week-day preachers, Dr. G. Kinkel lectured on Monday, at the South Kensington Museum, on Mohammedan art ; demonstrating the influence of Byzantine art on the schools of the East, the artistic development in Egypt, Spain, and India, as seen in the mosques and other buildings and decorations. Before Mo- hammed, said Dr. Kinkel, the Arab, who lived in a tent, homeless, house- less, and a wanderer, had necessarily no original art. After the advent of the Prophet, wherever his followers conquered, they adopted, added to, and improved the art of the country, and from the remnants of antiquity, the stores of their plunder, and the conversion of materials around them, as they poured their victorious hordes from Delhi to Cordova, the Moors laid the foundations of that barbaric magnificence out of which grew the insur- passable richness, variety, and picturesqueness of the Alhambra. The his- tory of the cupola and the minaret were eloquently told; the cupola, aptly called by Dr. Kinkel the symbol of despotism, every pillar, arch and stone in the building being au viliary to its support in the edifice dominated by it. The peroration reviewed the magnificent tombs of India. A full and attea- tire audience remained to the close of the lecture, and rapturously applauded the lecturer.
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