the highest flights of the
epic or tragic muse, and it has been brought to a perfection to be
paralleled only by the greatest conceptions of Grecian statuary. If
called upon to assign the arts which human genius had, since the beginning
of the world, brought to absolute perfection, no one would hesitate to fix
on Grecian sculpture and Italian painting. Imagination can conceive a more
faultless poem than the _Iliad_, a more dignified series of characters
than those of the _AEneid_, a more interesting epic than _Paradise Lost_;
but it can figure nothing more perfect than the friezes of Phidias, or
more heavenly than the _Holy Families_ of Raphael. It is one of the most
extraordinary and inexplicable facts recorded in the history of the human
mind, that these two sister arts should both have been brought to
perfection near each other, on the shores of the Mediterranean, in the
lifetime of a single generation; for the transition from the marbles of
AEgina to those of the Parthenon, made in the lifetime of Pericles, is as
great as from the paintings of Pietro Perugino to those of Raphael, made
in the lifetime of Leo X.

The sculpture of antiquity aimed chiefly, if not entirely, at the
representation of a _single figure_. Even the procession on the frieze of
the Parthenon is not sculpture--it is a series of isolated horsemen or
figures passing. The group of Niobe and her children is the only attempt
extant at telling a story, or representing emotion by a variety of
figures. Within this limited range, the great sculptors carried the art to
the highest imaginable perfection. The Apollo is the most perfect
representation of manly beauty, the Venus of feminine grace and delicacy.
The Laocoon exhibits the most fearful contortions and agonized expressions
of pain and anguish in suffering humanity; the Fighting Gladiator--the
most inimitable representation of war-like energy at its extreme
tension--the Dying Warrior of the Capitol, of valour sinking beneath the
ebbing stream of blood. The Hercules Farnese is the perfection of physical
strength, the Jupiter Tonans of awful majesty, the Venus Calipyge of
alluring beauty. Thus the expression of _character_ was their great
object; emotion was not overlooked, but it was studied only as it brought
out or illustrated the permanent temper of mind. A collection of ancient
statues is a vast imaginary gallery, in which, as in the heroes of the
_Iliad_, every conceivable gradation of the human m