derns by her undertakers!

END OF THIRD VISIT.

VISIT THE FOURTH.

The visitor will now enter the museum to complete his inspection of
its contents. His way lies once more to the west on entering the great
hall, into the first Sculpture Gallery, or that which he will
recognise as leading into the great central saloon. Here, as he pauses
on the threshold of a noble room filled with splendid specimens of
Greek art, he may recur to the historical points which these works
illustrate. Throughout this, his last visit, he will be occupied with
the examination of the works of the ancient Greeks. These works, as he
will notice, are of various degrees of excellence. Already has he
examined the rude labours of the Greek sculptors of Xanthus; and
to-day his journey will be amid those more modern and perfect labours,
performed when the talent of the Greeks was chiefly concentrated upon
European ground. Although these glories of remote antiquity are here
mostly in an admirable state of preservation, historians are generally
lost in contradictions when they attempt to point to any particular
piece of statuary as the labour of any known sculptor. The sculptor of
the Venus de Medici is not known; and the Apollo Belvedere is a
masterpiece, the author of which lies shrouded in the depths of the
past. Rude and harsh were the early performances of the Greeks. We
have histories of Greek sculptors who flourished many hundred years
before our era; and of these the mythical Daedalus is the oldest and
most renowned. This sculptor is reported to have flourished fourteen
centuries before the Christian era. He is said to have fashioned
colossal wooden statues; and Pausanias mentions his statue of Hercules
in the possession of the Thebans, and his wooden Venus in the
possession of the Delians. His Hercules, however, appears to have been
considered his masterpiece; and Flaxman, commenting upon the antiquity
of the figures of Hercules found on some coins, seems to think that we
may not unreasonably conjecture that these are copies from the
masterpiece of Daedalus. Other sculptors of the same name, appear to
have flourished in the Achaic period of Grecian history. Indeed it is
shrewdly conjectured that Daedalus derived his name from wooden
statues called Daedala; and that amongst the ancient Greeks, Daedalus
meant nothing more than one skilled in making Daedala. The earliest
sculptures of the Greeks were fashioned of materials easily worke