the expression of
most subtile Grace, pretends to be merely a type of that large language
of forms with which the most refined intellects of antiquity uttered
their Love, and their joyful worship of Aphrodite. This line, of course,
is Greek.

[Illustration]

The three great distinctive eras of Art, in a purely
psychological sense, have been the Egyptian, the Grecian, and the
Romanesque,--including in the latter term both Roman Art itself and all
subsequent Art, whether derived directly or indirectly from Rome, as the
Byzantine, the Moresque, the Mediaeval, and the Renaissance. Selecting
the most characteristic works to which these great eras respectively
gave birth, it is not difficult, by comparison, to ascertain the
master-spirit, or type, to which each of these three families may be
reduced. If we place these types side by side, the result will be as in
the diagram, presenting to the eye, at one view, the concentration
of three civilizations, DESTINY, LOVE, and LIFE;--Destiny, finding
utterance in the stern and inflexible simplicity of the tombs and
obelisks of Egypt; Love, expressing itself in the statuesque and
thoughtful grace of Grecian temples, statues, and urns; Life, in the
sensuous and impulsive change, evident in all the developments of Art,
since Greece became Achaia, a province of the Roman Empire. Here we
behold the perpetual youth, the immortal genius of Hellas, tempering the
solid repose of Egypt with the passion of Life. This intermediate Beauty
is the essence of the age of Pericles; and in it "the capable eye" may
discover the pose of the Cnidian Venus of Praxiteles, of the Jupiter
Olympius of Phidias, and the other lost wonders of ancient chisels, and,
more directly, the tender severity of Doric capitals, and the secret
grace of the shafts of the Parthenon.

You remember Pliny's account of the visit of Apelles to the great
painter Protogenes, at Rhodes;--how, not finding him at home, Apelles
inscribed a line upon a board, assuring the slave that this line would
signify to the master who had been to see him. Whatever the line was,
Protogenes, we hear, recognized in it the hand of the greatest limner of
Greece. It was the signature of that Ideal, known to the antique
world by its wider developments in the famous pictures of the Venus
Anadyomene, and Alexander with the Thunderbolt, hung in the temple of
Diana at Ephesus.

The gravity with which this apparently trifling anecdote is given us
from an