Miletus; and as we, to praise our fine women, call them Grecian beauties, the European Greeks were accustomed to call their mistresses Ionian beauties, καλας το Ιωνικον. Besides, the difficulty would be by no means resolved by this difference of form, even were it granted in its fullest extent; for I imagine there are few who will deny, that the difference between our most handsome men and the most handsome Athenian, is much less considerable than the difference between our most beautiful statues and the masterpieces of the Greeks. Moreover, the Greeks had no models in nature for their architectural monuments: nevertheless, the same character,—the evident product of the very same principles,—is displayed in their temples as in their statues; and, equally as in them, it is to be seen in their vases, in their furniture and in the most common of their utensils.
3. The same remarks may, with a very little variation, be applied to their religion, and to the facility of seeing the naked figure. It was the virgins of Sparta who were so much celebrated for displaying their charms in the public festivals, and yet the Spartans were no lovers of the arts. Shut up within the impenetrable walls of their apartments, the women of the other Grecian states did not appear even at the Olympic games, and courtezans were the only models of the artists. Our artists, on the other hand, who see every day, without restraint, heads and hands of the most exquisite elegance, well worthy of the finest days of Miletus or of Sparta, produce neither heads nor hands which can bear the most remote comparison with the antique. As for the spirit of religion, I confess I am greatly inclined to banish it altogether from the number of those influences which were favourable to the arts of Greece. Easily excited, and disposed for unquestioning admiration, it is little fitted for the exercise of a severe judgment; it becomes every day more and more attached to its ancient idols, and adores in them less that which it sees in reality than what it believes is to be seen. The devout Greek, who bowed himself at Olympus before the Jupiter of Phidias, revered at Argos, at Thespis, and even in the bosom of Athens, fiures of J uno, of Venus, of the Graces, and of Love, which were nothing more than rude masses of stone, or ill-fashioned pieces of timber. He adored, at Mount Elaius, a horse-headed Ceres; at Phygalia, an Eurynome, who was half woman and half fish, like the idol of the barbarians of Gath; and at the temple of Ephesus itself, which was one of the seven wonders of the world, a gigantic or hieroglyphical monster, with nine or ten tiers of breasts. Civil usages and manners, and the general taste, had happily more effect on the religion of Greece than that religion had upon them. But for the revolution which national genius, taste, and the arts themselves, operated in the creed of the Greeks, that people, so celebrated for the beauty of their gods, would have remained prostrate before the monsters of the Nile, under the despotism of their priests. The religion of the Greeks, moreover, is far from being the only one which has attributed to deities the forms of men. If this religion, by the poetical mystery which it involved, favoured the perfection of the arts, and lifted the imagination of the artists above the sphere of the senses, why is it that the Christian religion produces no similar effects? Did the poetry or the religion of the Greeks contain any thing more lofty and more imposing than the imagery of the Scriptures? The beauty of Angels is all that imagination can represent as most admirable and most divine. Martyrs, Prophets, and Apostles, are at least equal in dignity with Philosophers, Fauns, and Pentathletæ. The dying resignation of the holy Stephen is surely as good a subject as the expiring shudder of a hireling gladiator. Moses found lying among the bulrushes by the daughter of Pharoah, is as picturesque an incident as the discovery of Œdipus by the shepherds of Cithæron. Samson was as strong as Milo; and many beauties are recorded in the Bible, who were at least as worthy of the chisel of a Phidias, as the Laises and the Elpinices of an Athenian brothel.
4. With regard to poetical liberty, we see in Greece, as every where else, free people, who have rejected the arts; and others, ruled by despots, who have cultivated them with the greatest success. Did the arts languish at Sicyon, under Aristatus and the Cypselides; at Athens, under Hippias; at Saraos, under Polycrates; at Syra-
