ty was not invested with the
human form as a mere symbol. They could conceive no loftier way of
representing him. The grandest statue, expressing most adequately the
calmness of absolutely unfettered strength, might well, in their eyes,
be a veritable portrait of divinity. To a Greek, beauty of form was
a consecrated thing. More than once a culprit got off with his life
because it would have been thought sacrilegious to put an end to such
a symmetrical creature. And for a similar reason, the Greeks, though
perhaps not more humane than the Europeans of the Middle Ages, rarely
allowed the human body to be mutilated or tortured. The condemned
criminal must be marred as little as possible; and he was, therefore,
quietly poisoned, instead of being hung, beheaded, or broken on the
wheel.

Is not the unapproachable excellence of Greek statuary--that art never
since equalled, and most likely, from the absence of the needful social
stimulus, destined never to be equalled--already sufficiently
explained? Consider, says our author, the nature of the Greek sculptor's
preparation. These men have observed the human body naked and in
movement, in the bath and the gymnasium, in sacred dances and public
games. They have noted those forms and attitudes in which are revealed
vigour, health, and activity. And during three or four hundred years
they have thus modified, corrected and developed their notions of
corporeal beauty. There is, therefore, nothing surprising in the fact
that Greek sculpture finally arrived at the ideal model, the perfect
type, as it was, of the human body. Our highest notions of physical
beauty, down to the present day, have been bequeathed to us by the
Greeks. The earliest modern sculptors who abandoned the bony, hideous,
starveling figures of the monkish Middle Ages, learned their first
lessons in better things from Greek bas-reliefs. And if, to-day,
forgetting our half-developed bodies, inefficiently nourished, because
of our excessive brain-work, and with their muscles weak and flabby from
want of strenuous exercise, we wish to contemplate the human form in its
grandest perfection, we must go to Hellenic art for our models.

The Greeks were, in the highest sense of the word, an intellectual race;
but they never allowed the mind to tyrannize over the body. Spiritual
perfection, accompanied by corporeal feebleness, was the invention of
asceticism; and the Greeks were never ascetics. Diogenes might scorn
superflu