s the advantage of being
fixed; for without some standard universally admitted, we should run
into all the extravagances of conceit and affectation.

"No work of the present time is ever universally admitted as an
indisputable standard. It is only when time has placed an interval
between the present and the past, wide enough to destroy all the
rivalries of competition; that great works receive the full
acknowledgments of their merits, and become standards to which we all
appeal. Thus in the art of writing our own language, we refer to the
best models of past instead of to the works of our own days; and our
youth at school are chiefly trained on the written models of Greece
and Home, instead of those of our own country. The advantage of this
consists in having before us examples which all appeal to, not because
we contend that they are in all respects the best, but because they
were the best of their day, and being written in a language no longer
subject to change, may be taken as an universal standard by which all
civilised nations may measure their thoughts and the mode of
expressing them. The frieze of the Parthenon and the dramas of
Sophocles, the forms of the marble and the conceptions of the great
poet, still speak to our imagination and our understanding: we
recognise, in both, the beauty of proportion, the simplicity and truth
of design; and we all assent to a standard which we feel to be in
harmony with nature, and to which all nations will yield a more ready
obedience than to any other that we can name.

"Though the artist and the student may examine the sculptures of the
Parthenon with somewhat different views, their studies are more nearly
allied than is generally supposed. The artist who looks at them merely
as delineations of form, without reference to the ideas which gave
them their existence, loses half the pleasure and the profit; and the
student who merely names and catalogues them, without connecting them
with the written monuments of Grecian genius, that is with the
illustration of ancient texts, is also pursuing a barren study."

And now the visitor's way lies through the sculpture galleries, back
to the grand entrance. He has accomplished the labour of examining all
that is exhibited to the public generally of the contents of the
national museum. He may wander into the eastern wing of the building
(if it be open to the general visitor), and through the northern,
where the vast library of printed