odern verse with Homer's serene perfection; it would take,
perhaps, a greater mind than Bach's to employ all the resources of
modern music with his glorious ease and directness. And greater minds
than those of Bach and Homer the world has not often the felicity to
possess.

The arts of painting and sculpture are imitative arts above all others,
and therefore more dependent than any others upon exact knowledge, more
tinged with the quality of science. Let us see how they illustrate our
supposed law.

Sculpture depends, as does architecture, upon certain laws of proportion
in space which are analogous to the laws of proportion in time and in
pitch upon which music is founded. But as sculpture represents the human
figure, whereas architecture and music represent nothing, sculpture
requires for its perfection the mastery of an additional science, which
is the knowledge of the structure and movement of the human body. This
knowledge may be acquired with some rapidity, especially in times and
countries where man is often seen unclothed. So, in the history of
civilizations, sculpture developed early, after poetry, but with
architecture, and before painting and polyphonic music. It reached the
greatest perfection of which it is capable in the age of Pericles, and
from that time progress was impossible to it, and for a thousand years
its movement was one of decline. After the dark ages sculpture was one
of the first arts to revive; and again it develops rapidly--though not
so rapidly as before, conditions of custom and climate being less
favorable to it--until it reaches, in the first half of the sixteenth
century, something near its former perfection. Again it can go no
further; and since then it has changed but has not progressed. In
Phidias, by which name I would signify the sculptor of the pediments of
the Parthenon, we have the coincidence of a superlatively great artist
with the moment of technical and scientific perfection in the art, and a
similar coincidence crowns the work of Michelangelo with a peculiar
glory. But, apart from the work of these two men, a the essential value
of a work of sculpture is by no means always equal to its technical and
scientific completeness. There are archaic statues that are almost as
nobly beautiful as any work by Phidias and more beautiful than almost
any work that has been done since his time. There are bits of Gothic
sculpture that are more valuable expressions of human feeling than