ircumstances. Like the snow, which hides the familiar
brown soil from us, with its unearthly and uncongenial whiteness, its
perpetual snow chills and repels human sympathies. Nature, for a
similar reason, introduces white flowers very sparingly into the
landscape; and their dazzling whiteness is toned down by the greenery
around them, and the balancing of coloured objects near at hand, so
that they do not in reality attract more notice than other flowers.
The ancient Greeks themselves, keenly sensitive as they were to all
external influences, had a fine instinct for this want of harmony
between white marble and the tones of nature and the feelings of man;
and therefore, in many instances, they coloured not only the marble
buildings exposed to view outside, but even the marble statues
carefully secluded in the niches within. The Parthenon was thus tinted
with vermilion, blue, and gold, which seems to us, who now see only
the golden hue with which the suns of ages have dyed its pure Pentelic
marble, a barbarous superfluity, but which, to the people of the time,
was necessary on account of the dazzling brightness of its material,
concealing the exquisite beauty of the workmanship, and the finished
grace of its proportions. Colour was used with perfect taste to
relieve the sculptured details of the exterior, to articulate and
ornament mouldings, and to harmonise the pure white temple with the
dark blue sky of Greece and the rich warm tones of her landscape. The
magnificent sarcophagi of white marble recently discovered at Sidon,
belonging to the best type of Greek art, are most effectively adorned
with different tints and gradations of red and purple, gold being
sparingly applied. We see many traces of bright colouring on the
columns and other parts of the buildings in the Roman Forum. The
bas-reliefs on the Lumachella marble of Trajan's Column were
originally picked out with profuse gilding and vivid colours; the egg
and arrow moulding of the capital being tinted green, red and yellow,
the abacus blue and red, the spirals yellow, the prominent figures
gilt against backgrounds of different hues, and the water of the
various rivers blue. Statues of the deities in Rome were nearly all
coloured; and they received a fresh coat of vermilion--which, although
it was the hue of divinity, was extremely fugacious--on anniversary
occasions or in times of great national rejoicing.

All this pleads powerfully in behalf of Gibson's colou