bably an Athenian, warding off a blow from a centaur.

[Illustration: DYING GLADIATOR.]

The Macedonian age, to which most of these statues belonged, commenced
with Alexander the Great, and terminated with the absorption of Greek
art by the Romans.

Art having, in the two previous periods, reached its culminating point
of perfection, as is the law of all development, when a culminating
point is reached, a downward tendency and a period of decline begins,
for the cycle of development must be completed and the stages of
rise, progress, maturity, decline and decay run through.

No exact date, however, can be assigned to the beginning of the stage
of decline; no sharp line of demarcation can be pointed out dividing
one stage from the other. The decline was so gradual that there was an
inevitable blending of the two. We perceive evident signs of decline
in the fourth stage, while, in the fifth, or stage of decline, we
sometimes meet some noble works of art partaking of the perfect style
of the earlier periods. A period of decline inevitably and invariably
follows an age of maturity and perfection. As Mr. Lecky observes, "The
sculptor and the painter of the age of Praxiteles precipitated art
into sensuality; both of them destroyed its religious character, both
of them raised it to high aesthetic perfection, but in both cases that
perfection was followed by a speedy decline." Muller remarks, "The
creative activity, the real central point of the entire activity of
art, which fashions peculiar forms for peculiar ideas, must have
flagged in its exertions when the natural circle of ideas among the
Greeks had received complete plastic embodiment, or it must have been
morbidly driven to abnormal inventions. We find, therefore, that art,
during this period, with greater or less degrees of skill in
execution, delighted now in fantastical, now in effeminate
productions, calculated merely to charm the senses. And even in the
better and nobler works of the time there was still on the whole
something--not, indeed, very striking to the eye, but which could be
felt by the natural sense, something which distinguished them from the
earlier works--the _striving after effect_." The spirit of imitation
marked the later portion of this period of decline. The sculptors of
this age, despairing of equaling the productions of the former age,
gave themselves up completely to servile imitation. The imitation was
naturally inferior to the origin