significance as the broken marbles collected in this room. The
contemplative man, seeing their perfect beauties, asks himself in
their presence many puzzling questions. But perhaps the first that
rises in the mind is wonder at the contrast between the development of
art and the poorness of science in this splendid antiquity. No steam
then to wield the hammer; only the most limited knowledge of the
earth: the west an indescribable region of harmony and glory; the
world a flat surface; fearful mariners hugging the shore close at
home, and trusting to the stars; and England a savage place where
wolves rent the air at night; and a heathen mythology the faith of the
most civilised people of the earth. Under these barbarous
circumstances, the poetry that dwells in the heart of all people who
cultivate some affinity to nature, fashioned the mould of a Phidias
for the people of Athens. A man with a stern soul, an eye large and
grand, a frame built to realise the soul's tasks--we see this Phidias
of the Greeks as he hovered about the foundations of the Parthenon,
when the name of Pericles was every Greek's watchword, four centuries
and a half before our Christian era. The man appears to have been of
colossal parts in every way. Versed in history, a poet given to study
fables (as all poets are), keen in sifting the subtleties of geometry,
a passionate reader of Homer; this was indeed the sculptor of the
gods! Of the high estimation in which the sculptures of the Parthenon
should be held, it is superfluous to say more than all writers on art
have agreed in saying. Here we have master-pieces, beyond which the
sculptors of the many ages that have passed away since Phidias
laboured at his Jupiter in the Olympian grove have never reached. High
praise this to say of a man who has been twenty-two centuries in his
grave, that he accomplished in the utmost perfection those ideals to
which his imitators have vainly aspired. It appears that Phidias had
his troubles, knew the force of a frown from men in power, and in