are intimately blended in the service of religion. If then a nation
has existed whose physical organisation, whose climate, and whose
religion all combined to develop the principles of beauty, and taught
man to choose from nature those forms and combinations which give the
highest and most lasting pleasure, we of the present day who do not
possess these advantages must follow those who were the first true
interpreters of nature. Their models possess 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