But on the other hand it may well be doubted whether the impersonation of the Greek allegories in the purest forms of Greek art will ever give intense pleasure to the people, or ever speak home to the hearts of the men and women of these times. And this not from the want of an innate taste and capacity in the minds of the masses—not because ignorance has “frozen the genial current in their souls”—not merely through a vulgar preference for mechanical imitation of common and familiar forms; but from other causes not transient—not accidental. A classical education is not now, as heretofore, the _only_ education given; and through an honest and intense sympathy with the life of their own experience, and through a dislike to vicious associations, though clothed in classical language and classical forms, _thence_ is it that the people have turned with a sense of relief from gods and goddesses, Ledas and Antiopes, to shepherds and shepherdesses, groups of Charity, and young ladies in the character of Innocence,—harmless, picturesque inanities, bearing the same relation to classical sculpture that Watts’s hymns bear to Homer and Sophocles. Classical attainments of any kind are rare in our English sculptors; therefore it is, that we find them often quite familiar with the conventional treatment and outward forms of the usual subjects of Greek art, without much knowledge of the original poetical conception, its derivation, or its significance; and equally without any real appreciation of the idea of which the form is but the vehicle. Hence they do not seem to be aware how far this original conception is capable of being varied, modified, _animated_ as it were, with an infusion of fresh life, without deviating from its essential truth, or transgressing those narrow limits, within which all sculpture must be bounded in respect to action and attitude. To express _character_ within these limits is the grand difficulty. We must remember that too much value given to the head as the seat of mind, too much expression given to the features as the exponents of character, must diminish the importance of those parts of the form on which sculpture mainly depends for its effect on the imagination. To convey the idea of a complete individuality in a single figure, and under these restrictions, is the problem to be solved by the sculptor who aims at originality, yet feels his aspirations restrained by a fine taste and circumscribed by certain inevitable associations.