“But to reach these proud eminences of intellectual grandeur and extensive usefulness, the arts must be solicited, ample protection must be afforded to them; similar inducements to those which produced these great results must not only be offered, but substantially and permanently provided for their use. This garden of the human intellect must be regularly and assiduously cultivated with great care, and kept clear of the noxious weeds that would deform its beauties. Under genial treatment, all its charms develop themselves, and an endless variety of interesting and charming creations are called into existence, illustrating the high principles of religion, the noblest traits of moral and heroic conduct, and the sweetest dreams of the poetic muse: but the turmoils of war and high political contention are to them most injurious, blasting their fairest bloom, as the poisonous simoon of the desert withers the gardens of Palestine; and to these two causes, and these only, aided by anti-English prejudice, can we attribute the very slow advances which the arts had made among the natives of Britain until the auspicious period of which we are now treating”--time of George III.--_Taylor’s History of the Fine Arts in Great Britain_, vol. ii, p. 150. ANTIQUITY OF THE FINE ARTS. Homer, who flourished about B. C. 900, gives a striking proof of the antiquity of the fine arts, in his description of that admirable piece of chased and inlaid work--the shield of Achilles. Its rich design could not have been imagined, unless the arts necessary to produce it had arrived to a high degree of perfection in his country at the time he wrote, though we may doubt whether, at the period of the Trojan war, three hundred years before Homer, there existed artificers capable of executing it. Within a century after the taking of Troy, the Greeks had founded many new colonies in Asia Minor, and the Heraclidæ finally regained their ancient seats in the Peloponnesus. It is worthy of remark that about that period, David built his house of cedars, and Solomon adorned Jerusalem with her magnificent first temple, and that Hiram, king of Tyre, sent to Solomon “a cunning man, endued with understanding,” to assist him in the building of the temple, but more especially to superintend the execution of the ornaments. (1st Kings, vii, 13, and 2d Chron., ii, 14.) THE PŒCILE AT ATHENS.