It is not my purpose to describe the decline of art, or enumerate the names of the celebrated masters who exalted sculpture in the palmy days of Pericles or even Alexander. I simply speak of sculpture as an art which reached a great perfection among the Greeks and Romans, as we have a right to infer from the specimens that have been preserved. How many more must have perished, we may infer from the criticisms of the ancient authors. The finest productions of our own age are in a measure reproductions; they cannot be called creations, like the statue of the Olympian Jove. Even the Moses of Michael Angelo is a Grecian god, and Powers's Greek Slave is a copy of an ancient Venus. The very tints which have been admired in some of the works of modern sculptors are borrowed from Praxiteles, who succeeded in giving to his statues an appearance of living flesh. The Museum of the Vatican alone contains several thousand specimens of ancient sculpture which have been found among the débris of former magnificence, many of which are the productions of Greek artists transported to Rome. Among them are antique copies of the Cupid and the Faun of Praxiteles, the statue of Demosthenes, the Minerva Medica, the Athlete of Lysippus, the Torso Belvedere sculptured by Apollonius, the Belvidere Antinous, of faultless anatomy and a study for Domenichino, the Laocoön, so panegyrized by Pliny, the Apollo Belvedere, the work of Agasias of Ephesus, the Sleeping Ariadne, with numerous other statues of gods and goddesses, emperors, philosophers, poets, and statesmen of antiquity. The Dying Gladiator, which ornaments the capitol, is alone a magnificent proof of the perfection to which sculpture was carried centuries after the art had culminated at Athens. And these are only a few which stand out among the twenty thousand recovered statues that now embellish Italy, to say nothing of those that are scattered over Europe. We have the names of hundreds of artists who were famous in their day. Not merely the figures of men are chiselled, but of animals and plants. Nature in all her forms was imitated; and not merely Nature, but the dresses of the ancients are perpetuated in marble. No modern sculptor has equalled, in delicacy of finish, the draperies of those ancient statues as they appear to us even after the exposure and accidents of two thousand years. No one, after a careful study of the museums of Europe, can question that of all the nations who have claimed to be civilized, the ancient Greeks and Romans deserve a proud pre-eminence in an art which is still regarded as among the highest triumphs of human genius. All these matchless productions of antiquity are the result of native genius alone, without the aid of Christian ideas. Nor with the aid of Christianity are we sure that any nation will ever soar to loftier heights than did the Greeks in that proud realm which was consecrated to Paganism.