It would be erroneous, however, to conclude from this that Greek art owed everything to the actual. The type existed more or less imperfectly in the population, but Phidias and the Greek artists took and developed it, by the aid of the imagination, into that perfect phase of physical beauty which we justly term the _beau-ideal_. A nation’s beau-ideal is always the perfectionment of its own type. It is easy to see how this happens. In nations, as in individuals, the soul moulds the body, so far as extrinsic circumstances permit, into a form in accordance with its own ideas and desire; and accordingly, whenever a marked difference exists in the physical aspect of two nations, there, also, we may expect to find a variance in their beau-ideals. Not, as is generally supposed, from the eye of each race becoming accustomed to the national features, but because these features, are themselves an incarnation and embodiment of the national mind. It is the soul which shapes the national features, not the national features that mould the æsthetic judgment of the soul. It is not _association_, therefore, that is the cause of the different beau-ideals we behold in the world, but a psychical difference in the nations which produce them,—a circumstance no more remarkable than those moral and intellectual diversities in virtue of which we see one race excelling in the exact sciences, another in the fine arts, a third in military renown, and a fourth in pacific industry. We may adduce, in curious illustration of this point, the well-known fact that Raphael and many other eminent artists have repeatedly given their own likeness to the imaginary offspring of their art,—not real, but idealised likenesses. How was this? From vanity? No, certainly; but because the ideal most congenial to them, which they could most easily hold in their mind, and which it gave them most pleasure to linger over and beautify, was the ideal constituted by the perfectionment of their own features. There is something more than mere vanity in the pleasure usually derived from looking into a mirror; for when the features are in exact or nearly exact accordance with the desires of the framing Spirit within, there must always be a pleasure in the soul looking upon its own likeness: even as it experiences a similar delight when meeting with a being of perfectly congenial nature—in other words, its spiritual (as the other is its physical) likeness. It is to be expected, _cæteris paribus_, that this pleasure will be most felt by those who are gifted with much personal beauty, and whose features are most perfect of their kind; for in their case there is more than ordinary harmony between the soul and its fleshly envelope. Accordingly, no artist ever painted himself more than the beautiful Raphael. And we could name an eminent individual, now no more, as rarely gifted with physical beauty as with mental powers, to whom the contemplation of his portrait was almost a passion. Some of our