their feet, and also from the same cause which led the Egyptians to employ granite, which was afterwards painted—viz. because it was the most enduring, and capable of receiving a higher finish of workmanship.” He maintains that so utterly regardless were these Greeks of any supposed beauty in marble—especially white marble—that they took pains to hide every appearance of its texture; that they not only painted it all over, but covered it with a coating of stucco. Listen to an oracle that, we will answer for it, never came from Delphi, that no Pythia in her madness ever conceived, and that, if uttered in the recesses, would have made Apollo shake his temple to pieces. “To what extent were white marble temples painted and ornamented? I would maintain that they were _entirely_ so; that neither the colour of the marble, nor even its surface, was preserved; and that preparatory to the ornamenting and colouring of the surface, the whole was covered with a thin coating of stucco, something in the nature of a gilder’s ground, to stop the absorption of the colours by the marble.” “A thin coat of stucco!” and no exception with respect to statues—to be applied wherever the offensive white marble showed its unblushing nakedness and beauty!! Let us imagine it tested on a new statue—thus stucco over, however thin, Mr Bayley’s Eve, or Mr Power’s Greek Slave—the thought is enough to make the sculptor go mad, and commit a murder on himself or the plasterer—to see all his fine, his delicate chisellings obliterated! all the nice markings, the scarcely perceptible dimplings gone!—for let the coat of stucco be thin as a wafer, it must, according to that thickness, enlarge every rising and diminish the spaces between them: thus, all true proportion must be lost; between two risings the space must be less. “What fine chisel,” says our immortal Shakespeare, “could ever yet cut breath?” How did he imagine, in these few words, the living motion of the “breath of life” in the statue! and who doubts either the attempt or the success so to represent perfect humanity, when he looks at the finest antique statues? Let an audacious innovator dare to daub one of them with his coat of stucco, and all the chiselling of the life, breath, and motion is annihilated. It must be so, whatever be the thickness of the coat; though it be but a nail-paring it must diminish risings and hollows, and all nicer touches must disappear. We should heartily desire to see the innovator suffocated in his plaster and paint-pot, that in his suffering he may know it is a serious thing to knock the life-breath out of the body even of a statue. “Nec lex est justior ulla Quam necis artifices arte perire suâ.”