put in varieties of flesh tones, show the blue veins beneath, and all that a painter _renowned_ for these things was in the habit of doing in his pictures. If this be not the meaning of this author, and the object of Mr Owen Jones in making such a parade of it, he or the writer writes without any fixed ideas, and all this assumption, all this absurd theory, is after all built upon a word which these people are determined to misunderstand, and yet upon which they cannot help but express the doubt. But why should there be any doubt at all? As far as we can see, the word is a plain word, and explains itself very well, and even expresses its _modus operandi_. A writer acquainted with such a schoolboy book as Ainsworth’s Dictionary might have relieved his mind as to any doubts or forced construction of _circumlitio_; he might have found there, that the word comes from _Lino_, to smear, from _Leo_, the same—and that _Circum_ in the composition shows the action, the mode of smearing. Nay, he is referred to two passages in Pliny, the very one from which the quotation in the _Historical Evidence_ is taken, and to another in the same author, Pliny—and authors generally explain themselves—where the word is used in reference to the application of medicinal unguents. We can readily grant that the ancient sculptors did employ recipes of the most skilful persons in making unctuous varnishes, which they rubbed into the marble as a preservative, and also to bring out more perfectly the beauty of the marble texture—not altogether to hide it. It may be, without the least concession towards Mr Owen Jones’s painting theory, as readily granted that they gave this unctuous composition a warm tone, with a little vermilion, as many still do to their varnishes. Pliny himself, in his 33d book, chap. vii., gives such a recipe: White Punic wax, melted with oil, and laid on hot; the work afterwards to be well rubbed over with cere-cloths. To return to the “Circumlitio,” we have the word, only with _super_ instead of _circum_, used in the application of a varnish by the Monk Theophilus, of the tenth century, who, if he did not take the word from Pliny, and therefore in Pliny’s sense, may be taken for quite as good _Latin_ authority. After describing the method of making a varnish of oil and a gum—“gummi quod vocatur fornis”—he adds, “Hoc glutine omnis pictura superlinita, fit et decora ac omnino durabilis.” The two words Superlitio and Circumlitio,[46]—the first applicable to such a surface as a picture; the last to statues, which present quite another surface. But if it could be proved—and it cannot—that the works of Praxiteles were in Mr Owen Jones’s sense painted over, would that justify the colouring the frieze of the Parthenon, the work of Phidias, who preceded Praxiteles more than a century, during which many abominations in taste may have been introduced? We are quite aware that, at a barbarous period, images of gods, probably mostly those of wood, were painted over