We have been reading an account of the discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii—without doubt, both these places contained Greek sculpture of a good period. There have been a vast number of marble statues and fragments of statues found. The marble of which they are made is mentioned. They are mostly white marble, and there is no notice of any having been painted. If one should be, or should have been found coloured, it would be an exception, the not unlikely experiment of individual bad taste. We should bear in mind, also, that the discovered works must have been found with regard to substance and colour in the state in which they were overwhelmed in the sudden destruction of the towns. Yet do we read of a single painted marble statue? The paintings are, however, minutely described, and their coloured wall decorations. We have yet to learn that there has been any paint discovered upon those exquisitely beautiful statues belonging to the Lycian Temple Tomb, in the British Museum, discovered and brought to this country by Sir Charles Fellowes. Could we be brought to believe that marble statues were stuccoed or painted—and we utterly repudiate any such attempts as Mr Jones’s to make it credible—we should bless the memories, had they left us any notices of their names, of those worthies of a better taste who had the good sense to obliterate, to the utmost of their power, the bedaubers’ doings. With them we venerate white marble; and while we think of the Polychromatists, we entertain greater respect for the taste and sense of the so-called simpletons of the fable who endeavoured to wash the blackamoor _white_, than for the fatuous who would make the _white_ black, or even vermilion.