If Mr Jones colours the horses brown and grey, the faces of the riders flesh colour, and marks their eyes, and reddens their lips, and draperies their bodies after patterns out of a tailor’s book—it is quite absurd to say that the Greeks never intended exact imitation. In what he has done every one will recognise the attempt to portray exact nature in colour. Upon this principle, and establishing a contempt of white marble, there is but one more step to take, to set up offensive wax-work above the art of the statuary in marble. Sculpture is an appeal to the imagination, not to the senses. That which attempts to deceive disgusts by the early discovery of the fraud. Indeed, it is a maxim in sculpture that a certain unnaturalness in subordinate accompanying objects is to be adopted, to show that a comparison with real nature is not intended. “If imitation is to be preferred,” says Aristotle, “which is least adapted to the vulgar and most calculated to please the politest spectators, that which imitates everything is clearly most adapted to the vulgar, as not being intelligible without the addition of much movement and action, as bad players on the flute turn round, if they would imitate the motion of a discus.” Paint to the statuary is what all this motion is to the flute-player. Whoever mutilates what is great and good in art, and would persist in so doing, after reproof, ought to pay the penalty of his folly. We would not be too severe in the punishment of offenders in taste, but should rejoice to see one of a congenial kind put in practice, one very mild for such an offence as this of statue painting—the tarring and feathering the perpetrators, plasterers and bedaubers, principals and coadjutors. Upon Mr Owen Jones’s principle, the “ex uno omnes,” and his making a confirmed summer of one swallow, though we entirely deny the existence of this one _rara avis_, a white marble statue painted, he and his company ought not to object to the punishing process, for more culprits have been known to have been tarred and feathered than are even the pretended specimens of painted marbles on record. We would, out of consideration for the peculiar taste of the decorators, mitigate the punishment, by allowing the received proportion of Mr Jones’s blue and vermilion to be mixed with the tar.