other considerations was dear to a Grecian heart. Hence labour and pains, assiduity and exertion, were unremittingly applied to advance their peculiar art, to smooth its asperities, to ornament its nakedness, to improve whatever of excellent existed in it, and to aim at still farther capabilities of excellence. Certain of the approbation of their contemporaries, repressed by no ideas of unattainable perfection, which were the growth of latter times and of the greatest refinement, they daily added something to the common stock; and though that something was in itself, perhaps, inconsiderable, it yet raised its possessor to no common degree of celebrity. Thus the arts advanced, proceeding from strength to strength, constantly receiving accessions of improvement, which were favoured by many conspiring, and retarded by no unpropitious circumstances: and, being native to the country, the abilities of the artists in a great measure formed the taste of the age, as its fostering admiration constituted their most flattering reward. [Footnote f: Præter laudem nullius avaris. Horatius De Arte Poetica.] From a situation perfectly dissimilar, though the Romans long and sedulously cultivated the arts, yet their noblest efforts never equalled the best works of the Grecian school; of which the sacred remnants still remain unrivalled and unmatched. For amongst them they were not indigenous, but introduced as it were by violence; by the power of the conquering sword, and by the plundering of insatiable rapacity: each of the Roman generals, however ignorant or unpolished himself, yet pillaging vanquished Greece of the choicest works of her happier days. Thus, indeed, exquisite models and patterns of consummate beauty were procured for the rustic Latians,[g] on which they wrought with assiduity, and attempted to emulate: but their redundancy was rather oppressive than co-operative, and their very perfection tended to prevent an encouraging esteem of the rising artists. For the judgment, or what we call the Taste, of the public being formed not gradually, and by progressive steps of improving art, but all at once, and (as it were) at a bound, assumed a squeamish delicacy which nothing imperfect would please, and which delighted more in finding faults than in discovering beauties. And this cause, whose operation is alike powerful and general, contributed more to keep down the Roman arts, and to prevent them from equalling the Greek, than any inferiority of talents, or than any want of continued application and culture. [Footnote g: - - - - - - artes Intulit agresti Latio. Horatii Epis. Lib. ii. Ep. 1.]