possible the production of major art. The main interest for us in the "Dissertation," then, lies in Scott's notions of the kind of society needed to produce major art, and beyond that, in what is entailed in holding fast to that notion, developing it into a doctrine, and even hoping to make it a reality in his own time. He outlines the doctrine in great detail, simply by describing what he takes to be the sociocultural situation of the classical Greek artist (and incidentally, that of the artist of the Italian Renaissance). He chooses to write almost entirely of the fine arts (for him in this case, sculpture), although he conceives, as the student of his age would expect him to, that what holds for the fine arts will also hold for poetry. In the immediacy of appeal of sculpture, he finds a quality which, when its working and expression are analysed, will let him see just how the artist and his work have been ideally related to the society in which they have flourished. Scott's description of the artist and his place in Greek society is one which, in general, is familiar to students of eighteenth-century critical theory. Equally familiar is his concern to establish the fact that, as he puts it, "the connate temper of the times" made possible the production of great art. He sees Greek art as being authentically marked by the "rich raciness of the native soil." And he sees Greek society as in all departments making the work of the artist possible. In small, free, uncentralized states; in states where art has a public, memorial function; in states where, because so many games and rituals are performed naked, the artist is always directly and overwhelmingly aware of the possibility of beauty in the human body--in such states, owing to such "natural causes," art must necessarily flourish. Above all, art is of the people and their artists as they form a vital community; it is not borrowed; it is fresh and original. Finally, such a cultural situation, and therefore such an art, is found obviously to be lacking in his own time.