[Footnote l: Horatius.] It was not the idea of the[m] hundred talents which he received, great as that sum was (for not one _drachma_ of it would he have received had not his work been approved), that inspirited the genius of Phidias when he was sculpturing the Olympian Jupiter; but the reflection that by his skill the rude block was to be transformed into the representative likeness of the father of gods and men, to be the admiration and adoration of his enraptured countrymen: and hence profound study, exquisite pains, and incessant labour, were employed to produce that statue, which thence became afterwards the wonder of the world. Under the impulse of such impressions must the Apollo Belvedere have come from the hands of its unequalled sculptor: for though we know not the history of that incomparable statue, yet its expression of dignity more than human, its unforced graceful ease which nature can but faintly copy, its perfect symmetry, and union of complete beauty with full bodily strength, tell more than a thousand witnesses the pains, the study, and the labour that must have been unremittingly exerted to produce it. [Footnote m: 19,375 l.] It would argue a silly prejudice, not a due sense of the merits of the ancients, to attempt to insinuate that this labour and study, to which we are inclined to attribute so much, was universal. No; for in Greece then, as with ourselves now, there were among the artists (what in the modern phrase we call) _fine gentlemen_: persons of too sublime a genius to condescend to study, and of too delicate a frame to submit to labour. The character of the species has been preserved, though the names of its individuals have long, long since been forgotten. But they never promoted the progress, never advanced the improvement of any art: but, like their _amiable_ successors, followed a trade for support, and did not cultivate a profession with dignity. But the persons of whom we speak, as distinguished by these qualities, were those worthy citizens who addicted themselves to no art without adorning and improving it; whose names ennobled the age in which they lived; who then were never mentioned without reverence, nor yet, at this far distant period, are ever thought on without respect. By their studies and their labours, vigorously and undeviatingly exerted, was the progress of the arts promoted, their improvement accelerated, and their near approximation to perfection effected: they thus experimentally proving the energetic power of these valuable qualities, and leaving examples to fire the emulation of the spirited and the active in each future age.