This influence lasted, until the counter-current of Greece found an inlet to Roman life, filtering "through Campania into Rome from the opposite end of the peninsula." And then, from the fall of Syracuse, and the bringing of its spoils to Rome, we find a perfect craze for Grecian marbles, bronzes, pictures, gems, inflaming the magnates, nobles, and _nouveaux riches_ of Rome. How fortunate that influence was in another field, that of literature, we know. In plastic art, by reason of the essentially inartistic spirit of the Roman race, the result was practically small; save indeed in one department, that of portraiture, to which the essential impulse was, as Leighton very suggestively shows, "ethic, not æsthetic." Even in Roman architecture, our critic finds little to weaken his view of the Roman æsthetic inefficiency. "It was not," he said, "the spontaneous utterance of an æsthetic instinct, but the outcome of material needs and of patriotic pride," and hence only an incomplete expression of Roman civilization. "To them, in brief, art was not vernacular: their purest taste, their brightest gifts of mind, found no utterance in it." [Illustration: STUDY OF A HEAD] "We have seen Art," he concluded, "such Art as it was given to Rome to achieve--rise and fall with the virtues of the Roman people. From the lips of the most seeing of its sons we know the solvent in which those virtues perished: that solvent was the greed, the insatiate greed, of gold--'auri sacra fames'--the rot of luxury. 'More deadly than arms,' Juvenal magnificently exclaims, 'luxury has swept down upon us, and avenges the conquered world.' ...... 'Sævior armis Luxuria incubuit, victumque ulciscitur orbem.'" From Rome we are taken, in the fifth Discourse, delivered on the 10th December, 1887, to the making and the racial re-shaping of Italy, that began with the fifth century. All through these Discourses the speaker laid great stress upon the ethnological history of the European races, as he turned to one after another, and essayed to trace their artistic idiosyncracy and their artistic evolution. Italy is, to the ethnologist as well as to the art student, one of the most interesting countries in Europe. Rome almost alone, among the Italian provinces, retained her racial and æsthetic peculiarities, unaffected to the end of the chapter; and even when she wielded "the sceptre of the Christian world," still she produced no one flower of native genius, we are reminded, unless Giulio Romano, that "brawny and prolific plagiarist of Raphael," as Leighton well stigmatizes him, be thought a genius; which criticism forbid!