In all that merely meets the eye, the marbles of the Parthenon display the finest keeping, with the general nobleness of their intellectual character. But the execution is perfect, simply because the composition is so. It comes not forward as an independent merit. Its exquisite mechanism operates without intruding. Unseen and unfelt amid the intelligence it conveys, it is finally noticed as an harmonious element of a perfect whole, and only then calls forth an especial admiration. The finish is high, and even delicate, because the extreme beauty and correctness of the design required to be rendered with corresponding elegance and ease. The chiselling is at once detailed and vigorous, harmonizing with attitudes and expressions full of vivacity, natural grace, and dignity. The touch is broad, the forms decided--the marking deep and firm, according with and increasing the general grandeur and conception. The style of design, indeed, is, in the strictest acceptation, learned, the parts being pronounced with a decision and truth unequalled, we are almost inclined to say, in any other remain of antiquity. The ideal of Phidias is derived entirely from nature, as the true ideal of art must ever be. Much has been said respecting the import of this term among the ancients; and the words their writers have employed in speaking of this very master, have been construed into meanings not only inconsistent with, but subversive of, the principles of genuine excellence. If, by the divine archetypes which he is reported to have followed, be implied, that he copied after ideas not existing in nature--living and tangible nature, the breathing works before us attest, that whether ancients or moderns, these critics speak with more zeal than knowledge. In the Elgin marbles, every conception deeply participates of human sentiment and action, so intimately does the representation belong to reality, that every form seems, by the touch of enchantment, to have become marble in the very energies of its natural life. This happy effect of truth, however, does not arise from the imitation of common, that is, of imperfect types; neither is nature the only real object of art, viewed through any medium of fancy, nor imitated according to conventional or imaginative principles. The artist has only looked abroad upon all existence, refining partial conceptions and limited modes by the unerring and collected harmonies of the whole. The true ideal, then--the ideal of Grecian sculpture, as beheld in these its sublimest productions, is but the embodied union of whatever of beauty and perfection still lingers among the forms of nature viewed universally--free from individuality or accident. Truth is thus the primary constituent of the ideal. Beauty is the perfect expression of this truth, agreeably to the most unblemished and purest models which general nature presents. In this union of collective excellence and individual verisimilitude, the mind feels, and at once