Praxiteles, born about the 104th Olympiad, or 364 B. C., was a native of Magna Grecia, but of what town is uncertain. From preceding remarks it will appear, that in praising him as an original inventor,--the discoverer of a new style, writers very generally have mistaken the influence exercised by his genius upon the progress and character of sculpture. Finding the highest sublimity in the more masculine graces of the art already reached; perceiving, also, that the taste of his age tended thitherwards; he resolved to woo exclusively the milder and gentler beauties of style. In this pursuit he attained eminent success. None ever more happily succeeded in uniting softness with force,--elegance and refinement with simplicity and purity; his grace never degenerates into the affected, nor his delicacy into the artificial. He caught the delightful medium between the stern majesty which awes, and the beauty which merely seduces,--between the external allurements of form, and the colder, but loftier, charm of intellectuality. Over his compositions he has thrown an expression spiritual at once and sensual; a voluptuousness and modesty which touch the most insensible, yet startle not the most retiring. The works which remain of this master, either in originals or in repetitions,--the Faun,--the Thespian Cupid, in the Museum of the capitol,--the Apollino with a Lizard, one of the most beautiful, as well as difficult, specimens of antiquity, abundantly justify this character. Of the works that have utterly perished, the nude and draped, or Coan and Cnidian Venus of Praxiteles, fixed each a standard which future invention dared scarcely to alter. Indeed, he appears to have been the first, perhaps the sole master, who attained the true ideal on this subject, in the perfect union of yielding feminine grace with the dignity of intellectual expression. The Venus of Cnidos, in her representative the Medicean, still 'enchants the world', --and fills The air around with beauty: we inhale The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld, instils Part of its immortality; the veil Of Heaven is half withdrawn; within the pale We stand, and in that form and face behold What mind can make when nature's self would fail.