During at least forty years from the death of Alexander, the school founded and presided in by these two masters would preserve undiminished the beauty of the art. The latter was still alive on the death of the Macedonian prince, in the last year of the 114th Olympiad, or 324 B. C.; while Praxiteles survived to the 123d Olympiad. If, again, we consider the pupils immediately deriving their science from these great men, the period may be extended during which Greece could have produced sculptors not unworthy her ancient glory. When we contemplate also her condition in other respects, never had she exhibited a more numerous or a more imposing assemblage of intellectual worthies. Surely, then, the death of a despot could not have wrought so fatal and so immediate a decline in the means and faculties of human genius. No! but the consequences of that event destroyed an artificial system, and dried up factitious streams of prosperity, which for a time had supplied or concealed the absence of those healthful and constitutional currents, whence was circulated, throughout the whole of Greece, the very life-blood of her glory and greatness. Had liberal institutions been then restored; had the moral vigour of her better days reappeared, even amid wars and revolutions--in such struggles they had been reared--her genius and taste, her letters and arts, would have survived. These were innate in the constitution of her free states. The last, in particular, formed at once a means and an end in her popular governments. Springing up an ornamental blossom amid the sterner and the nobler fruits of liberty, they withered as independence decayed.