You may laugh at the lions of Gebel Barkal, you may deny that they are beautiful; but, whoever you are, scholar, poet, painter or layman, you will admit that they are cruelly distant and strange, terribly remote and uncommunicative. A. The Parthenon. Now, if you turn round and bear to the right in the Egyptian Gallery at the British Museum, you will find a broad passage lined with statues that seem very much more familiar to you than those which you are just leaving behind; and, in the distance, you will espy the maimed figures of the Eastern pediment of the Parthenon. In a moment you will be in the Elgin Room, and everywhere about you you will see all that remains of the ancient temple of Athens which is worth seeing. If you have not been to Athens, you must not suppose that you have missed much, as far as the Parthenon is concerned. Unless you are very modern and very romantic, and can take pleasure in visiting a gruesome ruin by moonlight, you would be only depressed and disappointed by the decayed and ugly mass of stones that now stands like a battered skeleton on the Acropolis. You may take it, therefore, that, as you stand in the Elgin Room, you have around you the best that the Parthenon could yield after its partial destruction and dismantlement in 1687 by the victorious Veneto-German army. And what is it that you see? Remember that you are a man of the twentieth century A.D., and that you have just been bored to extinction by a walk in the Egyptian Gallery. Remember, too, that you have very few fixed opinions about Art, and that the artistic condition of your continent is one of chaos and anarchy. In spite of all this, however, you will walk up to the horse's head at the extreme right of the Eastern pediment of the Parthenon, and the two thousand and four hundred years that separate you from it will vanish as by magic. For years I have taken men, women and children up to this horse's head. In some cases these people have been technical connoisseurs of a horse's points; in others they have been mere bourgeois people, indifferent both to the art of Greece and to equine anatomy; and with the children I was concerned with raw manhood that cared not a jot for Art, and whose one sole, savage instinct was to recognize and classify what was before them.