visit (1884), I found a cast of it in the Ministry of Public Instruction at Athens. On my third I found the original removed to a prominent place in the National Museum at Athens, where the traveller may now study it at his ease. The great value of these reliefs consists (apart from their artistic value) in their undoubted genuineness. For we know that in later days, both in Greece and Italy, a sort of pre-Raphaelite taste sprang up among amateurs, who admired and preferred the stiff awkward groping after nature to the symmetry and grace of perfect art. Pausanias, for example, speaks with enthusiasm of these antique statues and carvings, and generally mentions them first, as of most importance. Thus, after describing various archaic works on the Acropolis of Athens, he adds, “But whoever places works made with artistic skill before those which come under the designation of archaic, may, if he likes, admire the following.”(105) As a natural result, a fashion came in of imitating them, and we have, especially in Italy, many statues in this style which seem certainly to be modern imitations, and not even Greek copies of old Greek originals. But these imitations are so well done, and so equalized by lapse of centuries with the real antiques, that though there are scholars who profess to distinguish infallibly the _archaistic_, as they call it, from the archaic, it is sometimes a very difficult task, and about many of them there is doubt and debate. But here at Orchomenus—a country which was so decayed as to lose almost all its population two centuries before Christ, where no amateurs of art would stay, and where Plutarch was, as it were, the last remains in his town of literature and respectability—here there is no danger whatever of finding this spurious work; and thus here, as indeed all through Greece, archaic work is thoroughly trustworthy. But the unfortunate law of the land not often violated, as in this case—which insists upon all these relics, however isolated, being kept in their place of finding—is the mightiest obstacle to the study of this interesting phase of culture, and we must await the completion of the Hellenic Society’s gallery of photographs, from which we can make reliable observations. The Greeks will tell you that the preservation of antiquities in their original place, first of all, gives the inhabitants an interest in them, which might be true but that there are very often no inhabitants: and next, that it encourages travelling in the country. This also is true; but surely the making of decent roads, and the establishing of decent inns, and easy communications, would do infinitely more, and are indeed necessary, before the second stimulus can have its effect.