The mound where we found the lion was much humbler and smaller; in fact, hardly a mound at all, but a rising knoll, with its centre hollowed out, and in the hollow the broken pieces of the famous lion. It had sunk, we are told, into its mound of earth, originally intended to raise it above the road beside, and lay there in perfect safety till the present century, when four English travellers claim to have discovered it (June 3, 1818). They tried to get it removed, and, failing in their efforts, covered up the pieces carefully.(107) Since that time they seem to have lain undisturbed, and are still in such a state that a few days’ labor, and a few pounds of expense, would restore the work. It is of bluish-gray stone—they call it Bœotian marble or limestone—and is a work of the highest and purest merit. The lion is of that Asiatic type which has little or no mane, and seemed to us couchant or sitting in attitude, with the head not lowered to the forepaws, but thrown up.(108) The expression of the face is ideally perfect—rage, grief, and shame are expressed in it, together with that noble calmness and moderation which characterize all good Greek art. The object of the monument is quite plain, without reading the affecting, though simple, notice of Pausanias: “On the approach to the city,” says he, “is the tomb of the Bœotians who fell in the battle with Philip. It has no inscription; but the image of a lion is placed upon it as an emblem of the spirit of these men. The inscription has been omitted—I suppose, because the gods had willed that their fortune should not be equal to their valor.” So, then, we have here, in what may fairly be called a _dated_ record, one of the finest specimens of the sepulchral monuments of the best age of Greece. It is very much to be regretted that this splendid figure is not put together and photographed. Nothing would be more instructive than a comparison with the finest of modern monuments—Thorwaldsen’s Lion at Lucerne—the work, too, of the only modern sculptor who can for one moment be ranked beside the ancient Greeks. But the lion of Chæronea now owes its existence to the accident that no neighboring peasant has in old times lacked stones for a wall, or for a ditch; and when Greece awoke to a sense of the preciousness of these things, it might have been gone, or dashed into useless fragments.