I pass to the public collections at Athens, in which we find few of these figures, and which rather contain the usual products of Greek plastic art—statues, reliefs, as well as pottery, and inscriptions. As I have said, the statues are in the most lamentable condition, shattered into fragments, without any attempt at restoring even such losses as can be supplied with certainty. What mischief might be done by such wholesale restoration as was practised in Italy some fifty years ago, it is hard to say. But perhaps the reaction against that error has driven us to an opposite extreme. There is, indeed, one—a naked athlete, with his cloak hanging over the left shoulder, and coiled round the left forearm—which seems almost as good as any strong male figure which we now possess. While it has almost exactly the same treatment of the cloak on the left arm which we see in the celebrated Hermes of the Vatican,(22) the proportions of the figure are nearer the celebrated _Discobolus_ (numbered 126, Braccio Nuovo). There are two other copies at Florence, and one at Naples. These repetitions point to some very celebrated original, which the critics consider to be of the older school of Polycletus, and even imagine may possibly be a copy of his _Doryphorus_, which was called the _Canon_ statue, or model of the perfect manly form. The Hermes has too strong a likeness to Lysippus’s _Apoxyomenos_ not to be recognized as of the newer school. What we have, then, in this Attic statue seems an intermediate type between the earlier and stronger school of Polycletus and the more elegant and newer school of Lysippus in Alexander’s day. There can, however, be no doubt that it does not date from the older and severer age of sculpture, of which Phidias and Polycletus were the highest representatives. Any one who studies Greek art perceives how remarkably not only the style of dress and ornament, but even the proportions of the figure change, as we come down from generation to generation in the long line of Greek sculptors. The friezes of Selinus (now at Palermo), and those of Ægina (now in Munich), which are among our earliest classical specimens, are remarkable for short, thick-set forms. The men are men five feet seven, or, at most, eight inches high, and their figures are squat even for that height. In the specimens we have of the days of Phidias and Polycletus these proportions are altered. The head of the _Doryphorus_, if we can depend upon our supposed copies, is still heavy, and the figure bulky, though taller in proportion. He looks a man of five feet ten inches at least. The statue we are just considering is even taller, and is like the copies we have of Lysippus’s work, the figure apparently of a man of six feet high; but his head is not so small, nor is he so slender and light as this type is usually found.