In a philosophy now rather forgotten than extinct, and which once commanded no small attention, Adam Smith was led to analyze the indirect effects of _sympathy_, from which, as a single principle, he desired to deduce all the rules of ethics. While straining many points unduly, he must be confessed to have explained with great justice the origin of good taste or tact in ordinary life, which he saw to be the careful watching of the interest of others in our own affairs, and the feeling that we must not force upon them what concerns ourselves, except we are sure to carry with us their active sympathy. Good breeding, he says, consists in a delicate perception how far this will go, and in suppressing those of our feelings which, though they affect _us_ strongly, cannot be expected to affect in like manner our neighbor, whose sympathy should be the measure and limit of our outspokenness. There can be no doubt that whatever other elements come in, this analysis is true, so far as it goes, and recommends itself at once to the convictions of any educated man. The very same principle applies still more strongly and universally in art. As tragedy is bound to treat ideal griefs and joys of so large and broad a kind that every spectator may merge in them his petty troubles, so ideal sculpture and painting are only ideal so far as they represent those large and eternal features in human nature which must always command the sympathy of every pure human heart. Let us dispose at once of an apparent exception—the mediæval pictures of the Passion of Christ, and the sorrows of the Virgin Mary. Here the artist allowed himself the most extreme treatment, because the objects were necessarily the centre of the very highest sympathy. No expression of the grief of Christ could be thought exaggerated in the Middle Ages, because in this very exaggeration lay the centre point of men’s religion. But when no such object of universal and all-absorbing sympathy can be found (and there was none such in pagan life), then the Greek artist must attain by his treatment of the object what the Christian artist obtained by the object itself. Assuming, then, a mastery over his material, and sufficient power of execution, the next feature to be looked for in Greek art, and especially in Greek sculpture, is a certain modesty and reserve in expression, which will not portray slight defects in picturing a man, but represent that eternal or ideal character in him which remains in our memory when he is gone. Such, for example, is the famous portrait-statue of Sophocles.