is only natural to suppose that the delicate skill acquired in the manipulation of such materials should have given rise to a distaste for the humbler though more obedient clay. Many of the vases suggest the transition from pottery to bronze in the evidence which their decoration gives of having been imitated from metal. When we turn to Rome, little investigation is required to satisfy us that there is no such thing as an independent Roman ceramic art. Whatever Rome possessed was acquired from without, not developed from within. One could expect no artistic sense to manifest itself among the horde of refugees, outcasts, and criminals who surrounded Romulus in his little castle on the Palatine hill. His successor, Numa Pompilius, in aiming a blow at idolatry, may have also retarded the growth of art. He forbade the use of images, and for one hundred and sixty years after his death no statue appeared in the temples of Rome. This brings us down to the Etruscan monarch, Tarquinius Priscus, who placed in the Roman capitol a terra-cotta statue of Jupiter, by an Etruscan artist. Whatever the Romans required they obtained from Etruria, until they found a new source of supply in Magna Græcia. That they made very slow progress in the arts may be inferred from one incident which happened nearly five hundred years after Numa had issued his order against idolatry. While the second Punic war was raging, the Roman consul, Marcellus, besieged Syracuse, a Corinthian city in Sicily, and, after taking it, sent its paintings and statues to Rome, in order that his countrymen might learn from the art of Greece, and acquire a taste for such works. Syracuse fell B.C. 212, and eleven years afterward the war was brought to an end. It was by thus acquainting themselves with the beauty of Grecian art that the Romans began to display a desire for the artistic embellishment of their homes and capital. When their arms were directed against Greece, and Athens fell under their assaults, in the first century before Christ, Greek artists flocked to Rome, and for a time made it the workshop in which they labored and the school in which they taught. But with the sun itself its rays of golden light must disappear, though for a time they gild the earth and clouds with their departing glory. Greece was enslaved. Her ancient spirit was crushed. She had taught the world the lesson intrusted to her, and with political independence sank art and literature, though not without leaving imperishable monuments behind. As the tree withered, so did the branches; and the expatriated Greeks in Rome and the long-subdued colonies of Magna Græcia, deriving no longer any warmth from the centre from which they came, were quickly lost to sight. There also, as in Etruria, richness took the place of beauty. Gold, silver, and gems were more to the luxurious Romans of the empire than ceramic art, and that which had embellished the palaces of kings was left to the gods and the poor.