More than seventeen hundred years ago there reigned a Roman emperor who loved art passionately. He looked upon it from an intellectual altitude which few have reached, and he valued it as the monumental consummation of Græco-Roman culture. Standing upon a plane of intellectual elevation, himself gifted with artistic intuition, he knew of no higher enjoyment for a ruler than the cultivation of the architectural and other forms of art. It was he who opened up to the energy of artists a field such as has never been offered to them before or since. He spent upon his works sums incalculable, so that his people grew restless under their emperor's mania for building. His villa at Tivoli, which attained to the extent of a town, was in itself a copy of everything that he most loved and admired in the world. It united nearly all the renowned buildings of Athens in one masterly reproduction. And then with architecture came the other arts. The most magnificent collections of sculpture were formed, for none had better opportunities of acquiring the antique masterpieces of the Greek towns. Numberless frescoes, scenes from those cities and regions which had most impressed him on his travels, adorned the walls. And yet subsequent generations have viewed with unconcern this halcyon period in the history of art. Though his contemporaries fancied that the splendour of the Greek sun was still radiating over them, it was but a borrowed lustre, which never went beyond the reproduction or copying of classic examples. Whatever Greek temples the emperor might build and decorate, he failed to summon into being a Phidias or a Polygnotes to revive for him the forms of the antique. The names of the artists who worked for him are forgotten. They had no originality; they copied the types of the Grecian and Egyptian periods, and their art was but a repetition of old ideals, without character of age or place. The fifteen colossal columns of his Olympieion that are still standing impress one as foreign to Athens, and would seem more in place at Baalbeck or Palmyra than in this city of the Muses. Epictetus would have smiled at the emperor diverting himself with an album of the wonders of the world, as a piece of sentimentality. The age of Hadrian produced thousands of buildings, statues, and pictures, but no original works.