It is remarked by Winkelmann that Rubens painted the figures of Flemings after many years’ residence in Italy.—i. 60. The Greek grew up from infancy in the presence of the beauty he afterwards represented: his mother, his sisters, his father, and all around him. What he saw constituted the basis of what he painted or sculptured. In most modern nations the school models of our youth are Greek; but their home models, and which are to them models from the cradle, are of a different style. Hence they are under two sets of influences, the one neutralising the other, and producing that coldness which the mock classical exhibits. This may, perhaps, be one cause of the slow progress of art among us. Footnote 930: Plato, jocularly perhaps, bestows the same praise on Egyptian art, and Muretus seriously adopts his notions: “Meritoque Ægyptios commendat Plato, apud quos et pictorum et musicorum licentia legibus coërcebatur, quod permagni interesse judicarent, ut adolescentes à teneris annis honestis picturis, et honestis cantibus assuefierent.”—In Aristot. Ethic. p. 249. But perhaps Plato had not looked very narrowly into the sacred sculptures of Egypt which in reality abound with images offensive to decency. No doubt we come prepared to regard them with eyes coloured, and a fancy haunted by the beauties of Grecian literature. Possibly, it is under the spell of Homeric verse that our eyes grow humid with delight at the aspect of Aphrodite, that we behold divinity in Zeus or Phœbos Apollo; but this only proves that the fragments of Hellenic civilisation throw a light upon each other, and are parts of one great whole. Perhaps, too, no man ever enjoyed the sculpture of Greece as he should, unless conversant with her poetry—the right hand of her art. In this we find the first seeds and increments of those ideas, which were afterwards transplanted and bore fruit in another field. We discover, therefore, but half the subject when we see only the sculpture. It is unknown to us whether the artist has fulfilled the conditions into which he entered, by undertaking to clothe in marble, thoughts already invested with the forms of language. Hence the little sympathy between Hellenic art and the people generally of modern nations. The figures they behold are dumb to them. To a Greek, on the contrary, or to a man with a Greek’s soul, a thousand sweet reminiscences, a thousand legends, a thousand dim but cherished associations appear clustering round them. Every time they flash upon him, he lives his youth over again. The briery nook, the dewy lanes, the dim religious forests, the pebbly or wave-fretted shore, where the poetry of Greece first opened its eyes upon him in boyhood, sweep in procession over his fancy. He starts to see the hamadryad or the faun or the mountain nymph, before him but one remove from life; to him art speaks not merely in an intelligible, but in an impassioned tongue. He