However, in proportion as the public became more enlightened, and, to justify its admiration and enthusiasm, imposed harder conditions on artists, the latter enlarged the circle of their studies, which gradually expanded until it embraced a certain portion of metaphysics, the science of form and colours, with that art of grouping and arrangement which constitutes a species of narrative in painting. A complete exposition of their studies would be the best manual which could be put into the hands of contemporary artists, and at the same time would furnish the best explanation of their seemingly inexplicable superiority. But such an exposition would be out of place here. My object is simply to hint at what may be done, not to attempt it myself; and to show, that if the Greek nation afforded encouragement to its artists, it was because those artists met their countrymen more than half way, and laboured to deserve encouragement. There existed in Greece a philosophy of art, that is, a perfect theory of what its object is, and of all the means by which that object may be accomplished. Now the object of art is delight, a delight which aggrandises and ennobles the mind, and such delight is only to be obtained through the contemplation of the beautiful. This conviction established, the studies of the Greek artist were directed to the discovery of the elements of the beautiful, not such as it exists in the original types of the intellectual world (which he abandoned to the philosopher), but such as we find it in material developements of the ideal, and chiefly in the forms of our own species. Their researches, conducted in a philosophical spirit, by degrees taught them that perfect beauty, like perfect happiness, consists in absolute serenity and repose. Thus, the heavens are beautiful when in the noon of a summer’s day their blue depths are unstained by a cloud, and not a breath is heard among the trees. Thus, the ocean is beautiful when the most perfect calm broods upon it, and has smoothed down every ripple and converted it into a mirror for reflecting the cerulean purity of the sky. And this is what the poets signify when they represent Aphrodite, the very soul of beauty and of love, springing up from the level and glittering surface of such a sea. In the same state the human countenance is most beautiful, when every feature in the most perfect equilibrium breathes of calm, joy, and serenity, and by the force of sympathy converts all who approach it into so many mirrors reflecting its absolute bliss. This is the secret of that beauty which exists in Grecian sculpture.