An ancient author has the following expression: οὐκοῦν τὸ θῆλυ, κᾄν λίθινον ᾖ, φιλεῖται· τί δ᾽ εἴ τις ἔμψυχον εἶδε τοιοῦτον κάλλος;—Luc. Amor. § 17. Something very like which is found in Byron: “There, too, the Goddess _loves in stone_, and fills The air around with beauty.” In search, however, of female forms to represent these ideal originals artists travelled through the whole of Greece, gathering up as they went those fragments of beauty which, when united, were to approach perfection. They resembled Isis in search of the limbs of Osiris. Sometimes, as at Crotona and Agrigentum, parents did not scruple to expose their daughters naked to their eyes, that from them they might fashion that loveliness which was to represent to their senses the divine being they worshiped. But this excess of superstition was rare. In general the Hetairæ, their mistresses and companions, served for the models after which the soft divinities of Greece were moulded: “If Queensberry to strip there’s no compelling, ’Tis from a handmaid we must take a Helen.” Thus Phryne, idealised by art, became Aphrodite, Anadyomene in the hands of Apelles, or Aphrodite of Cnidos in those of Praxiteles. Childhood obtained its representative in Eros the god of love. Thus, from infancy upwards, even to old age, the human form in all its phases became the object of study to the Greek artist, not to be servilely copied, but to be idealised, to be clothed with poetry, to be divested of everything mean, gross, unspiritual, and embalmed in eternal beauty. And their success is proved by this, that, even with their works before them, modern artists have never been able satisfactorily to imitate their excellences. Of this Winkelmann[968] mentions some examples which have not come under my own notice. “Although the best modern artists,” he says, “have striven to imitate exactly the celebrated Medusa of the Strozzi cabinet at Rome, which, nevertheless, is not a countenance of the highest beauty, an experienced antiquary will always be able to distinguish the original from the copy.” The same thing is true, he says, with respect to the Pallas of Aspasios, engraved by Natter and others. But this is perfectly intelligible. The original artist, working after his own ideas and comprehending thoroughly his own object, would impart to his creations a flexibility, a grace, a freedom, not to be reached by one whose type existed out of his own mind. For even in literature it is thus—language, malleable, expansive, obedient to control in the hands of the original writer, who breathes into it his own ideas and requires it only to drape them, becomes a stiff unmanageable mass with the imitator like a corpse put in motion by galvanism. Footnote 968: Hist. de l’Art, iv. 2. 23.