The same authority has repeatedly told us, that if we mean to be correct, we must scrutinize the principles on which the ancients reared their forms. What were those principles? I shall not digress in search of them to that primitive epoch when the cestrum performed the functions of light and shade, and perhaps supplied linear painting with the faint hues of a stained drawing; nor yet to the second period, when practice had rendered the artist bolder, and the pencil assisted the cestrum; when Parrhasius, on the subtile examination of line and outline, established the canon of divine and heroic form; we shall find them acknowledged with equal submission in the brightest æra of Grecian execution, and the honour of exclusively possessing them contested by the most eminent names of that æra, Apelles and Protogenes. The name of Apelles, in ancient record, is the synonyme of unrivalled and unattainable excellence--he is the favourite mortal in whom, if we believe tradition, Nature exhibited _for once_ a specimen of what her union with education and circumstances could produce; though the enumeration of his works by Pliny points out the modification which we ought to apply to the idea of that superiority. It consisted more in the union than in the extent of his powers; he knew better what he could do, what ought to be done, at what point he could arrive, and what lay beyond his reach, than any other artist. Grace of conception and refinement of taste were his elements, and went hand in hand with grace of execution and taste in finish. That he built both, not on the precarious and volatile blandishments of colour, or the delusive charms of light and shade, but on the solid foundation of form, acquired by precision and obedience of hand--not only the confessed inability of succeeding artists to finish his ultimate Venus, but his well-known contest of lines with Protogenes (the correctest finisher of his time), not a legendary tale, but a well attested fact, irrefragably proves. The panel on which they were drawn made part of the Imperial collection in the Palatium, existed in the time of Pliny, and was inspected by him; their evanescent subtilty, the only trait by which he mentions them, was not, as it appears, the effect of time, but of a delicacy, sweep, and freedom of hand nearly miraculous. What they were, drawn in different colours, and with the point of a brush, one upon the other, or rather within each other, it would be equally unavailing and useless for our purpose to enquire; but the corollaries we may deduce from the contest are obviously these: that all consists of elements; that the schools of Greece concurred in one elemental principle, fidelity of eye, and obedience of hand; that these form _precision_, precision _proportion_,[95] proportion _symmetry_, and symmetry _Beauty_: that it is the "little more or less," imperceptible to vulgar eyes, which constitutes _Grace_, and establishes the superiority of one artist over