The astonishing remains of gods, demigods, and heroes treasured in the Museum, from the Parthenon and the Temple of Phigalia, constitute the first epoch. They establish the elements of proportion, they show what is essential in the composition and construction of the human frame. The artist's principle remained, however, negative; he understood the best he saw, but did not attempt to add, or conclude from what was, to what might be. These works are commonly considered as the produce of the school of Phidias, and the substantiation of his principles: if they are, and there can be little doubt but they are, it must be owned, that the eulogies lately lavished on them, as presenting, even on their mutilated and battered surfaces, more of the real texture of the human frame, a better discrimination of bone, muscle, and tendon, than most of the works ascribed to more advanced periods, little agree with the verdict of the ancients, as pronounced by Pliny, on the real character of Phidias, the architect of gods, fitter to frame divinities than men, and leave him little more share in the formation of our figures than the conception. In beholding them, we say, such is man, real unsophisticated man, man warm from the hand of Nature, but not yet distinguished by her endless variety and difference of character. The Dioscuri of the Quirinal, the Lapithæ in conflict with the Centaurs from the Parthenon, and the heroes from the fabric of Ictinus, are brothers, and only differ in size and finish; whilst the Panathenaic processions offer the unvaried transcript of Athenian youth. Delineation of character forms the second class of the figures in our possession, and the distinguishing feature of its artists. They found that, as _all_ were connected by the genus and a central principle of form, so they were divided into classes, and from each other separated by an individual stamp, by _character_: to unite this with the simplicity of the _generic_ principle was their aim; the symmetry prescribed by general proportion was modified and adapted, not sacrificed, to the demands of the peculiar quality which distinguished the attribute they undertook to personify. Thus the Hercules of Glycon, though the symbol of absolute, irresistible, and uniform strength, appears to be swift as a stag and elastic like a ball; and thus Agasias, the author of what the barbarity of custom still continues to misname the "Fighting Gladiator," though its style, evidently Iconic, be more connected with individual than generic nature, has spread over its whole the rapidity of lightning, and substantiated in its _motion_ all Homer says of Hector rushing through the shattered portals of the Grecian wall--that, at that instant, nothing could have stopped him but a God.