"We may carry the same reflections into the progress of the pencil. As the Greeks became refined in their minds, they gained an Apelles to paint, and an Alexander to patronise. We are not enabled now to speak of the works of that great master. His figure of Alexander, in the character of young Ammon, is described as his master-piece. Such was the expression with which the hand grasped the thunder-bolt, that it seemed actually to start from the pannel. The expression and force of character given to the whole, was equally marvellous. And when we consider the refinement to which the human mind had then arrived among the Greeks, the immense value which they put upon the works of that artist, and that they were too wise to devote their applause to things which fell short of consummate excellence, we cannot doubt but it was by the cultivation of the public mind that the arts reached such attainments among them. What must have been their exquisite state when the simple line drawn by Protogenes,--in the consciousness of his acknowledged perfection, and which was intended to announce the man who drew it, as much as if he had told his name,--was so far excelled by another simple line over it by Apelles, that the former at once confessed himself outdone? Those two lines, simple as they were, were by no means trifling in their instruction. They gave us, as it were, an epitome of the progress which the arts had long been making in Greece. For if the drawing of a simple line, of such a master as Protogenes, who was conceived by many to hold the first pencil in the world, was surpassed, to his great surprise, by another, how high must refinement have been raised by the exertions of the artists in a period so emulous of perfection!