be the resemblance, is but the result of the eye and hand, while the original is the expression of a true and deeply felt sentiment. Art was not sustained by the patronage of a few who affect to have what is called _taste_. In Greece, the artist, having a common feeling for the beautiful with his countrymen, produced his works for the public, which were erected in places of honor and dedicated in temples of the gods." [Footnote: _Encyclopedia Britannica_, "Sculpture," R. W. T.] [Sidenote: Phidias and his contemporaries.] [Sidenote: The statue of Zeus by Phidias.] But it was not until the Persian wars awakened in Greece the slumbering consciousness of national power, and Athens became the central point of Grecian civilization, that sculpture, like architecture and painting, reached its culminating point of excellence, under Phidias and his contemporaries. Great artists, however, had previously made themselves famous, like Miron, Polycletus, and Ageladas; but the great riches which flowed into Athens at this time gave a peculiar stimulus to art, especially under the encouragement of such a ruler as Pericles, whose age was the golden era of Grecian history. Pheidias or Phidias was to sculpture what Aeschylus was to tragic poetry, sublime and grand. He was born four hundred and eighty-four years before Christ, and was the pupil of Ageladas. He stands at the head of the ancient sculptors, not from what _we_ know of him, for his masterpieces have perished, but from the estimation in which he was held by the greatest critics of antiquity. It was to him that Pericles intrusted the adornment of the Parthenon, and the numerous and beautiful sculptures of the frieze and the pediment were the work of artists whom he directed. _His_ great work in that wonderful edifice was the statue of the goddess Minerva herself, made of gold and ivory, forty feet in height, standing victorious with a spear in her left hand and an image of victory in her right; girded with the aegis, with helmet on her head, and her shield resting by her side. The cost of this statue may be estimated when the gold alone of which it was composed was valued at forty-four talents. [Footnote: This sum was equal to $500,000 of our money, an immense sum in that age. Some critics suppose that this statue was overloaded with ornament, but all antiquity was unanimous in its admiration. The exactness and finish of detail were as remarkable as the grandeur of the proportions.] Another of his famous works was a colossal bronze statue of Athena Promachus, sixty feet in height, on the Acropolis, between the Propylaea and the Parthenon. But both of these yielded to the colossal statue of Zeus in his great temple at Olympia, represented in a sitting posture, forty feet high, on a pedestal of twenty. In this, his greatest work, the artist sought to embody the idea of majesty and repose,--of a supreme deity no longer engaged in war with Titans and Giants, but