jealous shame, Phaedra whispers the traitorous tale to Theseus, who utters a curse upon the boy, so that he falls into a wasting sickness. Even so the gods are merciful; he struggles back to life, to lose it again before the wrath of Poseidon, or even perhaps of Aphrodite herself, as he drives his chariot along the shore. The earth rocks, a great wave whitens on the beach; the horses plunge and start, and he is buffeted to death among the sea-boulders and the crawling brine. The tale has a curious magic about it; but though Greek in outline, it is hardly Greek in quality, suffused as it is with a strange and wistful romance that is born of a later and more self-conscious age. In the essays on the “Beginnings of Greek Sculpture” he touches on the possibilities of external influences, the hints from the East, from Egypt, Assyria, Phoenicia, Asia Minor, Cyprus, as forming possibly the seed of Greek art. But he points out truly that this art is all “emphatically _autochthonous_, as the Greeks said, new-born at home, by right of a new, informing, combining spirit playing over those mere elements, and touching them, above all, with a wonderful sense of the nature and destiny of man—the dignity of his soul and of his body—so that in all things the Greeks are as discoverers.” And he points out, too, that we are apt to import too purely an intellectual element into our conceptions of Greek art, because we have to deal with it principally in the form of sculpture, the only product that remains to us in large measure, while their pictures, their metal work, their carvings, their embroideries, have suffered a natural decay. Pater deals first with the descriptions of ancient shields, and with the excavated treasures of Mycenae, and points out that this metal work, with its special _cachet_, “the seal of nearness to the workman’s hand,” and the Greek tendency to overlay stone as far as possible with metal, show that Greek art probably first displayed itself in this form, and was in reality the expression of an age of gold rather than of stone. In the second essay he traces the growth of true sculpture, the gradual preference of marble as a medium for art, until the first school of sculptors appears at Sicyon, the chief seat in earliest days of Greek art. Here he depends mostly upon the authority of Pausanias; “our own fancy,” he says, “must fill up the story of the unrecorded patience of the workshop, into which we seem to peep through these scanty notices—the fatigue, the disappointments, the steps repeated, ending at last in that moment of success, which is all Pausanias records, somewhat uncertainly.”