He shows that in the detachment of images from the walls and pillars behind them, Greek art was already liberated from its earlier Eastern associations, which worked only in reliefs and friezes; and then came the perception that sculpture was not to be a thing of mechanical and mathematical proportions, but the representation of a living organism with freedom of movement, full of the human soul, instead of a mere stiff attitude and a frozen gesture. And then religion comes in to swell the richness of art, and the vague customs and traditions of the older days transform themselves into the breathing images of personal gods enshrined and enthroned. The essay ends with an attempt to indicate the characteristics of the great school of Sicyon as represented by Canachus—a sculptor, it would seem, of deep religious feeling, and distinguished by that early stiff _naïveté_ of work which indicates “a gravity, a discretion and reserve, the charm of which, if felt in quiet, is hardly less than that of the wealth and fulness of final mastery.” In “The Marbles of Aegina” Pater discusses the quality of the beautiful group of sculpture discovered in 1811 in a ruined temple of Athene in a remote part of Aegina, and purchased for the Munich Gallery by King Louis I. of Bavaria. The interest of this group is that it seems the consummate flower of Dorian as opposed to Ionian art, dating probably from about the time of Marathon. Pater skilfully contrasts the Ionian tendency of thought—the brilliant, diffused, undirected play of imagination, its restless versatility, its extreme individualism—with the Dorian influence of severe systematisation, the subordination of the individual to the state; the group has the characteristics of the purest Greek chivalry; he shows the “dry earnestness” of the craftsman, “with a sort of hard strength in detail, a scrupulousness verging on stiffness, like that of an early Flemish painter,” and withal “his still youthful sense of pleasure in the experience of the first rudimentary difficulties of his art overcome.” “In this monument, ...” he says, “pensive and visionary as it may seem, those old Greek knights live with a truth like that of Homer or Chaucer. In a sort of stiff grace, combined with a sense of things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the Aeginetan workman is as it were the Chaucer of Greek sculpture.” In the last of the _Studies_, “The Age of Athletic Prizemen,” composed twenty years later than the earliest essays, Pater traces the effect of the athletic system of Greece upon their sculpture. The pride of health, of perfect agility, of graceful movement, all concentrated upon the end in view, the perfect balance of mind and body alike—these were the ends which that system had in view—how different from our own gloomy and commercial athletics!