The triumphal monuments raised to commemorate the conquests of Titus, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Severus, and Constantine, together with the Trajan, Antonine, and Theodosian columns, bear the principal compositions of national sculpture; and these, it is believed, were mostly executed by Greeks. The coerced hand must perform its task, and the results were made to breathe the spirit of war, conquest, and universal dominion. But in vain do we search for one graceful figure or attractive charm. They are mere military bulletins carved in stone, petrified paragraphs of ostentatious success, gross in conception, and pernicious in sentiment. They owe no inspiration to the muses, and can claim neither epic dignity nor dramatic force. The principal groups are mobs of Romans, as insensible to beauty as the armor they bear, and dealing death to their equally barbarian foes, or driving them in chains to the mount Capitoline. Subjects are often chosen still more unfit for art, such as soldiers felling timber, carrying rubbish, driving piles, building walls, working battering-rams, or dragging victims to mortal torture. The expression of their heads is so ferocious and savage, as to excite the deepest compassion for the weaker combatants who might fall into their hands. If we would know the source of all Roman art, plastic as well as monumental, we must visit the shores of venerable and plundered Hellas, with Pausanias and Strabo for our guides. Despite desolating domestic wars, the inroads of barbarian hordes, and the hostilities of Macedonian and Roman conquerors, innumerable remains of ancient art are still there to be found. But, as Cicero says, that at Syracuse, after the temples had been plundered by the hand of Verres, those who guided travellers showed them not what still existed there, but enumerated what had been taken away, so the contemplation of what had been preserved from those times, and what has since been brought to light, reminds us of the infinitely greater affluence which, in the age of bloom and vigor, had adorned the plains and glorified the cities of Greece. Mummius completed the conquest of that land B.C. 146, the same year that Carthage was razed to the ground, and plundered more works of art than all his predecessors put together. He destroyed many works through ignorance, and his soldiers were seen playing at dice upon one of the most precious pictures of Aristides. When Octavius won the victory at Actium, he enlarged the temple of Apollo upon that promontory, and expressed his gratitude by dedicating the statue of Apollo, by Scopas, in a temple at Rome, on the Palatine hill. His declaration that he had found Rome of brick, and would leave it of marble, Augustus probably hoped to realize after that mode of procedure. Nero threw down the statues of victors in Greece out of envy, and illustrated his own taste by gilding a statue of Alexander, by Lysippus. Imperial vanity and infamous extravagance may be further