has a heart to be softened, a mind to be enlightened, and a body to be preserved. Thence arise the four orders of virtues, the theological, political, domestic, and personal; all placed in opposition to their contrary vices, as light is to darkness. Theological and political virtues, the influence of which is external, and suitable for the public arena, are placed without; domestic and personal virtues, which affect the individual and his family, are made to retire within, where they find shelter in stillness and comparative obscurity. Man's career is then continued from the creation to the last judgment, just as the sun pursues his course from east to west, and the remaining statues are employed to exhibit the history of the world, from the period of Adam and Eve down to the end of time. The inspired sculptor has, indeed, by the aid of the Prophets and of the Apocalypse, divined the future fate of man, long after his earthly existence should have terminated. This is the fourth and last division, completing what was called in the language of the middle ages, the "Mirror of the Universe." The intellectual framework of this stone Encyclopædia contained an entire poem, in the first canto of which we see reflected the image of nature; in the second, that of science; that of the moral sense in the third; of man in the fourth; and in the aggregate, the entire world. In those days, the state of society was such as to allow little vent to the innermost thoughts of the finely endowed, and the pent-up mind was glad to expend a vast amount of thought and labor upon works which mechanical skill eventually came to supersede. Before the press could do the same work more effectually, the sculptor used a building as a book on which to announce in powerful language his own peculiar disposition, hopes, sentiments, and experience. The apparently grotesque carvings sometimes met with in the better period of sculptural art, are indubitably intended to illustrate fables, legends, romances, as well as individual creeds. But in the sixteenth century, a moral and political revolution spread widely in all countries, and led to a marked change in sculpture as in every other intellectual pursuit. Manual dexterity became nearly perfect, and the capability of molding stone like wax, combined with the rapid unfolding of bold and novel ideas, induced a passionate love of fantastic ornament so peculiar to a vicious Renaissance style. Thus, while the figure sculpture of France and England still possessed a very peculiar and severe character, eminently ideal, in Italy, under the Pisani, plastic art grew to be dramatic and picturesque, the conventionalities of the antique were revived, and with the study of abstract beauty, came the loss of much freshness and individuality.