pure, their taste delighted in simplicity and unity, and they strictly
forbade a medley, alike in architecture, sculpture, and letters. The
history of their development opens with an epic yet unsurpassed, and
their literary creations have been adopted to be the humanities of
Christian universities. A writer has recently proposed to account for
their success in the arts from the circumstance that the features of
Nature around them were small,--that their hornet-shaped peninsula was
cut by mountains and inlets of the sea into minute portions, which the
mind could easily compass, the foot measure, and the hand improve,--that
therefore every hillock and fountain, every forest and by-way was
peopled with mythological characters and made significant with
traditions, and the cities were adorned with architectural and
sculptured masterpieces. Greece thus, like England in our own time,
presented the character of a highly wrought piece of ground,--England
being the more completely developed for material uses, and Greece being
the more heavily freighted with legends of ideal meaning. Small-featured
and large-minded Greece is thus set in contrast with Asia, where the
mind and body were equally palsied in the effort to overcome immense
plains and interminable mountain-chains. But whatever the reason,
whether geographical or ethnological, it is certain that the people of
Greece were endowed with a transcendent genius for art, which embraced
all departments of life as by an instinct. Every divinity was made a
plain figure to the mind, every mystery was symbolized in some positive
beautiful myth, and every conception of whatever object became
statuesque and clear. This artistic character was possible to them from
the comparatively limited range of pagan imagination; their thought
rarely dwelt in those regions where reason loves to ask the aid
of mysticism, and all remote ideas, like all remote nations, were
indiscriminately regarded by them as barbarous. But guarded by the
bounds of their civilization, as by the circumfluent ocean-stream of