Nothing Could Be More Glorious And Beautiful Than The Grecian Development; Nothing More Unlike It That The Stale, Wearisome, Repetitious Imitations Of It In Modern Times.

The Greek productions themselves have a living power to this day; but all imitations of them are cold and tiresome.

These old Greeks made such beautiful things, because they did _not_ imitate. That mysterious vitality which still imbues their remains, and which seems to enchant even the fragments of their marbles, is the mesmeric vitality of fresh, original conception. Art, built upon this, is just like what the shadow of a beautiful woman is to the woman. One gets tired in these galleries of the classic band, and the classic headdress, and the classic attitude, and the endless repetition of the classic urn, and vase, and lamp, as if nothing else were ever to be made in the world except these things.

Again: in regard to this whole French gallery, there is much of a certain quality which I find it very difficult to describe in any one word - a dramatic smartness, a searching for striking and peculiar effects, which render the pictures very likely to please on first sight, and to weary on longer acquaintance. It seems to me to be the work of a race whose senses and perceptions of the outward have been cultivated more than the deep inward emotions. Few of the pictures seem to have been the result of strong and profound feeling, of habits of earnest and concentrated thought.

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