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The touch of Phidias was his own, and so inimitable that a few months ago, an American, scanning, with his practiced eye, the galleries of the Louvre, recognized a fragment of the work of Phidias, long separated from the Parthenon frieze which Lord Elgin sent to London. The sculptor's touch could not be mistaken. It was as truly his own as his signature, his autograph.

Hudson may be a new Phidias, but Venus and Juno that 's you and I arrived to-day in a very dirty cab; and were cheated by the driver, too." "But, my dear fellow," objected Gloriani, "you don't mean to say you are going to make over in cold blood those poor old exploded Apollos and Hebes." "It won't matter what you call them," said Roderick. "They shall be simply divine forms.

She put the lens aside, and, laying her palms on her temples, she looked deep down into the luminous depths of the great emerald in a silence which Oscarovitch interpreted into such meaning as he was able to make for himself. Minute after minute passed in silence, and still her eyes were fixed upon the Stone. Her face became like that of a beautiful masterpiece of Phidias: pure, cold, and true.

Whether this makes men better, wiser, happier, is indeed disputed. In order to maintain the notion of a general and intended progress, it is not necessary to show that no preceding age has excelled ours in some special, development. Phidias has had no rival in sculpture, we may admit. It is possible that glass was once made as flexible as leather, and that copper could be hardened like steel.

Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that early Hellenic world, that I would know. The name and circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for history, embarrass when we come to the highest criticism.

And I am heartily sorry, we have so few royal images of that metal among us; the sight whereof, although it could hardly increase our veneration for His Majesty, which is already so great; yet would very much enliven it with a mixture of comfort and satisfaction. Alexander the Great, would suffer no statuary, except Phidias, to carve his image in stone or metal.

There is as little diversity of opinion on the subject, as in the admiration of the sculpture of Phidias, the verses of Virgil, or the paintings of Raphael.

The matchless temples and colonnades which arose on the Acropolis, adorned by the sculptures of Phidias, are still the wonder of the world. But that was not all. No men have ever thought so profoundly, nor spoken so wisely, nor with such eloquence, as did the men in those temples and under those Greek arcades.

To happiness Art lends intensity and elevation; but in affliction, in ruin, in the wreck of affection how much can Phidias and Raphael do for you? A poet makes Goethe say to a sceptical and perplexed world, "Art still has truth, take refuge there."

The Panathenaic festivals should end with a procession like that which took place in Athens, and which Phidias had immortalized in marble in his famous friezes. The young men spoke with enthusiasm of the horses they would ride, and of the contests for which they were training by persistent exercise.