But the genius displayed in sculpture was equally remarkable, and was carried to the same perfection.  The Greeks did not originate sculpture.  We read of sculptured images from remotest antiquity.  Assyria, Egypt, and India are full of relics.  But these are rude, unformed, without grace, without expression, though often colossal and grand.  There are but few traces of emotion, or passion, or intellectual force.  Everything which has come down from the ancient monarchies is calm, impassive, imperturbable.  Nor is there a severe beauty of form.  There is no grace, no loveliness, that we should desire them.  Nature was not severely studied.  We see no aspiration after what is ideal.  Sometimes the sculptures are grotesque, unnatural, and impure.  They are emblematic of strange deities, or are rude monuments of heroes and kings.  They are curious, but they do not inspire us.  We do not copy them; we turn away from them.  They do not live, and they are not reproduced.  Art could spare them all, except as illustrations of its progress.  They are merely historical monuments, to show despotism and superstition, and the degradation of the people.

But this cannot be said of the statues which the Greeks created, or improved from ancient models.  In the sculptures of the Greeks we see the utmost perfection of the human form, both of man and woman, learned by the constant study of anatomy and of nude figures of the greatest beauty.  A famous statue represented the combined excellences of perhaps one hundred different persons.  The study of the human figure became a noble object of ambition, and led to conceptions of ideal grace and loveliness such as no one human being perhaps ever possessed in all respects.  And not merely grace and beauty were thus represented in marble or bronze, but dignity, repose, majesty.  We see in those figures which have survived the ravages of time suggestions of motion, rest, grace, grandeur,—­every attitude, every posture, every variety of form.  We see also every passion which moves the human soul,—­grief, rage, agony, shame, joy, peace.  But it is the perfection of form which is most wonderful and striking.  Nor did the artists work to please the vulgar rich, but to realize their own highest conceptions, and to represent sentiments in which the whole nation shared.  They sought to instruct; they appealed to the highest intelligence.  “Some sought to represent tender beauty, others daring power, and others again heroic grandeur.”  Grecian statuary began with ideal representations of deities; then it produced the figures of gods and goddesses in mortal forms; then the portrait-statues of distinguished men.  This art was later in its development than architecture, since it was directed to ornamenting what had already nearly reached perfection.  Thus Phidias ornamented the Parthenon in the time of Pericles, when sculpture was purest and most ideal In some points of view it declined after Phidias, but in other respects it continued