I have endeavored to show how this Ideal may be concentrated in a certain abstract line, not only of sensuous, but of intellectual Beauty,—­a line which, while it is as wise and subtle as the serpent, is as harmless and loving as the sacred dove of Venus.  I have endeavored to prove how this line, the gesture of Attic eloquence, expresses the civilization of Pericles and Plato, of Euripides and Apelles.  It is now proposed briefly to relate how this line was lost, when the politeness and philosophy, the literature and the Art of Greece were chained to the triumphal cars of Roman conquerors,—­and how it seems to have been found again in our own day, after slumbering so long in ruined temples, broken statues, and cinerary urns.

The scholar who studies the aesthetical anatomy of Greek Art has a melancholy pleasure, like a surgeon, in watching its slow, but inevitable atrophy under the incubus of Rome.  The wise, but childlike serenity and cheerfulness of soul, so tenderly pictured in the white stones from the quarries of Pentelicus, had, it is true, a certain sickly, exoteric life in Magna Graecia, as Pompeii and Herculaneum have proved to us.  But the brutal manhood of Rome overshadowed and tainted the gentle exotic like a Upas-tree.  Where, as in these places, the imported Greek could have some freedom, it grew up into a dim resemblance of its ancient purity under other skies.  It had, I think, an elegiac plaintiveness in it, like a song of old liberty sung in captivity.  Yet there was added to it a certain fungus-growth, never permitted by that far-off Ideal whose seeds were indigenous in the Peloponnesus, but rather springing from the rank ostentation of Rome.  In its more monumental developments, under these new influences, the true line of Beauty became gradually vulgarized, and, by degrees, less intellectual and pure, till its spirit of fine and elegant reserve was quite lost in a coarse splendor.  It must be admitted, however, that the Greek colonies of Italy expressed not a little of the old refinement in the lamps and candelabra and vases and bijouterie which we have exhumed from the ashes of Vesuvius.

But, turning to Rome herself, the most casual examination will impress us with the fact that there the lovely Greek lines were seized by rude conquerors, and at once were bent to answer base and brutal uses.  To narrow a broad subject down to an illustration, let us look at a single feature, the Cymatium, as it was understood in Greece and Rome.  This is a moulding of very frequent occurrence in classic entablatures, a curved surface with a double flexure.  Perhaps the type of Greek lines, as represented in the previous paper on this subject, may be safely accepted as a fair example of the Greek interpretation of this feature.  The Romans, on the other hand, not being able to understand and appreciate the delicacy and deep propriety of this line, seized their compasses, and, without thought or love, mechanically produced a gross likeness to it by the union of two quarter-circles thus:—­