End of third visit.

VISIT THE FOURTH.

The visitor will now enter the museum to complete his inspection of its contents.  His way lies once more to the west on entering the great hall, into the first Sculpture Gallery, or that which he will recognise as leading into the great central saloon.  Here, as he pauses on the threshold of a noble room filled with splendid specimens of Greek art, he may recur to the historical points which these works illustrate.  Throughout this, his last visit, he will be occupied with the examination of the works of the ancient Greeks.  These works, as he will notice, are of various degrees of excellence.  Already has he examined the rude labours of the Greek sculptors of Xanthus; and to-day his journey will be amid those more modern and perfect labours, performed when the talent of the Greeks was chiefly concentrated upon European ground.  Although these glories of remote antiquity are here mostly in an admirable state of preservation, historians are generally lost in contradictions when they attempt to point to any particular piece of statuary as the labour of any known sculptor.  The sculptor of the Venus de Medici is not known; and the Apollo Belvedere is a masterpiece, the author of which lies shrouded in the depths of the past.  Rude and harsh were the early performances of the Greeks.  We have histories of Greek sculptors who flourished many hundred years before our era; and of these the mythical Daedalus is the oldest and most renowned.  This sculptor is reported to have flourished fourteen centuries before the Christian era.  He is said to have fashioned colossal wooden statues; and Pausanias mentions his statue of Hercules in the possession of the Thebans, and his wooden Venus in the possession of the Delians.  His Hercules, however, appears to have been considered his masterpiece; and Flaxman, commenting upon the antiquity of the figures of Hercules found on some coins, seems to think that we may not unreasonably conjecture that these are copies from the masterpiece of Daedalus.  Other sculptors of the same name, appear to have flourished in the Achaic period of Grecian history.  Indeed it is shrewdly conjectured that Daedalus derived his name from wooden statues called Daedala; and that amongst the ancient Greeks, Daedalus meant nothing more than one skilled in making Daedala.  The earliest sculptures of the Greeks were fashioned of materials easily worked, as plaster, clay, and wood.  Later they worked ivory, and began to understand the value of metals in statuary; and about five centuries before the Christian era, marble was used by sculptors for detached figures.  In the infancy of Greek art, when sculptors were gradually acquiring the skill to fashion their creations out of the most durable material, many combinations of wood, stone, and metal were used, which would sadly shock the modern sculptor’s eye;—­wooden figures burnished with gold,