and with painted vermilion faces, were fashioned in the age of Phidias; and it is believed by some, that this immortal sculptor helped to produce a statue of Jupiter, the face of which was of ivory and gold, and the body of gypsum and clay.  Phidias may be fairly acknowledged as the first great Greek sculptor, of whose career and whose works we have indisputable accounts.  He founded, and represents all the excellencies of the highest school of Greek art.  The sculptors who came after him, as Lysippus the favourite of the great Alexander, paid greater regard to graces of detail and to finish; but of those sublime effects, those forms of gods in human shape which really impress the modern spectator with their almost superhuman beauty, Phidias was the creator.  The sculptures known to the public as the Townley collection, are sculptures generally of a more modern date than those in the Elgin and Phigaleian Saloons.  The collection has undoubtedly many specimens of the rudest eras of Greek art:  but its most striking groups, to the general visitor, will be undoubtedly those finished statues and compositions which represent the ages when Greece was a great European power, and that subsequent period when the Greek sculptors plied their chisels under the patronage of Roman conquerors.  In this room the visitor will once more remark, how large a proportion of these priceless relics have been gleaned from ancient sepulchres.  Even as he enters the room, he may perceive on the right, the front of a tomb from Athens, carved in high relief; and on the left, the front of another tomb, also sculptured, from Delos.

The room is divided into compartments which the visitor should examine in their regular order of rotation.  He will begin therefore, of course with the

First division.

Before the first pilaster let the visitor notice at once a small seated statue of Cybele or Fortune, from Athens, presented to the nation by J.S.  Gaskoin, Esq.  Other remarkable objects to be examined before the visitor fixes his attention upon the contents of the case deposited here, are a bust of Demosthenes; a sepulchral altar or cippus, ornamented with sphinxes, etc.; and a sepulchral stele, inscribed with the name of the son of Artemidorus, who is reclining upon a couch, and crowning himself.  Over the case are deposited the end of a sarcophagus ornamented with a Bacchus reclining on a satyr; a bust of Julius Caesar; a sepulchral cippus; and a Greek stele.  On the case are a head found near Rome, probably of Mercury:  and the bust of a Muse crowned with a laurel wreath.