any such time, the seeds of music may not be present in strength or in a form to be quickenable into a separately manifesting art; and this may be true of poetry too; yet where poetry is, you may say music has been; for every real poem is born out of a pre-existing music of its own, and is the inverbation of it.  The Greek Melic poets (the lyricists) were all musicians first, with an intricate musical science, on the forms of which they arranged their language; I do not know whether they wrote their music apart from the words.  After the Greek, the Italian illumination was the greatest in western history; there the influx, beginning in the thirteenth century, produced first its chief poetic splendor in Dante before that century had passed; not raising an equal greatness in painting and sculpture until the fifteenth.  In England, the Breath that kindled Shakespeare never blew down so far as to light up a great moment in the plastic arts:  there were some few figures of the second rank in painting presently; in sculpture, nothing at all (to speak of).  Painting, you see, works in a little less material medium than sculpture does.  Dante’s Italy had not quite plunged into that orgy of vice, characteristic of the great creative ages, which we find in the Italy of the Cinquecento.  But England, even in Shakespeare’s day, was admiring and tending to imitate Italian wickedness.  James I’s reign was as corrupt as may be; and though the Puritan reaction followed, the creative force had already been largely wasted:  notice had been served to the Spirit to keep off.  Puritanism raised itself as a barrier against the creative force both in its higher and lower aspects:  against art, and against vice;—­probably the best thing that could happen under the circumstances; and the reason why England recovered so much sooner than did Italy.—­On the other hand, when the influx came to Holland, it would seem to have found, then, no opportunities for action in the non-material arts:  to have skipped any grand manifestation in music or poetry:  and at once to have hit the Dutchman ‘where he lived’ (as they say),—­in his paintbox.—­But to return:-

Sculpture, then, came later than poetry to Greece; and in some ways it was a more sudden and astounding birth.  Unluckily nothing remains—­I speak on tenterhooks—­of its grandest moment.  Progress in architecture seems to have begun in the reign of Pisistratus; some time in the next sixty years or so the Soul first impressed its likeness on carved stone.  I once saw a picture—­in a lantern lecture in London—­of a pre-Pheidian statue of Athene; dating, I suppose, from the end of the sixth century B. C. She is advancing with upraised arm to protect—­someone or something.  The figure is, perhaps, stiff and conventional; and you have no doubt it is the likeness of a Goddess.  She is not merely a very fine and dignified woman; she is a Goddess, with something of Egyptian sublimity.  The artist, if he had not attained perfect mastery