All that was spiritual in Greek civilisation was sick before the sack of Corinth, and all that was alive in Greek art had died many years earlier.  That it had died before the death of Alexander let his tomb at Constantinople be my witness.  Before they set the last stone of the Parthenon it was ailing:  the big marbles in the British Museum are the last significant examples of Greek art; the frieze, of course, proves nothing, being mere artisan work.  But the man who made what one may as well call “The Theseus” and “The Ilissus,” the man whom one may as well call Phidias, crowns the last vital movement in the Hellenic slope.  He is a genius, but he is no oddity:  he falls quite naturally into his place as the master of the early decadence; he is the man in whom runs rich and fast but a little coarsened the stream of inspiration that gave life to archaic Greek sculpture.  He is the Giotto—­but an inferior Giotto—­of the slope that starts from the eighth century B.C.—­so inferior to the sixth century A.D.—­to peter out in the bogs of Hellenistic and Roman rubbish.  Whence sprang that Hellenic impulse?  As yet we cannot tell.  Probably, from the ruins of some venerable Mediterranean civility, against the complex materialism of which it was, in its beginnings, I dare say, a reaction.  The story of its prime can be read in fragments of archaic sculpture scattered throughout Europe, and studied in the National Museum at Athens, where certain statues of athletes, dating from about 600, reveal the excellences and defects of Greek art at its best.  Of its early decline in the fifth century Phidias is the second-rate Giotto; the copies of his famous contemporaries and immediate predecessors are too loathsome to be at all just; Praxiteles, in the fourth century, the age of accomplished prettiness, is the Correggio, or whatever delightful trifler your feeling for art and chronology may suggest.  Fifth and fourth century architecture forbid us to forget the greatness of the Greeks in the golden age of their intellectual and political history.  The descent from sensitive, though always rather finikin, drawing through the tasteful and accomplished to the feebly forcible may be followed in the pots and vases of the sixth, fifth, fourth, and third centuries.  In the long sands and flats of Roman realism the stream of Greek inspiration is lost for ever.

Before the death of Marcus Aurelius, Europe was as weary of materialism as England before the death of Victoria.  But what power was to destroy a machine that had enslaved men so completely that they dared not conceive an alternative?  The machine was grown so huge that man could no longer peer over its side; man could see nothing but its cranks and levers, could hear nothing but its humming, could mark the spinning fly-wheel and fancy himself in contemplation of the revolving spheres.  Annihilation was the only escape for the Roman citizen from the Roman Empire.  Yet, while in the West Hadrian was raising the Imperial