The Scotchman nodded assent, and the Greek sculptor went on.

“I am not vindictive myself, Homer,” he said.  “Nobody has hurt me, and, on the whole, I don’t think sculpture is in such a bad way, after all.  There’s a shoemaker I wot of in the mortal realms who can turn the prettiest last you ever saw; and I encountered a carver in a London eating-house last month who turned out a slice of beef that was cut as artistically as I could have done it myself.  What I object to chiefly is the tendency of the times.  This is an electrical age, and men in my old profession aren’t content to turn out one chef-d’oeuvre in a lifetime.  They take orders by the gross.  I waited upon inspiration.  To-day the sculptor waits upon custom, and an artist will make a bust of anybody in any material desired as long as he is sure of getting his pay afterwards.  I saw a life-size statue of the inventor of a new kind of lard the other day, and what do you suppose the material was?  Gold?  Not by a great deal.  Ivory?  Marble, even?  Not a bit of it.  He was done in lard, sir.  I have seen a woman’s head done in butter, too, and it makes me distinctly weary to think that my art should be brought so low.”

“You did your best work in Greece,” chuckled Homer.

“A bad joke, my dear Homer,” retorted Phidias.  “I thought sculpture was getting down to a pretty low ebb when I had to fashion friezes out of marble; but marble is more precious than rubies alongside of butter and lard.”

“Each has its uses,” said Homer.  “I’d rather have butter on my bread than marble, but I must confess that for sculpture it is very poor stuff, as you say.”

“It is indeed,” said Phidias.  “For practice it’s all right to use butter, but for exhibition purposes—­bah!”

Here Phidias, to show his contempt for butter as raw material in sculpture, seized a wooden toothpick, and with it modelled a beautiful head of Minerva out of the pat that stood upon the small plate at his side, and before Burns could interfere had spread the chaste figure as thinly as he could upon a piece of bread, which he tossed to the shade of a hungry dog that stood yelping on the river-bank.

“Heavens!” cried Burns.  “Imperious Caesar dead and turned to bricks is as nothing to a Minerva carved by Phidias used to stay the hunger of a ravening cur.”

“Well, it’s the way I feel,” said Phidias, savagely.

“I think you are a trifle foolish to be so eternally vexed about it,” said Homer, soothingly.  “Of course you feel badly, but, after all, what’s the use?  You must know that the mortals would pay more for one of your statues than they would for a specimen of any modern sculptor’s art; yes, even if yours were modelled in wine-jelly and the other fellow’s in pure gold.  So why repine?”

“You’d feel the same way if poets did a similarly vulgar thing,” retorted Phidias; “you know you would.  If you should hear of a poet to-day writing a poem on a thin layer of lard or butter, you would yourself be the first to call a halt.”