and the fact, indeed, are so infinitesimal, that they obviously amount to nothing more than that element of practical incertitude which always prevails in materialising on so large a scale a mathematical calculation.

This perfect analogy between the principles of Music and the principles of Form, and the complete dependence of both of them upon the primal law of Numerical Proportion, is, we conceive, a remarkable truth, and one which cannot fail to be attended by wide and important results. It is one step nearer to the unveiling of a grand Law of Harmony which seems to pervade the universe.

The early and remarkable success which the Greeks attained in æsthetic science, under difficultics infinitely greater than those which beset such inquiries in modern times, is a fact suggestive of important reflections. Not to speak of the twenty centuries by which the world is older since then, during which physics and metaphysics have formed the subject of unremitting thought and discussion, it must be remembered that we have this immense advantage over the ancient philosophers, that we have merely to rediscover a system formerly known and practised, and whose splendid products still exist for our instruction. We have the science, in fact, still before us, embodied in stone and marble; and the only problem is-Given the results, to discover its principles. So that, for the one way of inquiry open to the ancients, we have two; and yet we have accomplished absolutely nothing in comparison to what was so splendidly accomplished by them.

In Greece, everything centred in philosophy. Physics and metaphysics, religion, ethics, and æsthetics, formed the pabulum of the philosophic mind of Greece. The grand first principles of things were publicly discussed and lectured upon, in such a way as to rivet the attention of every thoughtful man; and from these first principles many things in science were deduced which only modern experimentation could establish on an assured basis. The great centre-truth which was afterwards. applied with such effect to Grecian Art, seems originally to have

been derived, like not a few other ideas of Hellenic philosophy, from the East. Pythagoras was the medium through which it was introduced into Greece. Educated, like the generality of his countrymen, in music and poetry, excelling in eloquence, and versed in astronomy,-bearing off the palm for wrestling at the Olympic Games when in his eighteenth year,-admired for the beauty of his person and the brilliancy of his understanding, that remarkable man withdrew at an early age into the East, and became a favoured guest among the star-gazers of Chaldea and the white-robed priesthood of the Nile. There he searched deeply into the ancestral wisdom so carefully preserved, and not less jealously concealed, under mystic symbols, in those cradles of earliest civilisation; and on his return to his native land (about 520 B.C.), he brought with him, we are told, a system of Analogy, or key to all harmonious proportions. Certain it is, that he indoctrinated his disciples in a science of numbers, a system of proportions, of which the phenomena of the monochord were, if not the actual basis, at least a material exposition. Hence it appears to be a true paradox that, in Greece, the principles of Art were known before Art itself existed. It was precisely in the generation subsequent to Pythagoras that Grecian Art sprang into its heyday of existence. The "wisest of the Greeks" died in 497 B.C., and the very next generation witnessed the golden age of Pericles, with Ictinus at work upon the Parthenon, Phidias sculpturing the matchless statues and bas-reliefs, and Zeuxis and Parrhasius contending in glorious rivalry in the Agora of Athens. Pamphilius, we are told, charged his pupils a high fee for "lessons founded on an excellent theory;" and it is said of Parrhasius that he accelerated the progress of art by the purity and correctness of his designs, in consequence of his being "acquainted with the science of proportions." Cockerell has remarked that, in the Ægina Marbles, "a canon of proportion, and a system of anatomical expression, are observable throughout;" and Winckelman goes the length of saying that "it is probable that the Grecian, like the Egyptian artists, had rules by which not only

the greater but the smaller proportions of the body were accurately determined." Assuredly there was a type of face and figure which the Greek artists adhered to in their representation of the general man, as in battles, processions, &c.; and that the operative sculptors may have had a rule-of-thumb process for producing the proportions of this type, is possible. But further than this I cannot go for every fine statue requires proportions in some measure peculiar to itself, and I do not believe that the infinite mouldings and subtle curves of the human body can be reproduced by rules. Nevertheless I think it is now beyond question that the Greeks were better acquainted than our artists with the different æsthetic properties of the various geometric figures, curves, &c., and that they had a science which aided them in determining the pose and grouping of their figures, and the proportions of their buildings. Indeed, after the discoveries of Mr Hay in regard to the Parthenon, we must accept as literally correct the statement of Vitruvius, when, after observing that "the several parts which constitute a temple ought to be subject to the laws of Symmetry, the principles of which ought to be familiar to all who profess the science of architecture," he says-" the artists of antiquity must be allowed to have followed the dictates of a judgment the most rational when, transferring to the works of art principles derived from nature, every part was so regulated as to bear a just proportion to the whole. And those principles were more particularly attended to in the construction of temples and sacred edifices,-the beauties or defects of which buildings being destined to remain as a perpetual testimony of their skill or of their incompetency."

That Philosophy should thus have been the mother of Art in Greece, and should have bestowed upon her a precious dowry of deductions to guide her future steps, may appear surprising nowadays, when science is so authoritatively divorced from æsthetics, and every principle is scouted unless it come in the form of an a posteriori reasoning: but it will not so appear to any one conversant with the character and objects of Grecian

philosophy. It was the peculiar genius and vocation of that gifted people to grasp the first principles of things, and so become acquainted with the leading truths of science, by a process of imaginative inference resembling inspiration. Grecian intellect had an unequalled keenness of eye for the analogies of things. The slightest resemblance caught, charmed, and fixed its glance; and the phenomenon of the Milky Way, backed by a few commonplace facts, is said to have carried the swift imagination of Democritus to the conception of the Atomic Theory,—a world-wide generalisation, embracing and depicting facts of which positively its framer knew no more than the schoolboy or the Helot, yet which, after twenty centuries of neglect and doubt, the hair-splitting science of a Dalton and Berzelius is at length placing upon an irrefragable basis. The mental development of the Greeks and that of the moderns took totally opposite courses, each, however, supplementary of the other, and both leading from different starting-points to the same goal. Of the two great methods of scientific inquiry, the Ancients relied mainly on the Deductive system, the Moderns on the Inductive. The former, starting from principles, came down with eagle-swoop upon details; the latter, long groping among details, at length rises to principles. The former seized Truth while yet in the unembodied Idea, and by a brilliant but vague generalisation, applied it to the countless forms and phases of Nature;—the latter, gathering together a multitude of isolated facts in the outer world, sift them with patient industry, until, from the shapeless and perplexing mass, emerge the golden grains of truth. The one is a brilliant sovereignty of Mind, the other an intelligent worship of Matter. Bold speculation must always precede Experiment, before the latter can be turned to its legitimate account; and it should never be forgotten that the main value of the Inductive system of inquiry is, to test the results at which the mind has previously arrived by the method of Deduction.

F

We think this truth has been too much lost sight of in modern science, although it is notorious that all the greatest discoveries from that of the New World by Columbus, to Le Verrier's planet and Newton's grand Law of Attraction—have thus been beheld from afar by the boldly precursive mind of the explorer. That Esthetics have suffered from the too exclusive predominance at present assigned to the Baconian method of investigation, can hardly be doubted by any one who maturely considers the subject; and that the Platonic philosophy is likewise better fitted than that of Locke for the investigation of such principles as those of Beauty is manifest from this that whereas Locke's theory of the understanding practically regards the human soul as primarily a tabula rasa, whose subsequent ideas are the mere echo of the impressions of the outer world,—a reflex of the influences by which she may chance to be surrounded; according to Plato, she is a tablet legibly written on from the first,-a bright and thinking repository of ideas imparted, and qualities implanted in her, ab ovo, by her Divine Maker. And we must not forget that it is to the now despised deductive mode of conception that we owe that Ideal Beauty so finely embodied in the works of classic art, and the consideration of which we have reserved for this last stage of our inquiry.

nature.

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That IDEAL BEAUTY, it has been often asked, whence came it? It is often maintained that this chef-d'œuvre of Art was produced by a mere consideration of the forms of external But an average of humanity is necessarily an average of imperfections, and no one ought to be so absurd as to suppose that the ideal beauty of the Greeks was founded on so commonplace a basis. And even the Eclectical system-that of choosing the best points out of a multitude of fine forms-is inadequate to explain the acknowledged perfection attained to by the Greek artists. Firstly, because every fine face has an æsthetic ensemble of its own, which the alteration of a single line or feature would destroy; so that the mere collocation of