The ancient paintings on the polished surface of the marble have nearly vanished in the long course of centuries—but nature has retouched them. The marbles of the Akropolis have now taken those burning, those golden hues, which give such an indescribable beauty to the monuments of the south.

The Greeks, in their bright, creative imagination, and in their high sense of beauty, living surrounded by a scenery which nature had touched with the brilliant tints of the rainbow-boldly took up the hint thus given them, and adorned their sanctuaries with bright and glittering colors in perfect harmony with the natural objects around them.

The Goths, the Danes, the Anglo-Saxons, beneath their cold and cloudy sky, could only admire the immense gray and gloomy piles of their churches, the vaulted aisles of their convents, and their turretted and battlemented castles. The Greeks, on the contrary, were fond of light and life; they consecrated darkness and death to the austere deities of the Plutonian regions, and called the furies-the sable sisters of night.

The dazzling light of day-to aglaon phaos-surrounded the snowy abode of their Olympian gods, and the magnificent sanctuary of Pallas Athene, here, on her own towering Akropolis. But what signifies an idol surrounded by a kneeling worshipping multitude? Is it not the juvenile creation of man, sprung from his ardent desire to embody in a visible form before his eye, the presence of the invisible Being of the Almighty which he so deeply feels in his heart? The more fervid his imagination, the more vivid his faith in the presence of his Creator, the less he wants to be aroused to devotion by any sensual assistance. The rocky block, the pillar of stone, the gigantic oak tree, call forth his veneration for the Deity. Nay, long centuries after, when the skilful hand of the rapidly advancing Greek race had made their astonishing progress in the arts and comforts of civilized life, had built sanctuaries and temples, they still devoutly and with superstitious awe, continued to venerate the archaic and symbolic forms of their gods in their unwieldly wooden statues.

And it was not until the Periklean era, when the Athenian

art had reached its highest flight, that Phidias, the master mind, took up the bold and brilliant idea, at once, to represent the God-head in the most perfect beauty of the human formgrand, colossal, and adorned by all the splendor and pomp of ivory and gold, of precious stones and glittering vestments. and surrounded by a gorgeous architecture, which combined the whole symbolic representation into one harmonious picture. The supernatural beauty of the virgin goddess, the unrivalled perfection of the temple, the ingenious grouping of the traditions, and of the entire theology of the times-all was then considered a divine revelation by the enraptured people. Nay, Phidias alone, they said, had been called to behold the Olympian ruler of the universe, and no man could then die happy who had not venerated the divine, the inspired productions from his hand.

Such was the belief. And thus the Parthenon, in its unity, represented the whole imaginative theology of the Athenians— it formed a perfect model of art, an epic poem, sculptured in marble, complete and finished like a tragedy of Sophokles, or a hymn of Pindar, sprung from the deepest feelings of the heart and from the highest flight of the imagination.

The glory of the goddess is the theme. On the pediments is the foundation of her worship on carth and her veneration among the gods. On the metopes her victorious progress carrying civilization and happiness among her children. On the frieze she receives her grateful Athenian people, who joyfully approach her sanctuary with hymns and offerings-and within the magnificent vault of the temple, she stands herself, the protectress and guardian of her warlike republic.

Such was the poetic and artistic flight of Athenian religion. But the brooding mind of the philosophers rose above the glittering forms, and they said with a smile, that if Minerva would toss her head on high, the mighty temple would sink into ruins at her feet. And some centuries later, Paul, the divine Apostle of Christ, standing on Mars Hill, revealed to the astonished Sophists, "that the Lord of Heaven and Earth dwelleth not in temples made with human hands."

This thoroughly studied elegance-this extreme solicitude to

improve the effect to the eye, is proper only to the Greek race. We look in vain for this perfection of art among the Romans, nor do we find it in our own modern imitations of Grecian architecture, in our churches, banks and city halls, which though handsomely built and of good materials, are unable to convey any adequate idea of the complete harmony and the beautiful effect of the ancient Athenian temples.

An important discovery was made on the Akropolis in the year 1841 by our distinguished friend, Chevalier Edward Schaubert, principal architect to King Otho, which in a remarkable manner proves the accuracy and solicitude of the ancients to augment the effect of their architecture to the eye of the distant observer. This consisted in the curvature or inclination of all the lines in the Theseum and Parthenon. Not only do the lines of each column converge from the base of the shaft to the top of the capital-but the axes themselves converge also to assist the perspective of elevation. The architraves likewise form a curve and the columns, both of the porticocs and flanks stand in convex lines, contributing, as the architects say, to the beauty of the perspective and the concentrated strength of the structure.

The Greek artist gave a greater bulk to the columns at the angles of the peristyle, not in order to strengthen them, but as Vitruvius says, because these outer columns would appear more slender than they really were, by the effect of the sky seen between them. This perfection of art in its different parts contributed particularly to give grace and elegance to the whole. Great attention was paid to the columns and an extreme care taken by the Attic architects in placing the different frusta of the columns. They were polished like a marble-table; two frusta were placed the one upon the other, both fastened in the centre by an axis of cedar-wood, round which they were turned. By this continual friction on a fine sand, which was strown in between them, the surfaces of both became so equal and united that the column appeared to be a monolith, or made of one entire stone, and that the most exercised eye hardly can distinguish its joints to this day.*

* A splendid volume on the restoration of the temple of Victory and the

Christianity now began to shed its light over the world; the Parthenon became consecrated as a Christian church; and those tasteless Byzantine mosaics, and paintings of the Virgin Mary and the saints, began to cover the walls and ceilings, which, even at the present day, show us the utter degradation of the fine arts during the earlier period of the middle ages.

In the year 1460, the indolent dukes of Athens, the successors of the Crusaders, were inhabiting the towers and temples of the Akropolis, when they heard, with frantic despair, the wild shout of the Allah Acbar, Allah Kerim, of thousands of Turkish horsemen galloping through the plain.

The last duke, Franco Acciajuoli, surrendered to the terrible Mohammed, the conqueror of Constantinople, who himself visited the Akropolis, and, struck with admiration at the beauty of the great temple and its sculptures, turned round to his viziers and said, "Not one stone of this sacred mosque of the prophet is to be removed."

Thus the Parthenon, from a church of St. Mary, now became a mosque with soaring minarets, from which the Muezzim five times a day called the Moslemin to prayers-yet not a stone was removed from the Akropolis.

But, alas! Two centuries later, in 1687, during the siege of the Castle Hill, a Venetian shell, lighting on the temple, at that time used as a powder magazine, blew it up with the greater part of the Turkish garrison.

The explosion was terrific; and yet, the wonderfully strong building of Kallikrates resisted. Only eight columns on the north, and six on the south, were thrown down, together with their entablature, the roof and the greater part of the cell.

The building was thus split into two distinct parts, while between both remained immense mounds of marble blocks and fragments of the most beautiful sculpture.

The fickle and faithless merchants of Venice soon abandoned

excavations on the Akropolis, with colored plates, has been published in Berlin by the architects Schaubert and Hansen, and edited by the learned Prof. Doctor Lewis Ross. Yet in spite of the important information it contains, which has furnished materials for numerous English and French treatises on architecture and articles in Reviews-not a single copy of this work has as yet reached any public library in the United States.

their new conquest. The violence of war had in part ruined the sacred Parthenon, yet many of its superb ornaments still remained untouched-when a far more disgraceful spoliation was to be perpetrated by a British nobleman, in our own enlightened age.

Lord Elgin, the Scot, as British Ambassador in Constantinople, obtained by bribery in the Sultan's Harem, a firman, permitting him to gather some old stones in the Küleh or Castle of Athens. The work of spoilation now began by breaking down the cella wall of the Parthenon with axes and crow-bars, in order to take away the sculptures of the frieze. Lord Elgin or his satellites destroyed the entablatures; they removed the metopes; they disfigured the beautiful Portico of the Erechtheion by breaking down one of the Athenian Virgins; they pulled down the whole monument of Trasyllos, while carrying away the colossal statue of Bacchus; nay, they went so far in this arrogance and insolence, that they excited even the indignation. and wrath of the stupid Turks themselves. They attempted in vain to remove the elegant monument of Lysikrates, on the east of the Akropolis, which the Greeks called the lantern of Demosthenes.

When the last metope was broken away from the southwestern corner of the Parthenon, in the effort of removing it, the greater part of the superstructure, with the triglyphs, was hurled down by the workmen of the lord. The Turkish commander, who beheld the destruction of the noble building, took his pipe from his mouth, dropped a tear, and said, in a supplicating tone of voice, to Lusieri, the helpmate of Lord Elgin, in the presence of Lord Byron, "Let there now be an end of this, sir."

The French Ambassador, General Sebastiani, then almighty at Constantinople, took up the gauntlet; and lo! a Tartar comes galloping with the order that the Ingless Effendi should have no more stones from the Küleh!

This timely decree saved the beautiful procession of young Athenian horsemen on the western frieze, while all the other precious marbles having been transported to dark and smoky London, are now placed in the dull and dreary halls of the British Museum, looking gray and colorless, like all the objects around.