The Charioteer and the Disk-Thrower belong to the dawn and the early forenoon of Greek sculpture. Our next picture represents its noonday. Here are some of the horsemen from the frieze of the Panathenaic procession at the Parthenon—the greatest piece of low-relief sculpture that the world has ever seen, or ever will see probably. They are the work of Pheidias, or at least—for there is not a single figure existing that can be proved to be from his chisel—they were designed by him and carved under his supervision. Myron's Disk-Thrower makes you wonder how any man could be so clever as to carve a human figure in so difficult a pose. But you do not wonder at all at these young Athenian riders. You feel that they just were so, and could never have been anything else. So—quietly, easily, and gracefully, an Athenian knight sat his fiery little horse, turning round carelessly to speak to his companion, or checking the eagerness of his spirited mount. Any man could see a hundred such figures any day in Athens; but there was just one man who could fix them there in stone, as though they were living still. And this is where art becomes perfect, when you forget all about the cleverness and skill of it, and simply see what the great man saw and meant you to see.

Perhaps the most popular of all Greek sculptors was Praxiteles, who lived about a century after Pheidias. To say that he was the most popular is not to say that he was the greatest; but certainly the Greeks thought all the world of him and his work. All kinds of stories were told about him. He made a statue of the goddess Aphrodite for the people of the island of Knidos, (there is a copy of it in the Vatican at Rome,) so lovely that Nicomedes, King of Bithynia, offered to pay off the whole of the National Debt of the island if only they would let him have the statue. To their honour the people of Knidos preferred to bear their own National Debt, and keep their goddess.

Praxiteles once wished to make a present of a statue to a rather too famous Greek lady named Phryne. She was puzzled to know which statue she ought to choose, and so she hit upon a rather cunning, not to say sneaky, plan. She sent a messenger to the sculptor to tell him that his house was on fire, whereupon Praxiteles cried out that he was ruined if his statue of Eros (the God of Love) were burned. So Phryne chose the Eros, knowing that Praxiteles thought it his best work.

Till the year 1877 we had never seen a real original statue from the chisel of this great artist—nothing but copies, like the Vatican Aphrodite. But in that year the German excavators at Olympia found there a statue of Hermes, the Greek messenger-god, exactly as an old Greek writer described it, and in the very place where he saw it. One arm and both legs from below the knee were lost, but otherwise the figure was perfect, and you can see from the picture how beautiful it is. The young god stands in an easy position, holding on his right arm his little baby brother-god, Dionysos. The lost right hand probably dangled something, perhaps a bunch of grapes, before the baby, and little Dionysos reaches out his chubby hand to grasp it. But Hermes himself is not looking at his brother. He looks past him, with a dreamy expression, as though he were seeing something that we cannot see. The whole figure is exquisite in its gentle grace. Look at the carving of the hair. A second-rate artist would have tried to make it as like real hair as possible, and so have spoiled the whole effect. But Praxiteles knew that marble is marble, and that you must never try to make your material tell a lie; and so the curling locks are only suggested, and the whole head looks far stronger and more lifelike than if he had wasted his time cutting feeble lines all over the surface, and trying to make

If the Greeks made their gods in their own image, at least you can say that it was a splendid image.

And now, if you want to know what a noble Athenian lady of the fourth century looked like, take this statue of the Mourning Woman, from the British Museum. No one knows who carved it, though it belongs to about the time of Praxiteles; but I am sure you never saw anything more exquisitely graceful than this slight, sad figure, its lovely head gently bowed in sorrow, and all its grace accentuated by the lines of the flowing robes. The artist, whoever he was, that made this figure, was a great man among the greatest.

All that I have shown you so far is work from the hands of great artists. But the last thing I want you to look at is different. It is just the tombstone of an Athenian lady, "Hegeso, the daughter of Proxenos," who lived and died somewhere about 400 years before Christ. It is as simple and unaffected as possible. Hegeso is gone; well, let us put up, not a lamentation in stone, but something that will remind us of her just as we used to see her, taking, perhaps, a necklace out of the casket that her servant brings her. Remember that what you have to compare this with is not any of our big monuments, but the average tombstone in our churchyards and cemeteries. I wonder if we have much reason to be proud of the comparison.

Well, then, now that you have seen some really good Greek work in sculpture, how does it impress you? To me it seems that the things one remembers most about it are Simplicity and Nobility. It is all perfectly straightforward and perfectly dignified. The Greek artist had no use for the tricks that make people gape and say, "How clever!" and he hated with his whole heart all kinds of freaks and exaggerations. You will never get from him anything that is vulgar or ignoble, least of all anything that is vile. Someone has said that his aim is "to express, with noble simplicity and truth, something intrinsically worthy of expression"; and it was surely no unworthy aim. To have something fine to tell men, to tell it, whether in words or in colours, in marble or in bronze, simply, truly, nobly: I do not know that you can ask a great deal more of any art.

Only there is one thing. It is the last thing I have to tell you, and perhaps it holds the secret of how Greek faith, and culture, and art, great and noble in many ways as they are, failed and passed away at last. And that one thing you see perhaps more clearly than anywhere else in the art of this noble race. It had no place for the dark and broken side of human life, out of which come all the greatest and highest things that we know. The Greek loved strength, wholeness, beauty, and put away from him as far as possible all thought of sorrow and suffering. It was not till after Jesus Christ had come into the world that men began to realize that the greatest things on earth are not beauty and strength, but love, sympathy, and sacrifice. The Hermes of Praxiteles is beautiful and strong; but I wish I could have put beside him Donatello's great Christ on the Cross at Padua, for the contrast would have shown you, far better than I can tell it, where the Greek failed. The Greek god is far more beautiful than the Christian Saviour; but the Italian sculptor has done an infinitely greater thing, and taught an infinitely greater truth than Praxiteles ever dreamed of.