is explained by the fact that several strains of lineage, several branches of the Indo-European stock, have contributed to a result which no one of them could have produced alone. Thus, the most signal achievement of the French genius in art has been the creation of Gothic architecture; and, as the President of the Royal Academy reminded its Students some years ago, the cradle of that architecture was the Royal Domain of central France, a region in which the Celtic blood of the Cymri was mingled with the Latin element derived from the Romans, and with the Teutonic element furnished by the Franks; giving birth to that Gothic style which blends freedom with self-restraint, audacity with prudence, and science with emotion. No similar analysis can be applied to the masterpieces of the Greek architect and the Greek sculptor. Imperfect though our knowledge is, does it not warrant the belief that no people has yet appeared upon the earth whose faculty for art, in the largest sense of the term, was at once so fine and so comprehensive?
But it is through the classical literature of Greece that the mind of the race is most fully known to us. There is a passage in one of Macaulay's earliest writings—a review of Mitford in Knight's Quarterly Magazine—from which I will quote a few sentences, because they put the claim of Greek Literature in the boldest form; one which many readers, probably, would deem extravagant, or even paradoxical. "If we consider," he says, "the subtlety of disquisition, the force of imagination, the perfect energy and
