a
certain work of their pupil, Dontas of Lacedaemon.  It is to that
that we have definitely come at last, in the school of Dipoenus and
Scyllis.

Dry and brief as these details may seem, they are the witness to an
active, eager, animated period of inventions and beginnings, in which
the Greek workman triumphs over the first [235] rough mechanical
difficulties which beset him in the endeavour to record what his soul
conceived of the form of priest or athlete then alive upon the earth,
or of the ever-living gods, then already more seldom seen upon it.
Our own fancy must fill up the story of the unrecorded patience of
the workshop, into which we seem to peep through these scanty
notices--the fatigue, the disappointments, the steps repeated, ending
at last in that moment of success, which is allof the
soul with itself.  Who can doubt it who sees and considers the still
irresistible grace, the contagious pleasantness, of the Discobolus,
the Diadumenus, and a few other precious survivals from the athletic
age which immediately preceded the manhood of Pheidias, between the
Persian and the Peloponnesian wars?

[282] Now, this predominance of youth, of the youthful form, in art,
of bodily gymnastic promoting natural advantages to the utmost, of
the physical perfection developed thereby, is a sign that essential
mastery has been achieved by the artist--the power, that is to say,
of a full and free realisation.  For such youth, in its very essence,
is a matter properly within the limits of the visible, the empirical,
world; and in the presentment of it there will be no place for
symbolic hint, none of that reliance on the