which were constantly produced there, that the word Hermoglyph (sculptor of Hermes), was a long time the sole word employed at Athens to indicate every kind of sculptor. The form of Hermes, once found, did not remain exclusively peculiar to the deity whose image it had been at first. All the gods, principally that crowd of local deities, of private genii, to whom distinct names could be with difficulty assigned at that period, and still more difficult to represent them under different forms; all the gods, I repeat, were represented under the common form. In proportion as religious ideas became more extended, such signs were represented under a more complicated form, and were even doubled, that is to say, two heads were placed on the same pedestal. This was also very probably an Attic invention; for these double heads, the primitive type of Janus, are to be found on the coins of Athens and its colonies. They were originally a head of a man and a head of a woman placed together, that is, the two primitive principles, the two sexes, the two elements of all things, the sun and the moon, or Dsan and Dsana, old Greek words, from which the Romans made Janus and Diana; these two heads of different sexes are to be seen on the medals of Tenedos. At a later period, when these simple and primitive ideas began to change, and to lose themselves, the ancients restricted themselves to the representation of two similar heads, generally male, modifying and varying their characteristics, according to the necessities of their worship, of the progress of religion, and the resources of art. It was thus that the Janus of the Romans was produced; it was thus that in Greece itself there were Hermathenes, Hermeracles, Hermerotes, that is to say double Hermes of Mercury and Minerva, of Mercury and Hercules, of Mercury and Love: and it is very probable that from the same combination proceeded the Hermaphrodites, or Hermes of Mercury and Venus, a type which afterwards became in Grecian art one of the subjects in which, perhaps, are conspicuous, in the highest degree, the rare qualities which distinguish it, and perhaps the one beyond all which would. lead us most to appreciate its genius. When, in fact, one reflects on the prodigious interval which exists between the symbolical manner of representing the union of two natures, and the blending of two sexes by the means of two heads placed together on a single pillar, and that other manner, which we see practised at a later period, of blending in a same

body, of amalgamating in a same physiognomy, the different properties, the distinct characteristics of man and of woman, one can recognise from this single feature, and embrace at a single glance, the immense space which Greek art passed over in the career of imitation; one can appreciate at the same time all that may be attributed to a foreign influence, and all that it owes to its own genius.

The primitive Hermes with its double head and its pillar was nothing more, in fact, than a statue in the Egyptian style, that is to say, an idea under a material form, a real hieroglyphic; but the Greek Hermaphrodite, in which the man and the woman are so admirably expressed and so exquisitely blended in all their parts, that they cannot in any way be separated or distinguished one from the other, in which the ideal being which results from the blending of the two sexes, presents however all the appearance of a real being, joined to all the charm of truth, to all the illusion of nature, who would venture to maintain that such a figure was derived from such a hieroglyphic? And if the one is purely Egyptian, as the other is unquestionably Greek, who could further believe that Greek art was indebted to Egyptian art for anything but the germ of an idea which ever remained devoid of imitation on its own soil, and became in Greece the very miracle of imitation.

I ought not to leave this curious subject I have touched on, without indicating another connection which naturally finds its place here, and which is not the less suited to throw a light on the nature of Greek art, and on its principles so essentially different from those of Egyptian art. I mean those statues of a double nature, human and animal, the combination of which, varied to a boundless infinity, we have already seen have been the principal element of Egyptian art, and the representation of which was not unknown to Greek art. The Giants, the Harpies, Scylla, the Syrens, Sphinxes, Centaurs, Pan, are well-known monsters, composed of a man or of a woman, with the extremities of serpents, birds, or of quadrupeds, without speaking of some combinations of the same kind, of several animals forming one, such as Pegasus, the Griffin, the Chimæra. But there is between these representations, so apparently similar in intention and design, in reality a very remarkable difference: in the Egyptian works, the head of an animal is always placed on a human body, which is characteristic of a symbolical image, while, quite the contrary,

on the productions of Greek art a human head is placed on the body of an animal which constitutes the same image. It is then the man, that is to say, what there is most noble in creation represented by the head, also the most noble, and the most difficult object of imitation, which predominates in these combinations, so as not to disgust by excessive hideousness, and even to produce by the means of a number of gradations of shades of infinite variety and of exquisite delicacy,-to produce, I repeat, in those multiplied and fantastic beings, the appearance of simple and real beings endowed with all the organs of intelligence and of life. For example, in those statues of Pan, with a human head and the body, and the legs and feet of a goat, many examples of which have come down to us, and which were one of the most ancient, as well as the most common subjects of Greek art. By how many delicate lines, at the same time by what clearly marked forms, is the man confounded with the beast, even to the very head, where independently of the horns on the forehead, of the glands on the neck, of the pointed ears which belong to the animal, all the other features more or less participate in the two natures; where the form of the eye, with shaggy eyebrows over it, the nose with wide nostrils, the meagre and elongated face, the mouth which opens as if to bleat, the projecting chin with a goat's beard, everything bespeaks the goat, without almost taking away from the nature of the man, and thus produces a being so consistent in every point, so natural and so true, that not only its double nature does not appear a hideous deformity, as in the Egyptian statues, but does not even awaken in us the idea of a physical impossibility, nor the shadow of a painful sensation. I could adduce many other proofs of this, and the same fact would always result from them; namely, that the Greeks, by always placing the head of the man on the representations of double beings, and consequently by allowing the human nature to predominate in the blending of the two natures, differently from the Egyptians who reversed the two images by placing the animal above and the man below, introduced the principle of imitation even in the creation of monsters, and thus produced the illusion of reality even in the domain of fiction. I know but one single exception to this principle, which is, in the conformation of the Minotaur, which is always represented on the most ancient works of Greek art, as on the celebrated medal of Gnossus in the King's cabinet, and on

the Greek vases, as well as on the more recent, as in the beautiful painting of Herculaneum, and the group of the villa Albani, with a head of a bull and a human body, that is to say, that it is entirely conceived in accordance with the Egyptian system.

But the Minotaur is, as the learned Böttiger has recently demonstrated, a Phoenician fable, derived from the same symbolic sources whence Egyptian art derived the type of its images; and this truth, which the celebrated antiquary has established by arguments entirely unconnected with the present subject, receives an additional confirmation from the opposition which exists between this unique figure of the Minotaur thus conceived, and the entire system of the Hellenic representations. Let us return to the point from whence this digression made us diverge, and resume the history of Greek art, at the period when we left off. I mean at that in which this art might have undergone, in the configuration of its imperfect works, some foreign influence. We have seen it adding, by Athenian hands, a human head, with the Phallus, the Phoenician symbol of nature, to the cippus or to the column, which was the first object which had been erected not to the image, but in honour of the deity, and we have seen that the primitive Hermes was the result of this combination. At this very period, statues of Egyptian form and origin, for the most part executed in wood, were brought into Greece by those same adventurers who came to establish themselves there, and who indeed must have come from Egypt, though it does not necessarily follow from this, that they were Egyptians themselves; I here allude to Cecrops and Danaus. Pausanias, indeed, assures us, in terms too positive to admit of a possibility of doubt, that the most ancient statues which still existed in his time in Greece, were of wood, and what is more, that they were Egyptian.

In support of this he mentions the Lycian Apollo of Argos, which had been consecrated by Danaus; farther on he speaks of an idol of Hermes, or Mercury, which came from Hypermnestra, and in another part of his work he mentions another Hermes, of wood, which was supposed to be an offering of Cecrops. These statues had, therefore, been brought into Greece by foreign Colonies; they were of wood: they had the form of Hermes; that is, the form of a pillar, surmounted with a human bust without any indication of feet and of hands.

And this is what the same Pausanias says elsewhere, explicitly, when he attributes to the Athenians the merit of having among all the Greeks consecrated truncated Hermes (akáλovs 'Epuas) that is to say, Hermes without arms or legs. Now, on remarking those characteristic features, how can anyone refrain from considering these statues of wood in the form of mummies, with the arms attached to the body, so much so as to be scarcely distinguishable one from the other, and with the feet joined in a similar manner so as to form a kind of plinth or base, but as statues most manifestly of Egyptian workmanship and origin, of which we possess thousands of specimens, and which appear to have been executed in Egypt during a long series of centuries with that perseverance and tenacity, the causes and results of which we have already endeavoured to explain and appreciate? We must therefore admit as an established fact that the Greeks, particularly those of Attica and of Argolis, received from Phoenician merchants, or others who established themselves among them during the first period of Hellenic civilisation, some of those idols wrought in the Egyptian style, in cedar, sycamore, or ebony. We shall add that the Diana of Ephesus, under its primitive form, which was exactly that of a mummy, was one of those idols, and that it always remained in conformity with this Oriental type. The Diana of Perga, the Juno of Samos, as we find them represented in medals, belong to the same system, and are to be assigned to the same period. Only the arms of this kind of statues, as they are to be seen separated from the body of the idol, and supported by pieces of metal, indicate a later addition, and prove by this very addition of connecting parts which did not form a part of the block or pillar, since they had need of partial support, that these were in fact parts foreign to the primitive conception of the idol. Lastly, we will presume that the Egyptian statues were painted, as in reality are the greater number of the monuments of the same kind which we possess in almost every material, and we shall find, in this coarse admixture of painting and of sculpture, both so imperfect, the first principle of that taste of the Greeks for polychromatic sculpture, in which art afterwards produced such wonders. Thus then those rude statues, coarsely fashioned, coarsely coloured, in which the confusion and imperfection of this double art are such, that the eye fluctuates undecided between the outlines of the sculptor and the colouring of the