It is a known but unexplained phenomenon, that among the ancients statuary rose to such a degree of perfection, as almost to baffle the hope of imitating it, and mingled with despair at excelling it; while painting, at the same period, notwithstanding the admiration bestowed upon the ancient paintings of Apelles by Pliny and others, has been proved to be an excellence of much later growth, and to have fallen far short of Statuary. I remember a man, equally admirable for his talents and his rank, pointing to a sign-post, and saying that had Titian never lived, the richness of representation by colour, even there, could never have been existed. In that mechanical branch of painting, perspective, the ancients were equally deficient, as was proved by the discoveries at Herculaneum and the Palace of Nero, in which such blunders were to be found, as to render plausible the assertions of those who have maintained that the ancients were wholly ignorant of it. That they were not totally destitute of it is proved by Vitruvius in the introduction to his second book.

Something of the same kind appears to have been the case with regard to their dramas. Early in the lectures, I noticed how the Greek Stage has been imitated by the French, and by writers of England since the reign of Charles II. The scheme admits of nothing more than the change of a single note, and excludes that which is the true principle of life—the attaining of the same end by an infinite variety of means.

It is true that the writings of Shakespeare are not likenesses of the Greek: they are analogies, because by very different means they produce the same end; whereas the greater part of the French tragedies, and the English plays on the same plan cannot be called likenesses, but may be called the failing of the same end by adopting the same means under most unappropriate circumstances.