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to "overcome us like a summer's cloud and pass away," and we not know it. It is theirs to "keep honour bright," "to show virtue her own image:" "they shall assist the deeds of justest men," and so work "their country's good, with a respect more tender than their own lives." The honours they confer are reflected on the arts through which those honours are conferred. The great artist who feels that the theme he may select will live in men's memories long after he may "lie in cold obstruction's apathy," cannot but glow with pride, even while he ought in some measure to tremble with a sense of responsibility. He may be potent, for good or for ill, in the measure of the excellence, or the reverse, of the silent teaching of his works; and therefore it is that he should take undeviating care to let "all his ends be God's and his country's."

With equal propriety and elegance that profound archæologist, M. Beulé, perpetual secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts at Paris, has sketched the happiness which attends the artists to whose care may be confided the creation of monuments of art of all kinds worthy of a great and free country. In an imaginary dialogue between Phidias and Alcamenes, the scene being laid in the studio of the former, he makes him paint in glowing terms the temples and other edifices by the erection of which he proposed that the Greeks should celebrate at once the triumphs of their arts, philosophy, and arms. "Heureux," exclaims Alcamenes to whom his share as a sculptor in the creation of such monuments had not been as yet revealed, "heureux les architectes qui suffiront à peine à tant d'entreprises!" To which Phidias is made to reply, "Non moins heureux les statuaires et les peintres, car c'est pour eux que les architectes travaillent! A mesure que les monuments s'acheveront, vous les couvrirez de sculptures et de couleurs brillants; vous y tracerez l'histoire des hommes et celle des dieux. Plus puissants que les poetes, vous donnerez la vie à tout ce