beauty of site, and the site of the city of Athens is one of the most beautiful in the world. It is interesting for those who have not seen it to remember its remarkable resemblance to the site of Edinburgh. In the centre of each city is a lofty rock, the castle-rock of Edinburgh corresponding to the Akropolis. The Calton Hill, although somewhat larger, corresponds more or less to the Areopagos. Arthur's Seat, overhanging the city, corresponds to Lukabettos. The port of Leith corresponds to the Peiraieus, and as we stand upon the great city rock in either case we look across the water to the opposite shore, the Firth of Forth taking the place of the Saronic Gulf, the islands of Inchcolm and Inchkeith the place of the larger islands of Aigina and Salamis, and the hills of Fifeshire and the West the place of the hills of the Peloponnese. Looking backward again, the hills of Pentelikos or the Pentlands close the view.

But when we turn to look at the architecture, except for the copy of the Parthenon, the resemblance ceases. Athens was crowded with beautiful buildings from end to end, wonderful in that perfection and restraint of their artistic conception which has never been surpassed.

Throughout the city were numbers of temples of magnificent proportion and consummate workmanship, represented for us now by a few columns of the temple of Olympic Zeus and the fairly complete temple of Hephaistos.

Dominating the city stood the grand rock of the Akropolis, approached by its exquisite gateway, the Propulaia, the triumph of the skill of Mnesikles, resplendent in the marvelous white marble of Pentelikos, and mounting guard, as it were, upon the bastion was the exquisite little gem, the temple of Athene Nike Apteros. Within the Gates toward the North was the graceful, picturesque Erectheion, a perfect example of the delicate Ionian style and, to crown all, on the South was the noble Doric Parthenon itself, the subtlety and refinement of whose construction puts into the shade as rude and coarse all the work of the world done at any other period.

But these things by no means exhaust the architectural wonders,-the theatres, choregic monuments, stoai, the agora, the palaistrai, the gymnasia, the stadion, the hospitals, the horologion, the prutaneion, the music or concert halls, the bouleuterion, and many others combined to make a city of beauty. Enter the

houses and the same love of beauty will be found. Notice the exquisite and chaste designs of their chairs, tables and bedsteads, such as only a Greek could produce. Not only was that so, but every common householdimplement was a work of art, over which, when any survive, the dealers wrangle to-day that we may put them in the place of honour in our galleries and drawing rooms, a fate to which our saucepans and gallipots and tinned meat cans and beer bottles are not likely ever to attain.

But come out into the street again and what do we find?-literally thousands and thousands of statues of incomparable loveliness, almost any one of which would be the greatest treasure of a national museum if possessed complete and uninjured today. Of these not a single complete work by a great master remains.

The number of the statues was actually as great, or nearly as great, as the number of the population, greater than the number likely to be in the streets or open spaces at one time. Let us try and imagine ourselves getting up tomorrow morning and coming down into the streets of London or of New York to find a number of statues greater than the

number of the people moving there. Then we shall realize what art in the daily life of a people means. It is difficult for the modern to realize this intense and all pervading love of the beautiful, but we find evidence of it everywhere, not only in Athens but throughout Greece. We notice Simonides, for example, in his verses on happiness praying first for health and then for beauty as the most desirable of all things. How many of our people would put beauty before wealth, for instance?

Similarly the women used to have statues of Narkissos or Huakinthos or Nireus (the most beautiful of the Greeks, after Achilles, at the siege of Troy) in their lying-in chambers in order that they might be the mothers of beautiful boys.

Or we may notice such an incident as the erection of a special monument at Plataia to Kallikrates, because he was the fairest of the Greeks who fell on that day.

A still more remarkable instance is recorded of the citizens of Egesta in Sicily who erected a monument to a certain Philip of Kroton, not a fellow citizen-and made offerings before it on account of his extreme beauty. We can hardly imagine the citizens of New York erecting a statue to some man

who visited the town because he happened to be exceptionally beautiful.

Beauty contests were quite common in Greece, as, for instance, the beauty contests by the river Alphaios instituted by Kypselos, king of Arkadia.

And what was perhaps the crowning event in the life of the Athenian Citizen? The great Pan-Athenaïc festival, which occurred once every four years in honour of Athene, the goddess of Athenai (Athens), when everything that took place seems to have been done with the main intention of producing something beautiful.

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God delights in that which is beautiful and good, they argued, and our lives to please Him must pursue the beautiful and the good. Most of all must this be so in the case of anything connected with religion and especially in this great central ceremony of Athenian religion, the Panathenaia. [/

The Greek may have been wrong, but that was his point of view; and the modern might even reconsider his own position.

Think of that wonderful festival with the athletic contests in which men displayed their beauty of limb, and the dancing contests where they displayed their beauty of move