Prose Works - 2 Author:Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume: 2 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1888 Original Publisher: Chatto and Windus Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com ... more »where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: ESSAY ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS, AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS. a fragment. j)HE period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle, is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself, or with reference to the effects which it has produced upon the subsequent destinies of civilised man, the most memorable in the history of the world. What was the combination of moral and political circumstances which produced so unparalleled a progress during that period in literature and the arts ; -- why that progress, so rapid and so sustained, so soon received a check, and became retrograde, -- are problems left to the wonder and conjecture of posterity. The wrecks and fragments of those subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fiffe statue, obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of the whole. Their very language -- a type of the understandings of which it was the creation and the image -- - in variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness, excels every other language of the western world. Their sculptures are such as we, in our presumption, assume to be the models of ideal truth and beauty, and to whichno artist of modern times can produce forms in any degree comparable. Their paintings, according to Pliny and Pausanias, were full of delicacy and harmony; and some even were powerfully pathetic, so as to awaken, like tender music or tragic poetry, the most overwhelming emotions. We are accustomed to conceive the painters of the sixteenth century, as those who have brought their art to the highest perfecti...« less