"I'd rather have butter on my bread than marble, but I must confess that for sculpture it is very poor stuff, as you say." "It is indeed," said Phidias.

"For practice it's all right to use butter, but for exhibition purposes--bah!" Here Phidias, to show his contempt for butter as raw material in sculpture, seized a wooden toothpick, and with it modelled a beautiful head of Minerva out of the pat that stood upon the small plate at his side, and before Burns could interfere had spread the chaste figure as thinly as he could upon a piece of bread, which he tossed to the shade of a hungry dog that stood yelping on the river-bank.
"Heavens!" cried Burns.

"Imperious Caesar dead and turned to bricks is as nothing to a Minerva carved by Phidias used to stay the hunger of a ravening cur." "Well, it's the way I feel," said Phidias, savagely.
"I think you are a trifle foolish to be so eternally vexed about it," said Homer, soothingly.

"Of course you feel badly, but, after all, what's the use?
You must know that the mortals would pay more for one of your statues than they would for a specimen of any modern sculptor's art; yes, even if yours were modelled in wine-jelly and the other fellow's in pure gold.

So why repine ?" "You'd feel the same way if poets did a similarly vulgar thing," retorted Phidias; "you know you would.