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has left such bright examples in poetry, would not have spurned the idea of belonging to the servum pecus in any other of the sister arts? Yet is there hardly any thing extant, I believe, of Roman sculpture, very much above mediocrity. It strikes me there must be some other cause operating as a restraint upon national genius, not to be resolved on any of the commonly received principles. Let it be explained why England has never produced one original air worth a farthing in comparison of those in which the other three integral parts of the kingdom abound. How is it that contiguous countries, in constant habits of intercourse with each other, and who have access to the same means of improvement, and the same exemplars to copy, continue from age to age so essentially asunder in the scale of merit? I am convinced a great deal of undue, if not hurtful stress, is laid upon the study of models, and the maxim about devoting nights and days to the exemplaria Græca. Besides, have we not seen that the brightest geniuses the world ever produced,

were the most remarkable for their independence on them?

In my very humble judgment, an exemplar in any of the fine arts can only be of use, so far as it helps us by a shorter road to understand the principles of that art, and stirs up emulation to originate, not to copy. But the danger is, that we slide insensibly into a habit of following the letter of the details; and a passive habit can only produce a slave instead of a master. If we would propitiate the Muse to any purpose of producing great things ourselves, we must get rid of this idolatry, and invoke her creative power upon our own proper spirits. It is within myself I must look for the model, if I would soar with wings of my

own.

Tentanda via est quâ me quoque possum

Tollere humo, victorque virûm volitare per ora.

"The Greeks," says a late writer, “had no gallery of Egyptian sculpture; and if they had, we should not now have the Venus de Medicis and Apollo. The Romans, on the contrary,

were overwhelmed with Greek originals, and what did they produce?" In fact, the genius of Greece was trained in the only school where it will ever learn to produce great things-the school of Nature. The Olympic games, exhibiting the feats of wrestlers and gladiators, where the anatomy of expression could be studied in its full force and effect, supplied the only models they knew, or would know; and these, aided by an unlimited demand for their works, and the high prize of fame, the estimation of which may be guessed at, when so much was encountered to gain a chaplet of laurel, did what nothing else but a concurrence of the same causes will ever do again.

The unbounded veneration of our Flaxman for the Greek school, led him to suspect that even the Apollo Belvedere might be a copy; and nothing could more fully express the extent of this veneration than the reason he assigns for the suspicion; "because," said he, “it appears to me possible to make another as good." Let it not be supposed that the danger of an injudicious use of a model, is to be obviated by any

excellence in the original. So far otherwise, it may much more frequently prove the cause of failure. I am satisfied that it was the utter despair of being able to make any thing like an approach to the miracles of the Greek chisel that mainly repressed the emulation of their successors, and made them content with the glory of following, at a humble distance, the excellencies which they never would allow themselves to hope could be equalled.

The gallery of the Louvre, though dismantled of many of its most valuable paintings, still contains a great number of the very best schools. But to antique statuary I own my preference rises above any thing I can feel for painting. When we can assure ourselves of the authority both of the sculptor and his handiwork, the predilection I think not difficult to account for. Those classic recollections, which are entwined with our earliest devotion for the great names of antiquity, are brought into full play, in heightening the interest we take alike in the artist, the subject, and the performance. To the halo shed round these sacred relics,

there is added the no less imperishable fame of him by whose art these names are a second time illustrated and immortalized. To think that I behold the identical performance of a Phidias or a Praxiteles, and besides, that I am looking on the correct likeness, the figure, the lineaments, the very person of Demosthenes, Euripides, Eschylus, rivets one to the spot. It "makes us marble with too much conceiving," while lost in this reverie on the mighty dead, in whose venerated presence we stand. It is as if we passed back over the gulf which time had interposed, and were admitted to their society; and in all this the mind is so willingly accessory to its own delusion, that it almost forgets it is a delusion: "we become as it were a part of what has been." Of the authenticity of the two heads of Demosthenes in this Museum, there can be no doubt. They were found, one in Greece and the other at Antium, and are as like as if they were reflections of each other. But it so happens that we are able to put the matter beyond all reasonable question, by their close resemblance to a Hermes of

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