the orator in bronze, found in Pompeii, which has the name sculptured on the base. It will be observed how remarkably the under lip retreats below and within the upper, which appears almost like malformation, and accounted (to my fancy at least) for the difficulty he found in articulation. It is the mouth of a man you would almost expect to stutter; and there is the peculiar droop of the ears mentioned by authors.

The next piece of sculpture that interested me most was the Hermaphrodite (Borghese), and is accounted, I believe, by the best judges, to be one of the most finished and beautiful specimens of this subject that have been discovered. Certainly it is a very surprising incorporation of the graces of the youth of both sexes. One is lost in wonder how art could impart to cold rigid stone such an appearance of softness palpable. We have a high authority for the merit of this statue. Winkleman is of opinion that it is, beyond all doubt, the work of Polycles. It was discovered in

the beginning of the seventeenth century, near the baths of Dioclesian.

To do what I feel to be justice to the fighting Gladiator, would require the power of him who described him dying. Whether Greek or Roman, done by Phidias or Michael Angelo, as some will have it, it must be seen to enable one to form any idea of the living energy with which every muscle is exerted, and to which the whole performance lends force in all its details. The attitude combines a twofold movement, warding and striking. With his eye steadily and resolutely fixed on his adversary, the left arm is raised above his head to receive the coming blow, while the right is drawn back in the very act of inflicting revenge. the sinews and muscles are strained to the utmost; and, from the eager expression of the countenance down to the swollen veins of the foot, it is one intensity of effort, and the whole action so thrown, as it were, into the same instant of time, that the spectator involuntarily sympathizes with his perilous predicament.

All

There has been a great variety of opinions, whether this sculpture be really Greek; but all the best authorities, I believe, have voted in the affirmative. It is supposed to be one of the four hundred statues which Nero imported from Greece to adorn his Aurea Domus, and was found in Antium in the ruins of the same imperial palace where the Apollo was discovered a century before—just the sort of company in which we might expect to find such a performance. Noscitur à sociis.

The Louvre contains, at present, notwithstanding the dilapidations of Blucher, not less than six hundred statues, busts, and reliefs, and twelve hundred paintings, open every day for the benefit of artists and amateurs, and the amusement of the public. On Sunday it is filled to overflowing with all classes, who appear to me to take as much interest in viewing and criticising, as if they were all amateurs of virtû. A good deal of it, I verily believe, is talk, little better perhaps than the author has been indulging for the last half hour.

It is, perhaps, not generally known, that the

celebrated David, whose bust occupies a conspicuous place in the gallery of paintings, voted for the decapitation of Louis XVI. At least the royal family may be presumed unacquainted with this part of the history of the artist; or more likely it is their wisdom to appear ignorant, for David is a prodigious favourite with the lower classes: and not the less so for the character of his politics in the days of the revolution, and his attachment to Napoleon.

CHAP. II.

POPULAR EDUCATION.

THOUGH at the risk of tiring my reader with the repetition of a tale that has been told, not thrice, but perhaps three hundred times, I shall solicit his permission to bestow some desultory notice on the popular education of this country; as it may suggest some hints not beneath the attention of those to whom the consideration of the subject belongs among ourselves. When we reflect on the peculiar facilities of access to books, lectures, museums, cabinets, which Paris affords to all classes gratis, we have, I think, a ready solution, why the French community at large are so much advanced in civilization and refinement before any other country in the world. With so mature an experiment before our eyes, why then should we not adopt some