e, the maimed
statues, the bas-reliefs in fragments, even the isolated limbs--whether
the divine arm of a nymph or the sinewy, shaggy thigh of a satyr--evoke
the splendour of a civilisation full of light, grandeur, and strength.

* Best known in England, through Byron's lines, as the
Dying Gladiator, though that appellation is certainly
erroneous.--Trans.

At last Narcisse brought Pierre back into the Gallery of the Candelabra,
three hundred feet in length and full of fine examples of sculpture.
"Listen, my dear Abbe," said he. "It is scarcely more than four o'clock,
and we will sit down here for a while, as I am told that the Holy Father
sometimes passes this way to go down to the gardens. It would be really
lucky if you could see him, perhaps even speak to him--who can tell? At
all events, it will rest you, for you must be tired out."

Narcisse was known to all the attendants, and his relationship to
Monsignor Gamba gave him the run of almost the entire Vatican, where he
was fond of spending his leisure time. Finding two chairs, they sat down,
and the _attache_ again began to talk of art.

How astonishing had been the destiny of Rome, what a singular, borrowed
royalty had been hers! She seemed like a centre whither the whole world
converged, but where nothing grew from the soil itself, which from the
outset appeared to be stricken with sterility. The arts required to be
acclimatised there; it was necessary to transplant the genius of
neighbouring nations, which, once there, however, flourished
magnificently. Under the emperors, when Rome was the queen of the earth,
the beauty of her monuments and sculpture came to her from Greece. Later,
when Christianity arose in Rome, it there remained impregnated with
paganism; it was on another soil that it produced Gothic art, the
Christian Art _par excellence_. Later still, at the Renascence, it was
certainly at Rome that the age of Julius II and Leo X shone forth; but
the artists of Tuscany and Umbria prepared the evolution, brought it to
Rome that it might thence expand and soar. For the second time, indeed,
art came to Rome from without, and gave her the royalty of the world by
blossoming so triumphantly within her walls. Then occurred the
extraordinary awakening of antiquity, Apollo and Venus resuscitated
worshipped by the popes themselves, who from the time of Nicholas V
dreamt of making papal Rome the equal of the imperial city. After the
precursors, so since