t a convenient distance--it is here
only they can conceive and execute those works which are formed from
the _beau-ideal_; but it is not here they meet with patronage: the
most beautiful things I have seen at the various studj have all been
executed for English, German, and Russian noblemen. The names I heard
most frequently were those of the Dukes of Bedford and Devonshire,
Prince Esterhazy, and the King of England.

Canova has been accused of a want of simplicity, and of giving a too
voluptuous expression to some of his figures: with all my admiration
of his genius, I confess the censure just. It is particularly
observable in the Clori svegliata (the Nymph awakened by Love), the
Cupid and Psyche, for Prince Yousouppoff, the Endymion, the Graces,
and some others.

In some of Thorwaldson's works there is exquisite grace, simplicity,
and expression: the Shepherd Boy, the Adonis, the Jason, and the Hebe,
have a great deal of antique spirit. I did not like the colossal
Christ which the sculptor has just finished in clay: it is a proof
that bulk alone does not constitute sublimity: it is deficient in
dignity, or rather in _divinity_.

At Rodolf Schadow's, I was most pleased by the Cupid and the
Filatrice. His Cupid is certainly the most beautiful Cupid I ever saw,
superior, I think, both to Canova's and to Thorwaldson's. The
Filatrice, though so exquisitely natural and graceful, a little
disappointed me; I had heard much of it, and had formed in my own
imagination an idea different and superior to what I saw. This
beautiful figure has repose, simplicity, nature, and grace, but I felt
a _want_--the want of some internal sentiment: for instance, if,
instead of watching the rotation of her spindle with such industrious
attention, the Filatrice had looked careless, or absent, or pensive,
or disconsolate, (like Faust's Margaret at her spinning-wheel,) she
would have been more interesting--but not perhaps what the sculptor
intended to represent.

Schadow is ill, but we were admitted by his order into his private
study; we saw there the Bacchante, which he has just finished in clay,
and which is to emulate or rival Canova's Dansatrice. He has been at
work upon a small but beautiful figure of a piping Shepherd-boy, which
is just made out: beside it lay Virgil's Eclogues, and his spectacles
were between the leaves.[J]

Almost every thing I saw at Max Laboureur's struck me as vapid and
finikin. There were some pretty groups, b