e's mouth. Or did she believe the swerving, she must
have felt that Aurelian had the right, after all pain and wrong, to come
and claim the queen,--to say,--

"I did all this wrong _for_ you, and you were worth it."

The face (perhaps, with the present necessities of a catholicized Art,
its most important excellence) is not a Greek face, but a much farther
Oriental.

The bas-reliefs of Layard's Nineveh are not more characteristic,
national, faithful to the probable facts in that best aspect of facts
with which Art has to do.

As for the figure, none of those who from Roman studios have hitherto
sent us their work have ever given a juster idea of their advancement in
the understanding of the human anatomy. The bones of the right
metatarsus show as they would under the flesh of a queenly foot. The
right foot is the one flexed in Zenobia's walking, and that foot has
never been used to support the weight of burdens; it has gone bare
without being soiled. The shoulders perfectly carry the head, and no
anatomist could suggest a place where they might be bent or erected in
truer relative proportion to either of the feet. The dejection of the
right arm is a wonderful compromise between the valor of a queen who has
fought her last and best, and the grief of a woman who has no further
resource left to her womanliness.

Both arms, in their anatomy, in their truthfulness to the queenly
circumstances, may equally delight and challenge criticism. The chains
which the queen carries are smaller than we suspect a _Roman_ conqueror
put even upon a woman and a queen; but let that pass,--for they do not
hurt the harmony of the idea, and are simply a matter of detail, which
womanly sympathy might well have erred in since chivalric days, though
their adherence to actual truth would not have blemished the idea. At
all events, Zenobia holds them like a queen, so as not to hurt her. She
_will_ remember her glory.

The drapery of the statue is a subordinate matter; but that has been
attended to as true artists attend to even the least things which wait
on a great idea. The tassels of the robe have been chiselled by Miss
Hosmer's marble-cutter with a care which shows that the last as well as
the first part of the work went on under her womanly supervision. Every
fold of the robe, which must have been copied from the cast, falls and
swings before our eyes as the position demands. Grace and truth lie in
the least wrinkle of a garment which n