r-creed, which
has had so much prejudice to overcome. The beauty and expression of
ancient sculpture, whether for outside or inside decoration, were
greatly heightened by this tinting. In cases where it was not
employed, Nature herself became the artist, and has burnt into the
marble statue or the marble pillar the warm hue of life; and the
rusty, withered look of the ruins, over which ages of change have
passed, touches us more than the pure white marble structure could
have done in the pride of its splendour, and appeals to the tenderest
sympathies of beings who see in themselves, and in all around them,
the tokens of death and decay. The graceful Corinthian pillars of the
Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Forum, the three surviving
witnesses of its former grandeur, are all the more suggestive to us by
reason of the russet hues with which time has stained the snowy purity
of their Parian marble; and it is difficult to say, as some one has
shrewdly remarked, how much of the touching effect which the drooping
figure of the Dying Gladiator of the Capitol produces upon us may be
attributed to its discoloration, and to the absence of the dainty
spotlessness of the original Greek marble. That grime of ages "lends a
sort of warmth, and suggests flesh and blood," so that the suffering
is not a cold and frosty incrustation, with which we have nothing to
do, but a real tragedy going on before our eyes, by which our
sympathies are most deeply moved. In a dry, hot climate, like that of
Rome, there are no tender tones of vegetable colouring, no moss or
lichen touches of gold or gray or green to relieve the bare cold
surface, and the rigid formal outlines of the marble; but out of the
sky itself the marble gathers the soft shadows and the rich brown hues
that reconcile its strange, unnatural whiteness with the homely ways
of the familiar earth. That wonderful violet sky of Rome would glorify
the meanest object. The common red brick glows in its translucent
atmosphere like a ruby; and the russet defaced column, as it comes out
against its vivid light, becomes luminous like a pillar of gold. Brick
and marble are of equal aesthetic value in this magic city, in which
the uncomely parts and materials have a more abundant comeliness by
reason of the medium through which they are seen. Over all things
lingers permanently the transfiguring glow that comes to northern
lands only in the afternoon. In that land it is always afternoon; the
ru