tou at heart. Never purely
classic, never frankly modern. Louis XIV. would have loved him better
than Bernini.

* * *

If Alexander had believed himself a bubble of gas instead of the son of
a god, he would not have changed the face of the world. Negation cannot
be the parent of heroism, though it will produce an indifference that
counterfeits it not ill, since Petronius died quite as serenely as ever
did the martyrs of the Church.

* * *

Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the
influence of its begetting. Augustus could have Horace and Ovid; he
could never have had Homer and Milton.

* * *

I do not think with you. Talent takes the mark of its generation; genius
stamps its time with its own impression. Virgil had the sentiment of an
united Italy.

* * *

Tell her that past she thinks so great was only very like the Serapis
which men worshipped so many ages in Theophilis, and which, when the
soldiers struck it down at last, proved itself only a hollow Colossus
with a colony of rats in its head that scampered right and left.

* * *

Falconet struck the death-note of the plastic arts when he said, "Our
marbles have _almost_ colour." That is just where we err. We are
incessantly striving to make Sculpture at once a romance-writer and a
painter, and of course she loses all dignity and does but seem the jay
in borrowed plumes of sable. Conceits are altogether out of keeping with
marble. They suit a cabinet painting or a piece of china. Bernini was
the first to show the disease when he veiled the head of his Nile to
indicate that the source was unknown.

* * *

Whosoever has any sort of fame has lighted a beacon that is always
shining upon him, and can never more return into the cool twilight of
privacy even when most he wishes. It is of these retributions--some call
them compensations--of which life is full.

* * *

Men have forgotten the virile Pyrrhic dance, and have become incapable
of the grace of the Ionian; their only dance is a Danse Macabre, and
they are always hand in hand with a skeleton.

* * *

By night Rome is still a city for the gods; the shadows veil its wounds,
the lustre silvers all its stones; its silence is haunted as no other
silence is; if you have faith, there where the dark gloss of the laurel
brushes the