m hall to hall with a weary and heavy
heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the
frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite
Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones."

The plastic sense was not strong in Hawthorne; there can be no better
proof of it than his curious aversion to the representation of the
nude in sculpture. This aversion was deep-seated; he constantly
returns to it, exclaiming upon the incongruity of modern artists
making naked figures. He apparently quite failed to see that nudity is
not an incident, or accident, of sculpture, but its very essence and
principle; and his jealousy of undressed images strikes the reader as
a strange, vague, long-dormant heritage of his straight-laced Puritan
ancestry. Whenever he talks of statues he makes a great point of the
smoothness and whiteness of the marble--speaks of the surface of the
marble as if it were half the beauty of the image; and when he
discourses of pictures, one feels that the brightness or dinginess of
the frame is an essential part of his impression of the work--as he
indeed somewhere distinctly affirms. Like a good American, he took
more pleasure in the productions of Mr. Thompson and Mr. Brown, Mr.
Powers and Mr. Hart, American artists who were plying their trade in
Italy, than in the works which adorned the ancient museums of the
country. He suffered greatly from the cold, and found little charm in
the climate, and during the weeks of winter that followed his arrival
in Rome, he sat shivering by his fire and wondering why he had come
to such a land of misery. Before he left Italy he wrote to his
publisher--"I bitterly detest Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it
farewell for ever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin
that has happened to it, from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact,
I wish the very site had been obliterated before I ever saw it."
Hawthorne presents himself to the reader of these pages as the last of
the old-fashioned Americans--and this is the interest which I just now
said that his compatriots would find in his very limitations. I do not
mean by this that there are not still many of his fellow-countrymen
(as there are many natives of every land under the sun,) who are more
susceptible of being irritated than of being soothed by the influences
of the Eternal City. What I mean is that an American of equal value
with Hawthorne, an American of equal ge