Give me the Canova! The Apollo, too! --is a copy
--there can be no doubt of it --blind fool that I am, who cannot
behold the boasted inspiration of the Apollo! I cannot help --pity me!
--I cannot help preferring the Antinous. Was it not Socrates who
said that the statuary found his statue in the block of marble? Then
Michael Angelo was by no means original in his couplet --
'Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto
Che tin marmo solo in se non circonscriva.'"
It has been, or should be remarked, that, in the manner of the true
gentleman, we are always aware of a difference from the bearing of the
vulgar, without being at once precisely able to determine in what such
difference consists. Allowing the remark to have applied in its full
force to the outward demeanor of my acquaintance, I felt it, on that
eventful morning, still more fully applicable to his moral temperament
and character. Nor can I better define that peculiarity of spirit
which seemed to place him so essentially apart from all other human
beings, than by calling it a habit of intense and continual thought,
pervading even his most trivial actions --intruding upon his moments
of dalliance --and interweaving itself with his very flashes of
merriment --like adders which writhe from out the eyes of the grinning
masks in the cornices around the temples of Persepolis.
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