Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - The Roman Emperors in Marble - 1. Julius Caesar and Augustus
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
2 ROMAN DA YS.
the Corso. The Englishmen who idle there in troops,
would maybe recognize beneath his toga a kinsman of
their own Pelham. The young Romans would greet him
as the model of their dreams. The latest shade of the
Parisian dandy—he who educated in the school of the Jes-
uits is beginning to drive out the second empire’s un-
successful pattern of male refinement, the " petit creve,"
—would stare wonderingly after the heathen ; whose fea-
tures, radiant with genius, should gain heightened relief
from the empty, scholastically pious, but not unpreten-
tious look, peculiar to these young Frenchmen, and in
which one reads as plainly as in an advertisement : Je
ne sais rien ; done je siiis Jiomme du monde.
The colossal statue of Julius Caesar in the conserva-
tors’ palace, is an antique work, probably from the time
of the first empire, but by no means a master-work. That
the leader of Rome’s golden youth cannot be even faintly
discerned here, we need bestow no thought upon ; for it
is the aged emperor and tyrant of the world, not the young
patrician, whom the sculptor wished to represent. But
here, so much is wanting that we believed inseparable
from Caesar. Before us stands a military chief in full
armor, in whose hard, bony, elderly face never gleamed
the most distant flash of that genius which with the fires
of lightning split asunder the hosts of Gaul and Ger-
many, crushed the warlike fame of Pompey, overthrew
the Republic, and annihilated the remnants of old Ro-
man virtue. Not a glimpse of that affability which, in
the old Caesar as in the young, took captive an adversary;
or of that sense of beauty which made him an artist
among historians and orators ; or of that magnanimity
which, with human nobleness, gilded the selfishness of a
fiend. Is this the man who by the poetic strength of
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
