to
disgust;) it happened that one or two gentlemen joined our
party--young men too, and classical scholars, who perhaps thought it
fine to affect a well-bred _nonchalance_, a fashionable disdain for
all romance and enthusiasm, and amused themselves with _quizzing_ our
guide, insulting the gloom, the grandeur, and the silence around them,
with loud impertinent laughter at their own poor jokes; and I was
obliged to listen, sad and disgusted, to their empty and tasteless and
misplaced flippancy. The young barefooted friar, with his dark
lanthorn, and his black eyes flashing from under his cowl, who acted
as our cicerone, was in picturesque unison with the scene; but--more
than one murder having lately been committed among the labyrinthine
recesses of the ruin, the government has given orders that every
person entering after dusk should be attended by a guard of two
soldiers. These fellows therefore necessarily walked close after our
heels, smoking, spitting, and spluttering German. Such were my
companions, and such was my _cortege_. I returned home vowing that
while I remained at Rome, nothing should induce me to visit the
Coliseum by moonlight again.

To-day I was standing before the Laocoon with Rogers, who remarked
that the absence of all parental feeling in the aspect of Laocoon, his
self-engrossed indifference to the sufferings of his children (which
is noticed and censured, I think, by Dr. Moore) adds to the pathos, if
properly considered, by giving the strongest possible idea of that
physical agony which the sculptor intended to represent. It may be so,
and I thought there was both truth and _tacte_ in the poet's
observation.

The Perseus of Canova does not please me so well as his Paris; there
is more simplicity and repose in the latter statue, less of that
theatrical air which I think is the common fault of Canova's figures.

It is absolutely necessary to look at the Perseus before you look at
the Apollo, in order to do the former justice. I have gazed with
admiration at the Perseus for minutes together, then walked from it to
the Apollo and felt instantaneously, but could not have expressed, the
difference. The first is indeed a beautiful statue, the latter
"breathes the flame with which 'twas wrought," as if the sculptor had
left a portion of his own soul within the marble to half animate his
glorious creation. The want of this informing life is strongly felt in
the Perseus, when contemplated after the Apol