re
temperate reaction: "On peut ... gouter mediocrement le melodrame, sans
meconnaitre pour cela les reelles qualites du groupe. La composition est
d'une structure irreprochable, d'une harmonie de lignes qui defie toute
critique. Le torse du Laocoon trahit une science du nu pen commune"
(_Hist. de la Sculp. Grecque_, 1897, ii. 550, 551).]

[pv] {446} ----_the writhing boys_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[pw] _Shackles its living rings, and_----.--[MS. M. erased.]

[527] [In his description of the Apollo Belvidere, Byron follows the
traditional theory of Montorsoli, the pupil of Michael Angelo, who
restored the left hand and right forearm of the statue. The god, after
his struggle with the python, stands forth proud and disdainful, the
left hand holding a bow, and the right hand falling as of one who had
just shot an arrow. The discovery, in 1860, of a bronze statuette in the
Stroganoff Collection at St. Petersburg, which holds something like an
aegis and a mantle in the left hand, suggested to Stephani a second
theory, that the Belvidere Apollo was a copy of a statue of Apollo
Boedromios, an _ex-voto_ offering on the rout of the Gauls when they
attacked Delphi (B.C. 278). To this theory Furtwaengler at one time
assented, but subsequently came to the conclusion that the Stroganoff
bronze was a forgery. His present contention is that the left hand held
a bow, as Montorsoli imagined, whilst the right grasped "a branch of
laurel, of which the leaves are still visible on the trunk which the
copyist added to the bronze original." The Apollo Belvidere is, he
concludes, a copy of the Apollo Alexicacos of Leochares (fourth century
B.C.), which stood in the Cerameicos at Athens. M. Maxime Collignon, who
utters a word of warning as to the undue depreciation of the statue by
modern critics, adopts Furtwaengler's later theory (_Masterpieces of
Ancient Greek Sculpture_, by A. Furtwaengler, 1895, ii. 405, _sq._).]

[528] {447} [The "delicate" beauty of the statue recalled the features
of a lady whom he had once thought of making his wife. "The Apollo
Belvidere," he wrote to Moore (May 12, 1817), "is the image of Lady
Adelaide Forbes. I think I never saw such a likeness."]

[529] [It is probable that lines 1-4 of this stanza contain an allusion
to a fact related by M. Pinel, in his work, _Sur l'Insanite_, which
Milman turned to account in his _Belvidere Apollo_, a Newdigate Prize
Poem of 1812--

"Beauteous as vision seen in dreamy slee