ed from a full heart; but
although he secured the restitution of the two hundred and ninety-four
statues which Napoleon had taken from the Villa Albani, Cardinal
Giuseppe Albani, an unworthy successor of the great collector, sold all
but one in order to avoid the cost of their return transportation. The
poor peripatetic philosophers, emperors, empresses, gods, and goddesses
trooped on like uneasy ghosts, not a few of them finding shelter in the
Glyptothek at Munich.

The one piece of sculpture reserved from this fate of expatriation, and
reinstated in triumph in its old position in the salon at the left of
the main gallery of the villa, it is hardly necessary to state, was the
relief of _Antinous_. Here it remains and lures us, according to our
bent, to study or to dream of the life which its original so
passionately lived, and instinctively we search for some statue of a
woman of equal charm to link with it in our dreams.

Ebers thought he had found it in the loveliest of the nine muses which
Ligorio discovered in the theatre of Hadrian's villa. In 1689 Velasquez
was sent to Rome to acquire them for Philip V. Eight of them may still
be seen in the Museum of Madrid, but the ninth muse, Urania, from which
the d'Estes could not then be induced to part, is now in the Sala delle
Muse of the Vatican. This is the Urania which Ebers imagines to have
been carved by the young Alexandrine sculptor, Pollux, from the Selene
whom we are told Antinous vainly loved.

The face is very winsome and the romance might satisfy us, but for a
portrait-statue of a genuine Selene, found by Ligorio near the palazzita
and now in the casino of the Villa Albani.

[Illustration: _Alinari_

Urania

Museum of the Vatican]

It is catalogued as _Iris Descending_, but mistakenly, says Monsieur
Guzman, for Iris was invariably represented with wings, and this
graceful figure is wingless, a torch in hand, and floating downward so
gently that her motion scarcely agitates her soft drapery. Authorities
are now agreed that the lovely figure represents Selene, the
moon-goddess, who, enamoured with Endymion, kept tryst with him in his
dreams, and a beautiful "Sleeping Youth" was actually discovered beneath
the descending Selene, thus completing the composition and verifying the
assumption as to its subject. That the recumbent youth was not at once
recognised as intended to represent Endymion is due to the inability of
the scientific mind to grasp more th