Doubtless, modern breeding has wrought a difference in the animal.
Flaxman, in his outlines, seems to have imitated these classic steeds of
the Parthenon, and thus has produced horses that always appeared to me
affected and diminutively monstrous.
From the classic sculpture, I passed through an Assyrian room, where the
walls are lined with great slabs of marble sculptured in bas-relief with
scenes in the life of Senmacherib, I believe; very ugly, to be sure, yet
artistically done in their own style, and in wonderfully good
preservation. Indeed, if the chisel had cut its last stroke in them
yesterday, the work could not be more sharp and distinct. In glass
cases, in this room, are little relics and scraps of utensils, and a
great deal of fragmentary rubbish, dug up by Layard in his researches,--
things that it is hard to call anything but trash, but which yet may be
of great significance as indicating the modes of life of a long-past
race. I remember nothing particularly just now, except some pieces of
broken glass, iridescent with certainly the most beautiful hues in the
world,--indescribably beautiful, and unimaginably, unless one can
conceive of the colors of the rainbow, and a thousand glorious sunsets,
and the autumnal forest-leaves of America, all condensed upon a little
fragment of a glass cup,--and that, too, without becoming in the least
glaring or flagrant, but mildly glorious, as we may fancy the shifting
lines of an angel's wing may be.
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