school of Phidias, and of the wise administration of Pericles." Precisely when the war of words over these magnificent antiques begun I am not able to say, but one of the first who upraised his voice was a young Englishman of twentythree, who was travelling in Greece, and writing poetry. He had written a volume of youthful stuff, which a great Review struck at, and a satire which run amuck at the great Review, its aiders and abettors, and most of the British writers of the day. Now he was writing poetry, satirical, foolish poetry, and noble poetry of travel and reflection. Hear him rave in his "Curse of Minerva,” whom he supposes speaking in the shadow of her Parthenon : "Lo! here, despite of war and wasting fire, I saw successive tyrannies expire. 'Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth, Survey this vacant, violated fane; Recount the relics torn that yet remain : These Cecrops placed, this Pericles adorned, That Adrian reared when drooping Science mourned. Know Alaric and Elgin did the rest. That all may learn from whence the plunderer came, The insulted wall sustains his hated name; For Elgin's fame thus grateful Pallas pleads, The Gothic monarch and the Pictish peer; That pleasant line which rhymes so imperfectly with "Goth" was originally still more pleasant : "Hell sends a paltry Scotchman worse than both." The notes to this tender poem are charmingly urbane. Mr. West, who in the verse is a "feeble dotard," is sneered 66 at for confessing the truth that he was a mere tyro in art," and poor Crib is sadly puzzled with the Marbles, and asks if Elgin House is not a stone shop? This foolish nonsense was printed anonymously in a thin pamphlet in 1812, and never was inserted among the works of this noble poet until after his death. While he was writing this he was writing a poem about an imaginary wanderer like himself, whom Shelley in his Adonais characterized as the Pilgrim of Eternity, and in this great poem he returned to the charge. His pilgrim, who is musing in Athens, demands "But who, of all the plunderers of yon fane The last, the worst, dull spoiler, who was he? Thy free-born men should spare what once was free, But most the modern Pict's ignoble boast, To rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared; Cold as the crags upon his native coast, His mind as barren and his heart as hard, Is he whose head conceived, whose hand prepared, Aught to displace Athena's poor remains. Her sons too weak the sacred shrine to guard, Yet felt some portion of their mother's pains, And never knew till then the weight of Despot's chains!" When Lord Byron returned to England he published this poem, and awoke one morning and found himself famous. His was a splendid, fiery genius; he was the greatest elemental force in English poetry since Marlow; but he was ignorant of many things, notably of Art, for which he cared little, and of which he knew nothing, though he wrote beautifully about it, when it came to him in the form of the dandy Apollo Belvedere, and the adorable Venus di Medici. Thus wrote one poet on the Elgin Marbles, and the gentleman who saved them from destruction,-Thomas Bruce Elgin, Lord Elgin, descendant of Robert Bruce. Four years after the publication of. "Childe Harold," a young man of twenty, who had studied medicine, and taken to writing sonnets, a friend of Haydon's, went to see the Elgin Marbles, then the property of the English nation. He has tried to tell us how they affected him : 66 My spirit is too weak; mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, This struggle for utterance he sent to Haydon, with a sonnet addressed to him: Haydon ! forgive me that I cannot speak Think, too, that all these numbers should be thine; Of their star in the East, and gone to worship them !" We shall see another sonnet of his in the letters that passed between him and Haydon, and a couple of careless little lyrics, never before printed, to my knowledge. Not a line that ever came from his pen but is worthy of preservation. "The glory that was Greece," the grandeur of the Elgin Marbles is imperishable in his last work, a fragment like the Marbles, the greatest poem since Paradise Lost, divine "Hyperion." When the reader comes to the sonnet in the Letters, he will note a curious hiatus in the thirteenth line. Why was it left, and who can fill it properly? The three persons shadowed forth in the first eight lines are Wordsworth, Hunt, and Haydon, and I think they should be summed up in the hiatus thus: "Nature, Freedom, Art." No English painter, I imagine, was ever so be-sung as Haydon. Hunt blessed and approved him, John Hamilton Reynolds saw in him the saviour of Art, and kindly Miss Mitford shed poetic tears. I have not seen Hunt's effusions, nor Miss Mitford's. A greater than any of these wrote in the same year (annus mirabilis) a sonnet of which Haydon was proud, as he should have been. Here is what Wordsworth said to Haydon : "High is our calling, Friend! Creative Art, Faith in the whispers of the lowly Muse, The personality of Haydon and the effect of his work upon the minds of his contemporaries would be a fine subject for an Essay. He was not taken at his own estimate, except by his best friends, and perhaps not at all times by them, and his Art was openly derided, not merely by his militant brother artists, but by the world at large, including the wits and men of letters. He figures in that wonderful piece of sarcasm and humor, Poole's "Little Pedlington,” which was written when his fortunes were at their worst, and held him and his Art up to undeserved ridicule. ("Little Pedlington," by the way, is filled with contemporary portraits, Jack Hobbleday being Poole's friend, Thomas Hill, the original Paul Pry, the Rev. Jonathan Jubb, one of the two Montgomeries, Miss Cripps, L. E. L. Dowlas, Bulwer, |