One of the most offensive passages of the treatise is, no doubt, the unjust debasement of the modern sculptors beneath the ancients. These latter times are possessed of several Glycons in muscular heroic figures, and, in tender youthful female bodies, of more than one Praxiteles. Michael Angelo, Algardi, and Sluter, whose genius embellished Berlin, produced muscular bodies, ——_Invicti membra Glyconis,_ Hor. in a style rivalling that of Glycon himself; and in delicacy the Greeks are perhaps even outdone by _Bernini_, _Fiammingo_, _Le Gros_, _Rauchmüller_, _Donner_. The unskilfulness of the ancients, in shaping children, is agreed upon by our artists, who, I suppose, would for imitation choose a Cupid of Fiammingo rather than of Praxiteles himself. The story of M. Angelo’s placing a Cupid of his own by the side of an antique one, in order to inform our times of the superiority of the ancient art, is of no weight here: for no work of Michael Angelo can bring us so near perfection as Nature herself. I think it no hyperbole to advance, that Fiammingo, like a new Prometheus, produced creatures which art had never seen before him. For, if from almost all the children on ancient gems[36] and reliefs[37], we may form a conclusion of the art itself, it wanted the true expression of childhood, as looser forms, more milkiness, and unknit bones. Faults which, from the epoch of Raphael, all children laboured under, till the appearance of _Francis Quesnoy_, called Fiammingo, whose children having the advantages of suitable innocence and nature, became models to the following artists, as in youthful bodies Apollo and Antinous are: an honour which _Algardi_, his contemporary, may be allowed to share. Their models in clay are, by our artists, esteemed superior to all the antique marble children; and an artist of genius and talents assured me, that during a stay of seven years at Vienna, he saw not one copy taken from an ancient Cupid in that academy. Neither do I know on what singular idea of beauty, the ancient artists founded their custom, of hiding the foreheads of their children and youths with hair. Thus a Cupid was represented by Praxiteles[38]; thus a Patroclus, in a picture mentioned by Philostratus[39]: and there is no statue nor bust, no gem nor coin of Antinous, in which we do not find him thus dressed. Hence, perhaps, that gloom, that melancholy, with which all the heads of this favourite of Hadrian are marked. Is not there in a free open brow more nobleness and sublimity? and does not _Bernini_ seem to have been better acquainted with beauty than the ancients, when he removed the over-shadowing locks from the forehead of young Lewis XIV. whose bust he was then executing? “Your Majesty, said Bernini, is King, and may with confidence shew your brow to all the world.” From that time King and court dressed their hair à la Bernini[40].