he sometimes worked too fast, and sometimes undertook what did not greatly inspire him; but when we reflect on the limited period of his artist-life, on the intrepid advancement of its incipient stages under the pressure of narrow means and comparative solitude, on the extraordinary progress, the culminating force, the numerous trophies, and the acknowledged triumphs of a life of labors, so patiently achieved, and suddenly cut off in mid career,--we cannot but recognize a consummate artist and the grandest promise yet vouchsafed to the cause of national Art. Shelley used to say that a Roman peasant is as good a judge of sculpture as the best academician or anatomist. It is this direct appeal, this elemental simplicity, which constitutes the great distinction and charm of the art. There is nothing evasive and mysterious; in dealing with form and expression through features and attitude, average observation is a reliable test. The same English poet was right in declaring that the Greek sculptors did not find their inspiration in the dissecting-room; yet upon no subject has criticism displayed greater insight on the one hand and pedantry on the other, than in the discussion of these very _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of antiquity. While Michel Angelo, who was at Rome when the Laocoön was discovered, hailed it as "the wonder of Art," and scholars identified the group with a famous one described by Pliny, Canova thought that the right arm of the father was not in its right position, and the other restorations in the work have all been objected to. Goethe recognized a profound sagacity in the artist: "If," he wrote, "we try to place the bite in some different position, the whole action is changed, and we find it impossible to conceive one more fitting; the situation of the bite renders necessary the whole action of the limbs";--and another critic says, "In the group of the Laocoön, the breast is expanded and the throat contracted to show that the agonies that convulse the frame are borne in silence." In striking contrast with such testimonies to the scientific truth to Nature in Grecian Art was the objection I once heard an American back-woods mechanic make to this celebrated work; he asked why the figures were seated in a row on a dry-goods box, and declared that the serpent was not of a size to coil round so small an arm as the child's, without breaking its vertebrae. So disgusted was Titian with the critical pedantry elicited by this group, that, in ridicule thereof, he painted a caricature,--three monkeys writhing in the folds of a little snake.