[48] The gilding amidst the ruins of Persepolis is still, according to Winckelmann, in high preservation. [49] “In the most broken fragment, the same great principle of life can be proved to exist, as in the most perfect figure,” is one of the observations of Mr Haydon on the Elgin Marbles. [50] “Every thing here breathes life, with a veracity, with an exquisite knowledge of art, but without the least ostentation or parade of it, which is concealed by consummate and masterly skill.”--Canova’s _Letter to the Earl of Elgin_. [51] Mr West, after expressing his admiration of the horse’s head in Lord Elgin’s collection of Athenian sculpture, thus proceeds:--“We feel the same, when we view the young equestrian Athenians, and, in observing them, we are insensibly carried on with the impression that they and their horses actually existed, as we see them, at the instant when they were converted into marble.”--West’s _Second Letter to Lord Elgin_. [52] Mr Flaxman thinks that sculpture has very greatly improved within these last twenty years, and that his opinion is not singular--because works of such prime importance as the Elgin Marbles could not remain in any country without a consequent improvement of the public taste, and the talents of the artist.--See the _Evidence given in reply to Interrogatories from the Committee on the Elgin Marbles_. [53] The Theseus and Ilissus, which are considered by Sir T. Lawrence, Mr Westmacott, and other distinguished artists, to be of a higher class than the Apollo Belvidere, “because there is in them a union of very grand form, with a more true and natural expression of the effect of action upon the human frame than there is in the Apollo, or any of the other more celebrated statues.”--See _The Evidence, &c._ [54] “Let us suppose a young man at this time in London, endowed with powers such as enabled Michael Angelo to advance the arts, as he did, by the aid of one mutilated specimen of Grecian excellence in sculpture, to what an eminence might not such a genius carry art, by the opportunity of studying those sculptures, in the aggregate, which adorned the temple of Minerva at Athens?”--West’s _Second Letter to Lord Elgin_. [55] In allusion to the theories of Du Bos, Winckelmann, Montesquieu, &c., with regard to the inherent obstacles in the climate of England to the progress of genius and the arts.--See Hoare’s _Epochs of the Arts_, p. 84, 85. EXTRACTS FROM CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS.