_The Hall of the Dying Gladiator_ contains the three gems of the collection--"the Gladiator," "the Antinous of the Capitol," and the "Faun of Praxiteles." Besides these, we should notice--2. Apollo with the lyre, and 9. a bust of M. Junius Brutus, the assassin of Julius Cæsar. In the centre of the room is the grand statue of the wounded Gaul, generally known as the Dying Gladiator. "I see before me the gladiator lie: He leans upon his hand--his manly brow Consents to death, but conquers agony, And his drooped head sinks gradually low,-- And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, Like the first of a thunder-shower; and now The arena swims around him--he is gone, Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won. "He heard it, but he heeded not--his eyes Were with his heart, and that was far away; He reck'd not of the life he lost, nor prize, But where his rude hut by the Danube lay There were his young barbarians all at play, There was their Dacian mother--he, their sire, Butchered to make a Roman holiday. All this rushed with his blood--shall he expire, And unavenged? Arise, ye Goths, and glut your ire!" _Byron, Childe Harold._ It is delightful to read in this room the description in _Transformation_:-- "It was that room in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the dying gladiator, just sinking into his death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life, although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here, likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but assaulted by a snake.