June 2014
in a style to endure
1 June 2014, around 11.42.
In the world of literature and art, Goldsmith and Johnson had gone; Cowper was not yet much known; the most prominent poets were Hayley and Darwin; the most distinguished prose-writer, Gibbon. […] Miss Burney, afterwards Madame D’Arblay, surprised the reading world with her entertaining, but somewhat vulgar novels; and Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, and a then anonymous author, Robert Bage (who wrote Hermsprong, and Man as He Is), delighted liberal politicians with theirs. Mrs. Inchbald was also a successful dramatist; but her novels, which were written in a style to endure, were her chief merits.
- This is rather like a dusty shelf; now I’ve got some time to read again, I’m noticing it’s been neglected. [↩]
added too freely
8 June 2014, around 11.41.
In his ‘History of Ancient Art,’ of which the first edition appeared in 1764, Winckelmann gave to the study of the antique an impulse along a line which it has never wholly deserted; his theory of the ‘beautiful’ as manifested even in these Græco-Roman copies to which his imagination often added too freely the missing artistic beauty, still colours our modern phraseology when we speak of ancient art. But not even Winckelmann lived to enter the promised land. He was murdered in 1768, nearly half a century before the purchase of the marbles of the Parthenon, by which the British Museum in 1816, revealed to modern Europe the flower of Greek sculpture.
A view (42)
27 June 2014, around 18.35.
