Excerpt from Juvenal<br><br>The accidents of life gave me an Opportunity, in the year 1815, of seeing one of the celebrated statues of antiquity which had been taken from Rome in the revolutionary war, and replaced, as was customary, by a'cast, restored to~its ancient pedestal in the gallery of the-museum Capitolinum. I had frequently vis ited and admired the substitute, but shall never forget the aug mented pleasure that I derived on that interesting occasion from contemplating for the first time the original. One seemed to have hadno adequate acquaintance with the Dying Gladiator till that moment. The nearest approach and it must be a very near one, to an original p1ece of sculpture, is surely the cast of it: it is the most exact of translations; and yet a great portion of its beauty is lost. The paintings of the great masters are sup posed to be in some measure fam1liar to us by the exertions of the engraver; but the instrument of imitation being in this in stance still less exactly applicable, the result is as'comparatively defective as might have been presumed; and though models of architectural antiquities are often constructed on a scale which preserves their exact proportion, yet none, I will venture to say, have ever apprehended even the beauty, not to say the power of the originals by perusing them.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.