Three days previously he had visited the Museum of the Capitol, where he had admired the Venus, the Dying Gaul,* the marvellous Centaurs of black marble, and the extraordinary collection of busts, but here his admiration became intensified into stupor by the inexhaustible wealth of the galleries.
And, with more curiosity for life than for art, perhaps, he again lingered before the busts which so powerfully resuscitate the Rome of history--the Rome which, whilst incapable of realising the ideal beauty of Greece, was certainly well able to create life.

The emperors, the philosophers, the learned men, the poets are all there, and live such as they really were, studied and portrayed in all scrupulousness with their deformities, their blemishes, the slightest peculiarities of their features.

And from this extreme solicitude for truth springs a wonderful wealth of character and an incomparable vision of the past.

Nothing, indeed, could be loftier: the very men live once more, and retrace the history of their city, that history which has been so falsified that the teaching of it has caused generations of school-boys to hold antiquity in horror.

But on seeing the men, how well one understands, how fully one can sympathise! And indeed the smallest bits of marble, the maimed statues, the bas-reliefs in fragments, even the isolated limbs--whether the divine arm of a nymph or the sinewy, shaggy thigh of a satyr--evoke the splendour of a civilisation full of light, grandeur, and strength.
* Best known in England, through Byron's lines, as the Dying Gladiator, though that appellation is certainly erroneous .-- Trans.
At last Narcisse brought Pierre back into the Gallery of the Candelabra, three hundred feet in length and full of fine examples of sculpture.
"Listen, my dear Abbe," said he.