[28]. The same circumstance literally happened to Gibbon, though from a different cause. He fell on his knees before a Swiss lady (I think a Mademoiselle d’Ivernois,) and was so fat he could not rise. She left him in this posture, and sent in a servant to help him up.
[29]. The fronts of the houses and of many of the finest buildings seem (so to speak) to have been composed in mud, and translated into stone—so little projection, relief, or airiness have they. They have a look of being stuck together.
[30]. They are as different as Mr. Moore’s verses and an epic poem.
[31]. The French physiognomy is like a telegraphic machine, ready to shift and form new combinations every moment. It is commonly too light and variable for repose; it is careless, indifferent, but not sunk in indolence, nor wedded to ease: as on the other hand, it is restless, rapid, extravagant, without depth or force. Is it not the same with their feelings, which are alike incapable of a habit of quiescence, or of persevering action or passion? It seems so to me. Their freedom from any tendency to drunkenness, to indulge in its dreamy stupor, or give way to its incorrigible excesses, confirms by analogy the general view of their character. I do not bring this as an accusation against them, I ask if it is not the fact; and if it will not account for many things observable in them, good, bad, and indifferent? In a word, mobility without momentum solves the whole riddle of the French character.
[32]. Lord Byron has merely taken up the common cant of connoisseurship, inflating it with hyperbolical and far-fetched eulogies of his own—not perceiving that the Apollo was somewhat of a coxcomb, the Venus somewhat insipid, and that the expression in the Laocoon is more of physical than of mental agony. The faces of the boys are, however, superlatively fine. They are convulsed with pain, yet fraught with feeling. He has made a better hit in interpreting the downcast look of the Dying Gladiator, as denoting his insensibility to the noise and bustle around him:—
‘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,