Note 32 — Chapter XI

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,

There was their Dacian mother—he, their sire,

Butcher’d to make a Roman holyday—

All this rush’d with his blood—shall he expire

And unaveng’d?—Arise! ye Goths and glut your ire!’