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ers, stone-workers, gold and ivory workers, weavers, and engravers, but never mentions a caster. Philostratus also, enumerating the different classes of workmen in the plastic art, makes no mention of casters. Pliny never speaks of them. Indeed, their existence is never mentioned by any ancient writer.

All things considered, then, in conclusion, it seems impossible to believe that Pliny intended, in the passage relating to Lysistratus, to declare that he invented any method of casting in plaster, but rather that he intended to say that Lysistratus either modeled likenesses in wax over a core of gypsum, or, what is much more probable, that he colored his likenesses in imitation of life; and that his specialty was making accurate and literal likenesses in the round with color, thus uniting the two arts of the painter and the sculptor.

The process of casting in plaster, in our acceptation of the phrase, is of modern origin, and so far as we know was invented in the fifteenth century, a little before the time of Verrocchio (1432-1488), the master of Leonardo da Vinci. He was among the first who employed it, and may fairly be said to have introduced it. At all events, the first clear mention of this process of which we are aware is by Vasari in his life of Verrocchio; and he states that this sculptor and painter "cast hands, knees, feet, legs, even torsi, in order to copy them at his leisure; and that soon after casts began to be made from the faces of persons

after death, so that one sees in every house in Florence, on mantel-pieces, doors, windows, and cornices, a great number of these portraits, which seem alive. For some time after it seems to have been used chiefly for taking casts from dead faces, or hands and feet, and not to have been applied to casting from models of clay. The general practice of that period was to make a small model in clay, then to bake it, and from this model by proportional compasses to enlarge it and point it upon the marble. The process of casting from clay models seems not to have been practiced then, and so far as we know models of full size in clay were rarely if ever made, until rather a comparatively recent period.

A CONVERSATION WITH MARCUS

AURELIUS.

It was a dark and stormy night in December. Everybody in the house had long been in bed and asleep; but, deeply interested in the "Meditations of Marcus Aurelius," I had prolonged my reading until the small hours had begun to increase, and I heard the bells of the Capucin convent strike for two o'clock. I then laid down my book, and began to reflect upon it. The fire had nearly burned out, and, unwilling yet to go, I threw on to it a bundle of canne and a couple of sticks; again the fresh flame darted out, and gave a glow to the room. Outside, the storm was fierce and passionate. Gusts beat against the panes, shaking the old windows of the palace, and lashing them with wild rain. At intervals a sudden blue light flashed through the room, followed by a trampling roar of thunder overhead. The fierce libeccio howled like a wild beast around the house, as if in search of its prey, and then died away, disappointed and growling, and after a short interval again leaped with fresh fury against the windows and walls, as if maddened by their resistance. As I sat quietly gazing into the fire and musing on many shadows of thought that

The cold wind prætorium, and Far off is heard

came and passed, my imagination went back into the far past, when Marcus Aurelius led his legions against the Quadi, the Marcomanni, and the Sarmati, and brought before me the weather-beaten tent in which he sat so many a bleak and bitter night, after the duty of the day was done, and all his men had retired to rest, writing in his private diary those noble meditations, which, though meant solely for his private eye, are one of the most precious heritages we have of ancient life and thought. I seemed to see him there in those bleak wilds of Pannonia, seated by night in his tent. At his side burns a flickering torch. Sentinels silently pace to and fro. flirts and flaps the folds of the shakes the golden eagle above it. the howl of the wolf prowling through the shadowy forests that encompass the camp; or the silence is broken by the sharp shrill cry of some night bird flying overhead through the dark. Now and then comes the clink of armor from the tents of the cavalry, or the call of the watchword along the line, or the neighing of horses as the circuitores make their rounds. He is ill and worn with toil and care. He is alone; and there, under the shadow of night, beside his camp-table, he sits and meditates, and writes upon his waxen tablets those lofty sentences of admonition to duty and encouragement to virtue, those counselings of himself to heroic action, patient endurance of evil, and tranquillity of life, that breathe the highest

spirit of morality and philosophy. Little did he think, in his lonely watches, that the words he was writing only for himself would still be cherished after long centuries had passed away, and would be pondered over by the descendants of nations which were then uncultured barbarians, as low in civilization as the Pannonians against whom he was encamped. Yet of all the books that ancient literature has left us, none is to be found containing the record of higher and purer thought, or more earnest and unselfish character. As I glanced up at the cast of the Capitoline bust of him which stood in the corner of my room, and saw the sweet melancholy of that gentle face, ere care and disappointment had come over it and ruled it with lines of age and anxiety, a strange longing came over me to see him and hear his voice, and a sad sense of that

great void of time Where is he now?

and space which separated us. What is he now? I asked myself. In what other distant world of thought and being is his spirit moving? Has it any remembrance of the past? Has it any knowledge of the present? Yet the hand that wrote is now but dust, which may be floating about the mausoleum where he was buried, near the Vatican, or perhaps lying in that library of the popes upon some stained manuscript of this very work it wrote, to be blown carelessly away by some studious abbé as he ranges the volume on its shelf among the other precious records of the past.

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