IN THE STATE OF DENMARK 159 



nearly five hundred from the marble. He must have 

 begun in his cradle, while he watched his father, the 

 ship's carpenter, carving figure-heads. Probably he 

 cut his teeth with a chisel, and made mud gods instead 

 of pies. The tremendous group of Christ and the 

 Apostles, and the angel kneeling with the shell, could 

 honourably represent the best part of a career, and 

 yet they are but fourteen figures out of the host that 

 stands in cold trance in the halls of the huge building. 

 The ground-floor was portioned off into many- 

 coloured cubicles, each with its strenuous classic hero 

 or questionable goddess, meditating, in the singular 

 calm of an age that wore no clothes, in the midst of 

 a strictly respectable party of busts of gentlemen 

 with chins propped on swaddlings of cravat, and 

 ladies with sloping shoulders, snub noses, and 

 ringlets, as in 1830. Halls and cubicles were 

 traversed in solitude, unbroken except by the officials 

 in charge — a remarkably polished body — who smiled 

 and took off their caps to the visitors at all oppor- 

 tunities. One, anxious to make us feel at home, 

 pointed out a bust of Lord Byron; another, whose 

 good manners had yielded to exhaustion, slept pro- 

 foundly in a remote cubicle, impassive beneath the 

 menace of a nude gladiator and the mild attentive- 

 ness of a Copenhagen doctor's wife. In a quadrangle 

 in the heart of the building is Thorwaldsen's grave, a 

 granite frame enclosing a bed of ivy, with a mere 

 statement of birth and death cut in the stone. Lying 

 thus in the shadow of his accumulated honour, no 

 more could easily be added. Yet none the less is 

 the reticence admirable. 



" They find now his art too tranquil," was hoAV a 

 modern Dane that afternoon put the present attitude 

 of Denmark towards Thorwaldsen. Since the morn- 

 ing we had visited the enormous Museum of Northern 



