THE TWILIGHT OF GREEK AND ROMAN SCULPTURE. 285 



the hostile action of the last Congress, the friends of progress will be thankful if 

 they can keep it as it is. An eminent jurist introduced a Bill into Congress dur- 

 ing the last term, providing that innocence should be a valid defense for the in- 

 fringement of this the most intangible of all rights. It was also suggested that 

 the infringer should remain in the undisturbed possession of the right if it was for 

 his own use. They would have to pay the customary fee. This would be a very 

 convenient arrangement for the corporations that were advancing it, for having 

 established a communism of rights they would have little to fear from the average 

 patentee. In nearly all the cases cited in support of these attacks, had the in- 

 fringers been made to pay the damages, they would still have been benefited by 

 their use. The number of hardships are marvelously few, when we consider what 

 great changes have taken place in late years, and in many of these so-called hard- 

 ships the infringer did not use the most ordinary precaution. Certainly there are 

 but very few of them who have not received as much benefit as injury fiom mod- 

 ern improvement. 



Just here it might be well to consider the great amount of trouble caused by 

 a litigation that arises out of the common and best established law-rights. Yet 

 these few exceptions are taken up and made the grounds for legislation that would 

 compromise the whole system. Whatever may be said upon the question, the 

 remedies they suggest have the merits of completeness, and should they become 

 laws they could have but little more to ask. 



THE TWILIGHT OF GREEK AND ROMAN SCULPTURE. 



WILLIAM SHIELDS LISCOMB. 



It seems surprising, not that so many works of ancient art have been de- 

 stroyed, but that any at all have remained until the present day. Transported 

 from place to place, shattered by accidents, overthrown by earthquakes, consum- 

 ed by conflagrations, subject to the destructive malice of Macedonian and Roman 

 emperors, exposed to the violence of wars, buried beneath falling walls ; delivered 

 to the axe of the inconoclast, the hammer of the mason, the kiln of the lime- 

 maker, and the melting-furnace of the bronze-moulder ; torn from their bases, 

 trampled in the mire and filth of the streets, broken into fragments, and gradually 

 overwhelmed and hidden from view beneath the earth, how slight was the chance 

 that productions of the golden age of Athenian sculpture should ever meet the 

 eyes of that far-off nineteenth century in which we have our being ! With what 

 reverence may we justly stand before a work which, surviving such vicissitudes, 

 has traversed the vast reaches of bleak, barren centuries that lie between us and 

 antiquity, to greet us with its matchless loveliness to-day ! Perikles may have 

 gazed upon it; Sokrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno may have taught their dis- 

 ciples in its presence ; Euripides and Sophokles may have paused in the composi- 

 tion of their stately lines to rest the eye and brain on the symmetry of its proper- 



