DEPARTURE FROM ATHENS. 377 
natural genius unsubdued by the most powerful CHAP. 
obstacles. Educated in slavery; trained to the 
business of his profession beneath the active 
cudgels of his Russian masters; having also 
imbibed with his earliest impressions the servile 
propensities and sensual appetites of the tyrants 
he had been taught to revere; this extraordinary 
man arrived in Athens like another Euphranor, 
rivalling all that the Fine Arts had produced 
under circumstances the most favourable to 
their birth and maturity. The talents of Theodore, 
as a painter, were not confined, as commonly is 
the case among Russian artists, to mere works of 
imitation: although he could copy every thing, 
he could invent also; and his mind partook 
largely of the superior powers of original genius. 
With the most surprising ability, he restored 
and inserted into his drawings all the sculpture 
of which parts only remained in the mutilated 
bas-reliefs and buildings of the Acropolis. Be- 
sides this, he delineated, in a style of superior 
excellence, the same sculptures according to the 
precise state of decay in which they at present 
exist 1 . 
(0 See Memorandum on the Earl of Elgin's Pursuits iu Greece, 
p.5. Loud. 1811. 
