ESSAY ON SCULPTURE: IN A SERIES OF EPISTLES TO JOHN FLAXMAN, ESQ. R.A. WITH NOTES. Τα αγάλματα της παλαιας τέχνης, ο χρόνε δείται εις το θαυμασαι και οφθαλμών FOR T.CADELL JUN. AND W. DAVIES, IN THE STRAND. INTRODUCTORY LETTER Το MR. FLAXMAN. RECEIVE, my dear friend, with your usual kindness, the long-fufpended Work, of which I had the pleasure of repeating to you a few verses (as a joyous falute) on your fafe arrival from Rome in the year 1794. I then hoped to render it a more early and a more chearful tribute to your improved talents, and to our long friendship. My production is not fuch as I intended; yet I trust, in its present state, it is not utterly unworthy of your acceptance, or of that favour which every warm heart must be inclined to hope its endeavours to celebrate the genius of a friend may receive from the public. a You know but too well what impediments of anxiety and affliction have thwarted, for years, the progress of a performance that the honeft pride of friendship would have zealously laboured to make more worthy of the artist to whom it is infcribed. I am yet willing to think that affliction (fo often useful in life) may have had some fort of beneficial influence on this compofition : Sunt lacrymæ rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt. As much as my Work has loft, in knowledge and refinement, by the fevere trouble, that interrupted and changed its courfe, it may have gained, perhaps, in nature and pathos. I could hardly convert the sufferings of your dear disciple to a use more noble, than that of making them inftrumental, in any degree, to the reputa→ tion of fuch an inftructor. When I began the Poem, I intended that it should comprize a sketch of modern as well as ancient art: but |