office, to explain the sufferings and the failure of a conquered man.

What, in the end, are the sins which are to lead the reader, sad but
satisfied, to conclude with "See the result of--", or "So it ever must be
with him who yields to--," or whatever else may be the manner of
ratifying the sentence on the condemned and dead? Haydon, we hear,
omitted to ask advice, or, if he asked it, did not shape his course
thereby unless it pleased him. Haydon was self-willed; he had a wild
vanity, and he hoped he could persuade all the powers that include the
powers of man to prosper the work of which he himself was sure. He did
not wait upon the judgement of the world, but thought to compel it.

Should he, then, have waited upon the judgement of such a world? He was
foremost in the task of instructing, nay, of compelling it when there was
a question of the value of the Elgin Marbles, and when the
possession--which was the preservation--of these was at stake. There he
was not wrong; his judgement, that dealt him, in his own cause, the
first, the fatal, the final injury--the initial subtle blow that sent him
on his career so wronged, so cleft through and through, that the mere
course and action of life must ruin him--this judgement, in art, directed
him in the decision of the most momentous of all public questions. Haydon
admired, wrote, protested, declaimed, and fought; and in great part, it
seems, we owe our perpetual instruction by those judges of the Arts which
are the fragments of the Elgin sculptures, to the fact that Haydon
trusted himself with the trust that worked his own destruction. Into the
presence especially of those seated figures, commonly called the Fates,
we habitually bring our arts for sentence. He lent an effectual hand to
the setting-up of that Tribunal of headless stones.

The thing we should lament is rather that the world which refused,