that comes to.

But had it been a modern trick-sculpture, the moment you came to the
tomb you would have said, "Dear me! how wonderfully that carpet is
done,--it doesn't look like stone in the least--one longs to take it up
and beat it, to get the dust off."

Now whenever you feel inclined to speak so of a sculptured drapery, be
assured, without more ado, the sculpture is base, and bad. You will
merely waste your time and corrupt your taste by looking at it. Nothing
is so easy as to imitate drapery in marble. You may cast a piece any
day; and carve it with such subtlety that the marble shall be an
absolute image of the folds. But that is not sculpture. That is
mechanical manufacture.

No great sculptor, from the beginning of art to the end of it, has ever
carved, or ever will, a deceptive drapery. He has neither time nor will
to do it. His mason's lad may do that if he likes. A man who can carve
a limb or a face never finishes inferior parts, but either with a hasty
and scornful chisel, or with such grave and strict selection of their
lines as you know at once to be imaginative, not imitative.

But if, as in this case, he wants to oppose the simplicity of his
central subject with a rich background,--a labyrinth of ornamental
lines to relieve the severity of expressive ones,--he will carve you a
carpet, or a tree, or a rose thicket, with their fringes and leaves and
thorns, elaborated as richly as natural ones; but always for the sake
of the ornamental form, never of the imitation; yet, seizing the
natural character in the lines he gives, with twenty times the
precision and clearness of sight that the mere imitator has. Examine