United States or Argentina ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The execrable custom of sacrificing captives or slaves at the tombs of their masters and great men, which is still preserved among the negroes of Africa, obtained also among the antients, Greeks as well as Romans.
Whoever has seen Rome will acknowledge he must find sufficient there to exercise all his faculties; but though the architecture, and the paintings which ornament that august city might have engrossed his whole attention, the many venerable reliques which were shewn him of old Rome, appeared yet more lovely in his eyes; which shews the charms antiquity has for persons even of the most gay dispositions: but this, according to my opinion, is greatly owing to the prejudice of education, which forces us as it were to an admiration of the antients, meerly because they are so, and not that they are in any essential respect always deserving that vast preference given them over the moderns: this may be easily proved by the exorbitant prices some of our virtuoso's give for pieces of old copper, which are reckoned the most valuable, as the inscriptions or figures on them are least legible.
The drapery of statues, whether in brass or stone, when thrown into large masses, appears hard and unpleasant to the eye and for that reason the antients always imitated wet linen, which exhibiting the shape of the limbs underneath, and hanging in a multiplicity of wet folds, gives an air of lightness, softness, and ductility to the whole.
An inconsistence of which the antients had no idea; since, on that occasion, they almost constantly joined dancing to singing. They are both natural expressions of joy and festivity; and as such they thought neither of them improper in an address of gratulation to the deity, whom they supposed rather pleased at such innocent oblations of the heart, exulting in his manifold bounties and blessings.
His Familiarity with the Customs, Manners, Actions, and Writings of the Antients, makes him a very delicate Observer of what occurs to him in the present World.
Nature then being always Nature, always invariable in her operations and productions; there is no false conclusion, nor straining inferences, in avering, that the art of dancing could not but be a great gainer by a revival of the taste of the antients for the pantomime branch; which, upon the theatre, converted a transient flashy amusement of the eye, into a rational or sensible entertainment, and made of dancers, who are otherwise, a
This I faithfully promise, that, notwithstanding any affection which we may be supposed to have for this rogue, whom we have unfortunately made our heroe, we will lend him none of that supernatural assistance with which we are entrusted, upon condition that we use it only on very important occasions. In this the antients had a great advantage over the moderns.
This gentleman was an excellent classical scholar, and combined with his knowledge and admiration of the merits of the antients that liberality of respect for the endeavours of modern talent, with which the same kind of feeling is but rarely found connected.
In most of the nations among the antients, dancing was not only much practised, but constituted not even an inconsiderable part of their religious rites and ceremonies. The accounts we have of the sacred dances, of the Jews especially, as well as of other nations, evidently attest
However, it was from the theatres that dancing received its great and capital improvement. As an exercise, the virtue of dancing was well known to the antients, for its keeping up the strength and agility of the human body.
Word Of The Day