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"I wouldn't figure on that," observed the secretary, with a downward glance as though at the prostrate Raffles. "Have you looked to see if the trophies are all safe?" "Not yet," said Maguire, with a glance at the pseudo-antique cabinet in which he kept them.
Alfieri conceived liberty from the purely antique, or, if you prefer, pseudo-antique, point of view; it was to him the final cause of the world; the aim of all struggles; to be free was the one and only desideratum, to be master of one's own thoughts, actions, and words, merely for the sake of such mastery.
It was a quiet reposeful little town sheltered between gently sloping hills; there were gardens round the houses, cherry-trees and flowers, green lawns, beautiful shady trees, pseudo-antique ruins, white busts of bygone princesses on marble columns in the midst of the trees, with gentle and pleasing faces. All about the town were meadows, and hills.
The old gnome, rummaging among his ancient wares, displayed before me some antique bronzes pseudo-antique, at least, fragments of malachite, little Hindu and Chinese idols, jade monkeys, incarnations of Brahma and Vishnu, marvelously suitable for the purpose scarcely divine of holding papers and letters in place.
The form is a pseudo-antique strophe such as Klopstock often used; the substance a rhetorical denunciation of military ambition. The most awful curses are imprecated upon the head of the ruthless 'conqueror', whose badness is portrayed in lurid images and wild syntax that fairly rack the German language.
There is no congruity when even great people set about doing pseudo-antique sculpture in Canova-Thorwaldsen fashion because Winckelmann and Goethe have made antique sculpture fashionable; there is no congruity when people set to building pseudo-Gothic in obedience to the romantic movement and to Ruskin.
And then, impatient of their intoxicating and tantalizing search, suddenly grown desperate, they clutched and stored away everything, and returned home tattered, soiled, bedecked with gold and with tinsel, laden with an immense uncouth burden of jewels, and broken wealth, and refuse and ordure, with pseudo-antique philosophy, with half-mediæval Dantesque and Petrarchesque poetry, with Renaissance science, with humanistic pedantry and obscenity, with euphuistic conceits and casuistic quibble, with art, politics, metaphysics civilization embedded in all manner of rubbish and abomination, soiled with all manner of ominous stains.
Its fresco decorations, as seen to-day replacing that family portrait gallery which Napoleon caused to be painted out are after the pseudo-antique manner and represent bird's-eye views of various French cities and towns, while a series of painted armorial trophies decorates the ceiling. On the second floor are the apartments occupied by the Duchesse de Berry and those of the Duchesse d'Angouleme.
To us there is something delightful in the very fact that the Davids of Donatello and Verrocchio are mere ordinary striplings from the street and the workshop, that the singers of Luca della Robbia are simple unfledged choir-boys, and the Virgins of Mino Florentine fine ladies; we have enough of antique perfection, we have had too much of pseudo-antique faultlessness, and we feel refreshed by this unconsciousness of beauty and ugliness.
As for the pseudo-antique chorus, the best that he could do with that, by way of an experiment, was done later in 'The Bride of Messina'. Besides those already mentioned, there are a number of other plans which deserve a word, were it only to show the wide range of Schiller's interest and the eagerness of his quest after variety.
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