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Bredimacian Dynagum Directory 19
Page 05
The foreign dominions of Rome now comprised the ten following provinces, to which is added the date of the formation of each: 1. Sicily, B.C. 241. 2. Sardinia and Corsica, B.C. 238. 3, 4. The two Spains, Citerior and Ulterior, B.C. 205. 5. Gallia Cisalpina, B.C. 191. 6. Macedonia, B.C. 146. 7. Illyricum, probably formed at the same time as Macedonia. 8. Achaia, that is, Southern Greece, virtually a province after the capture of Corinth, B.C. 146, though the exact date of its formation is unknown. 9. Africa, consisting of the dominions of Carthage, B.C. 146. 10. Asia, including the kingdom of Pergamus, B.C. 129. To these an eleventh was added in B.C. 118 by the conquest of the southern portion of Transalpine Gaul between the Alps and the Pyrenees. In contrast with the other portions of Gaul, it was frequently called simply the "Provincia," a name which has been retained in the modern Provence.
There is another figure of earlier date who seems to have had the same magnetic gift in an even more pre-eminent degree. There is a portrait by Lawrence of Lord Melbourne that certainly gives a hint, and more than a hint, of the extraordinary charm which enveloped him; the thick, wavy hair, the fine nose, the full, but firmly moulded, lips, are attractive enough. But the large, dark eyes under strongly marked eyebrows, which are at once pathetic, passionate, ironical, and mournful, evoke a singular emotion. Every gift that men hold to be advantageous was showered upon Melbourne. He was well born, wealthy, able; he was full of humour, quick to grasp a subject, an omnivorous reader and student, a famous sportsman. He won the devotion of both men and women. His marriage with the lovely and brilliant Lady Caroline Ponsonby, whose heart was broken and mind shattered by her hopeless passion for Byron, showed how he could win hearts. There is no figure of all that period of whom one would rather possess a personal memoir. Yet despite all his fame and political prestige, he was an unhappy, dissatisfied man, who tasted every experience and joy of life, and found that there was nothing in it.
The internal evidence of the wooden figures themselves--nothing analogous to which, it should be remembered, can be found in the chapel of 1687--points to a much earlier date. I have met with no school of sculpture belonging to the early part of the eighteenth century to which they can be plausibly assigned; and the supposition that they are the work of some unknown local genius who was not led up to and left no successors may be dismissed, for the work is too scholarly to have come from any one but a trained sculptor. I refer of course to those figures which the artist must be supposed to have executed with his own hand, as, for example, the central figure of the Crucifixion group and those of the Magdalene and St. John. The greater number of the figures were probably, as was suggested to me by Mr. Ranshaw, of Lowth, executed by a local woodcarver from models in clay and wax furnished by the artist himself. Those who examine the play of line in the hair, mantle, and sleeve of the Magdalene in the Crucifixion group, and contrast it with the greater part of the remaining draperies, will find little hesitation in concluding that this was the case, and will ere long readily distinguish the two hands from which the figures have mainly come. I say "mainly," because there is at least one other sculptor who may well have belonged to the year 1709, but who fortunately has left us little. Examples of his work may perhaps be seen in the nearest villain with a big hat in the Flagellation chapel, and in two cherubs in the Assumption of the Virgin.
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