For a couple of hundred years or so,
not a statue was made from one end of the kingdom to the other, but the
instinct for having stuffed men and women was so strong, that people at
length again began to try to make them. Not knowing how to make them,
and having no academics to mislead them, the earliest sculptors of this
period thought things out for themselves, and again produced works that
were full of interest, so that in three or four generations they reached
a perfection hardly if at all inferior to that of several hundred years
earlier.
On this the same evils recurred. Sculptors obtained high prices--the art
became a trade--schools arose which professed to sell the holy spirit of
art for money; pupils flocked from far and near to buy it, in the hopes
of selling it later on, and were struck purblind as a punishment for the
sin of those who sent them. Before long a second iconoclastic fury would
infallibly have followed, but for the prescience of a statesman who
succeeded in passing an Act to the effect that no statue of any public
man or woman should be allowed to remain unbroken for more than fifty
years, unless at the end of that time a jury of twenty-four men taken at
random from the street pronounced in favour of its being allowed a second
fifty years of life.
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