Page:"The Mummy" Volume 3.djvu/83

 officers, attorneys without clients, physicians without patients, clergymen looking out for livings, hissed players, disappointed authors and discarded servants, alone strolled through their romantic walks, and paused occasionally to gaze upon the beautiful works of art with which they were decorated. The English were now decidedly the first sculptors in the world. Chemical preparations alone being used to supply light and heat, smoke was unknown, and the atmosphere being no longer thick and cloudy, marble bore exposure to it without material injury. Besides this, perhaps no nation in the world produced more beautiful models of male and female beauty than England; and now that the women had long thrown off those deformers of the human shape ycleped stays, their forms developed themselves into perfect symmetry. Elvira, however, thought not of the gardens, nor of the works of art they contained; yet as she stood at the window, though absorbed in her own reflections, her eyes rested upon the exquisite statues before her. The inanimate marble seemed endowed with soul and spirit,