at Washington.  By this happy contrivance, the horse will be freed from the degrading necessity of touching the earth at all,—­thus distancing Mr. Mills by two feet in the race for originality.  The pivot is to be placed so far behind the middle of the horse, that the statue, like its original, will always indicate which way the wind blows by going along with it.  The inferior animal I have resolved to model from a spirited saw-horse in my own collection.  In this way I shall combine two striking advantages.  The advocates of the Ideal in Art cannot fail to be pleased with a charger which embodies, as it were, merely the abstract notion or quality, Horse, and the attention of the spectator will not be distracted from the principal figure.  The material to be pure brass.  I have also in progress an allegorical group commemorative of Governor Wise.  This, like-Wise, represents only a potentiality.  I have chosen, as worthy of commemoration, the moment when and the method by which the Governor meant to seize the Treasury at Washington.  His Excellency is modelled in the act of making one of his speeches.  Before him a despairing reporter kills himself by falling on his own steel pen; a broken telegraph-wire hints at the weight of the thoughts to which it has found itself inadequate; while the Army and Navy of the United States are conjointly typified in a horse-marine who flies headlong with his hands pressed convulsively over his ears.  I think I shall be able to have this ready for exhibition by the time Mr. Wise is nominated for the Presidency,—­certainly before he is elected.  The material to be plaster, made of the shells of those oysters with which Virginia shall have paid her public debt.  It may be objected, that plaster is not durable enough for verisimilitude, since bronze itself could hardly be expected to outlast one of the Governor’s speeches.  But it must be remembered that his mere effigy cannot, like its prototype, have the pleasure of hearing itself talk; so that to the mind of the spectator the oratorical despotism is tempered with some reasonable hope of silence.  This design, also, is intended only in terrorem, and will be suppressed for an adequate consideration.

I find one comfort, however, in the very hideousness of our statues.  The fear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone may deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves into greatness.  It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel a wholesome dread of this posthumous retribution.  I cannot in any other way account for that nightmare of the solitary horseman on the edge of the horizon, in his Hartford Speech.  His imagination is infected with the terrible consciousness, that Mr. Mills, as the younger man, will, in the course of Nature, survive him, and will be left loose to seek new victims of his nefarious designs.  Formerly the punishment of the wooden horse was a degradation inflicted on private soldiers only; but Mr. Mills