(whose genius could make even Pegasus look wooden, in whatever material) flies at higher game, and will be content with nothing short of a general.  Mr. Cushing advises extreme measures.  He counsels us to sell our real estate and stocks, and to leave a country where no man’s reputation with posterity is safe, being merely as clay in the hands of the sculptor.  To a mind undisturbed by the terror natural in one whose military reputation insures his cutting and running, (I mean, of course, in marble and bronze,) the question becomes an interesting one,—­To whom, in case of a general exodus, shall we sell?  The statues will have the land all to themselves,—­until the Aztecs, perhaps, repeopling their ancient heritage, shall pay divine honors to these images, whose ugliness will revive the traditions of the classic period of Mexican Art.  For my own part, I never look at one of them now without thinking of at least one human sacrifice.

I doubt the feasibility of Mr. Cushing’s proposal, and yet something ought to be done.  We must put up with what we have already, I suppose, and let Mr. Webster stand threatening to blow us all up with his pistol pointed at the elongated keg of gunpowder on which his left hand rests,—­no bad type of the great man’s state of mind after the nomination of General Taylor, or of what a country member would call a penal statue.  But do we reflect that Vermont is half marble, and that Lake Superior can send us bronze enough for regiments of statues?  I go back to my first plan of a prohibitory enactment.  I had even gone so far as to make a rough draught of an Act for the Better Observance of the Second Commandment; but it occurred to me that convictions under it would be doubtful, from the difficulty of satisfying a jury that our graven images did really present a likeness to any of the objects enumerated in the divine ordinance.  Perhaps a double-barrelled statute might be contrived that would meet both the oratorical and the monumental difficulty.  Let a law be passed that all speeches delivered more for the benefit of the orator than that of the audience, and all eulogistic ones of whatever description, be pronounced in the chapel of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, and all statues be set up within the grounds of the Institution for the Blind.  Let the penalty for infringement in the one case be to read the last President’s Message, and in the other to look at the Webster statue one hour a day, for a term not so long as to violate the spirit of the law forbidding cruel and unusual punishments.

Perhaps it is too much to expect of our legislators that they should pass so self-denying an ordinance.  They might, perhaps, make all oratory but their own penal, and then (who knows?) the reports of their debates might be read by the few unhappy persons who were demoniacally possessed by a passion for that kind of thing, as girls are sometimes said to be by an appetite for slate-pencils. Vita brevis, lingua longa.