him was a figure of Justice, holding forth, instead of the customary grocer’s scales, an actual pair of brass steelyards.  It is an ancient and classic instrument, undoubtedly; but I had supposed that Portia (when Shylock’s pound of flesh was to be weighed) was the only judge that ever really called for it in a court of justice.  Pitt and Fox were in the same distinguished company; and John Kemble, in Roman costume, stood not far off, but strangely shorn of the dignity that is said to have enveloped him like a mantle in his lifetime.  Perhaps the evanescent majesty of the stage is incompatible with the long endurance of marble and the solemn reality of the tomb; though, on the other hand, almost every illustrious personage here represented has been invested with more or less of stage-trickery by his sculptor.  In truth, the artist (unless there be a divine efficacy in his touch, making evident a heretofore hidden dignity in the actual form) feels it an imperious law to remove his subject as far from the aspect of ordinary life as may be possible without sacrificing every trace of resemblance.  The absurd effect of the contrary course is very remarkable in the statue of Mr. Wilberforce, whose actual self, save for the lack of color, I seemed to behold, seated just across the aisle.

This excellent man appears to have sunk into himself in a sitting posture, with a thin leg crossed over his knee, a book in one hand, and a finger of the other under his chin, I believe, or applied to the side of his nose, or to some equally familiar purpose; while his exceedingly homely and wrinkled face, held a little on one side, twinkles at you with the shrewdest complacency, as if he were looking right into your eyes, and twigged something there which you had half a mind to conceal from him.  He keeps this look so pertinaciously that you feel it to be insufferably impertinent, and bethink yourself what common ground there may be between yourself and a stone image, enabling you to resent it.  I have no doubt that the statue is as like Mr. Wilberforce as one pea to another, and you might fancy, that, at come ordinary moment, when he least expected it, and before he had time to smooth away his knowing complication of wrinkles, he had seen the Gorgon’s head, and whitened into marble,—­not only his personal self, but his coat and small-clothes, down to a button and the minutest crease of the cloth.  The ludicrous result marks the impropriety of bestowing the agelong duration of marble upon small, characteristic individualities, such as might come within the province of waxen imagery.  The sculptor should give permanence to the figure of a great man in his mood of broad and grand composure, which would obliterate all mean peculiarities; for, if the original were unaccustomed to such a mood, or if his features were incapable of assuming the guise, it seems questionable whether he could really have been entitled to a marble immortality.  In point of fact, however, the English face and form are seldom statuesque, however illustrious the individual.