is so apt to encounter;—­I met one once at an evening party.  But I would be thrown into a den of them rather than sleep in the same room with that statue.  Posterity will think we cut pretty figures indeed in the monumental line!  Perhaps there is a gleam of hope and a symptom of convalescence in the fact that the Prince of Wales, during his late visit, got off without a single speech.  The cheerful hospitalities of Mount Auburn were offered to him, as to all distinguished strangers, but nothing more melancholy.  In his case I doubt the expediency of the omission.  Had we set a score or two of orators on him and his suite, it would have given them a more intimidating notion of the offensive powers of the country than West Point and all the Navy Yards put together.

In the name of our common humanity, consider, too, what shifts our friends in the sculpin line (as we should call them in Chesumpscot) are put to for originality of design, and what the country has to pay for it.  The Clark Mills (that turns out equestrian statues as the Stark Mills do calico-patterns) has pocketed fifty thousand dollars for making a very dead bronze horse stand on his hind legs.  For twenty-five cents I have seen a man at the circus do something more wonderful,—­make a very living bay horse dance a redowa round the amphitheatre on his (it occurs to me that hind legs is indelicate) posterior extremities to the wayward music of an out-of-town (Scotice, out-o’-toon) band.  Now, I will make a handsome offer to the public.  I propose for twenty-five thousand dollars to suppress my design for an equestrian statue of a distinguished general officer as he would have appeared at the Battle of Buena Vista.  This monument is intended as a weathercock to crown the new dome of the Capitol 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