To supply means of judging to the American merchant (full of kindness and honorable sympathy as beneath the crust he so often is) who wants pictures and statues, not merely from ostentation, but as means of delight and improvement to himself and his friends, who has a soul to respect the genius and desire the happiness of the artist, and who, if he errs, does so from ignorance of the circumstances, I give the following memorandum, made at my desire by an artist, my neighbor:—­

“The rent of a suitable studio for modelling in clay and executing statues in marble may be estimated at $200 a year.

“The best journeyman carver in marble at Rome receives $60 a month.  Models are paid $1 a day.

“The cost of marble varies according to the size of the block, being generally sold by the cubic palm, a square of nine inches English.  As a general guide regarding the prices established among the higher sculptors of Rome, I may mention that for a statue of life-size the demand is from $1,000 to $5,000, varying according to the composition of the figure and the number of accessories.

“It is a common belief in the United States, that a student of Art can live in Italy and pursue his studies on an income of $300 or $400 a year.  This is a lamentable error; the Russian government allows its pensioners $700, which is scarcely sufficient. $1,000 per annum should be placed at the disposal of every young artist leaving our country for Europe.”

Let it be remembered, in addition to considerations inevitable from this memorandum, that an artist may after years and months of uncheered and difficult toil, after he has gone through the earlier stages of an education, find it too largely based, and of aim too high, to finish in this world.

The Prussian artist here on my left hand learned not only his art, but reading and writing, after he was thirty.  A farmer’s son, he was allowed no freedom to learn anything till the death of the head of the house left him a beggar, but set him free; he walked to Berlin, distant several hundred miles, attracted by his first works some attention, and received some assistance in money, earned more by invention of a ploughshare, walked to Rome, struggled through every privation, and has now a reputation which has secured him the means of putting his thoughts into marble.  True, at forty-nine years of age he is still severely poor; he cannot marry, because he cannot maintain a family; but he is cheerful, because he can work in his own way, trusts with childlike reliance in God, and is still sustained by the vigorous health he won laboring in his father’s fields.  Not every man could continue to work, circumstanced as he is, at the end of the half-century.  For him the only sad thing in my mind is that his works are not worth working, though of merit in composition and execution, yet ideally a product of the galvanized piety of the German school, more mutton-like than lamb-like to my unchurched eyes.