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 (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.