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Now
merry

Justice held her sides
To keep her ribs frae rackin';
She leuchuntil her e'en ran tides,

Her very saul was shakin'.
Sae funny were the thoughts that wauken

To hear the duddy crew-
“What slave," quo’she, “tholes ha'f sic whackin'
As whacks dealt down on you,

Aye silent syne?

"O seek nae sair for siller's birth,

Aye pouch-but binna speerin';
There's nae ae bodle tracks the earth

That has nae brought a tear in-
Think ye yon holy house ye'r rearin'

Will spotless pennies pay it ?
When some are sawin'—some are shearin'-
Some are makin' hay yet,

To sell it syne!”

OUR STATUES AND THEIR WARDROBES.

BY ANGUS B. REACH.

THERE is one dress for the people of the nineteenth century, and another dress for the statues of the people of the nineteenth century. Flesh and blood wear English costumes - stone and bronze, Roman. Coats and trowsers are quite good enough for

. actual breathing humanity -- togas and buskins must be employed to set off its more valuable and honoured effigies. A man is not felt to be degraded by a waistcoat and a standing shirt-collara statue is. The statue, being the more exalted thing of the two, claims the greatest cares of the costumier. Anything is good enough for an existing original_hardly anything is good enough for a metallic portraiture. The tailor is thought to be sufficient to clothe the man— the artist must drape the statue. Happy -statues-miserable men! Who would not be bronze rather than human,-sculptured by man rather than formed by Nature ?

We generally take our notions of the dress and personal appearance of an age from the statues and coins which come down to us, Paper and canvass moulder away while stone and metal remain.

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The moth may leave nothing of the picture save the frame. Rust is at worst but a metallic cutaneous disease, and bronze bids it defiance. Imagine then, ages after this, when England shall be England, but living England no more—when the tide of civilisation shall have flowed away as it has flowed towards us—when the governing isles of the earth shall be the coral-reared clusters of southern seas—and when the Thames shall flow at midday as silently as the Thames flows at midnight now. Imagine, centuries after some great convulsion of the world's society-when the learned of a thousand years hence shall take to disinterring our past history and habits in antiquarian works on England in the nineteenth century-imagine, I say, the luminous notions they will obtain of our costumes from such of the now existing statues of London as may be dug up from tumuli, or perhaps fished up out of the reedy waters of our river. If our great men, they will say, had little Roman virtue, they, at all events, made up for it by seizing every opportunity of aping Roman attire. Historians have not recorded of George IV. the character of a Cato or a Cincinnatus. But at all events--our antiquarians will urge-he seems, as clearly appears by his statue, to have been made up for either part. It will be infallibly demonstrated-vide copies of their counterfeit bronze presentments ---that Pitt and Fox and Canning were in the habit of addressing the House of Commons in togas ; and as it will not be contended that the great men of a country in the state of civilisation to which we had arrived, would probably have decorated their persons in quite a different style from that adopted by the multitude, the natural presumption will or ought from the guiding statues to be, that the people of England in the nineteenth century wore the dress assumed by the people of Rome some 2,000 years further back still; that the tailors of the banks of the Thames worked by the same patterns as the tailors of the banks of the Tiber ; and that the crowd on Lord Mayor's day hurried along, to all appearance, exactly a similar congregation to that which might have greeted a triumphing Cæsar, depositing his spoils in the Capitol.

And yet what have we to do with ancient Rome or ancient Romans ? Can we not dress the statues of Englishmen as Englishmen? Cannot we leave memorials of our time and generation -as our time and generation existed ? We rear the statuenow of a good great man, anon a bad, paltry king---so be it ; but give them to us as they were. Let them be not the “brief,” but the

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" bronze chronicles of the time”-let posterity have them and know them in their “habits as they lived." Do not cast metallic falsehoods—do not chisel granite lies. If a statue is worth anything it ought to give an idea of the person represented by it. If it fail in this, it may be a very fine piece of art, yet it is not what it was intended, and what it ought, to be. You erect a monument to

a man--a statue of a man. Mark the distinction. Both may commemorate, but one represents, copies, communicates to those who have never seen the original, his appearance in feature and limb. A statue professes to be a portrait - it may be a work of high art also ---but if the likeness be wanting, the principal requisition is absent. Now, clothes go very far in making up our notions of a man's appearance. Let any person who doubts just contemplate his most intimate friend jumping in or out of a bathing machine—I defy recognition at twenty yards. An entire change of costume is just as puzzling as no costume at all. Look at actors on and off the stage. Look at Richard the Third in an omnibus—at Shylock in a fourpenny steamer. Why then proceed, in what, from the very nature of their materials, must be the most long-lived portraits of our public men, to bewilder and mislead, and by an elaborate change of dress prevent the very objects from being fulfilled which a portrait-statue seeks to achieve. Posterity will be much more gratified by a peep at what Brummel's " fat friend” really was, than by being treated to an effigy which may be a tolerably correct one of George IV., or a tolerably correct one of Julius Cæsar.

I know I shall be answered by an outcry against the unpicturesque style of our dress, and the impossibility of using it for the purposes of art. Why, an ugly man who went to a miniature painter to have his likeness taken, might just as reasonably be turned away with the consolatory assurance that his features were too monstrous for “ the purposes of art.”. But the monstrosity is the look out of the sitter, not of the artist. His business is to perpetuate on canvass or ivory the copy which nature and its proprietor have set before him. Here is my face, let me have your copy of it. Our sculptors, however, have taken very good care not to reject commissions, because of the ugliness of the costumes in which those commissions ought naturally to be executed. They have adopted what they deem a compromise between the claims of taste and pocket. They do not turn the coated and trowsered man out of doors as an unfit subject for the divinity

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which inspires every blow bestowed upon their chisels. No, they strip off the paletot and put on the toga. They sacrifice what all must know to be abstract truth, for what some contend to be beauty. They give you a resemblance of

man, out of which they have been careful to chip out the most salient points of likeness. It is just as if a portrait-painter were to tell a gentleman, You are a particularly ugly and repulsive individual you are lame and crooked-you have only one eye, and no nose at all to speak of. All this is very bad, very unpleasant to look upon-it will not do for art. Art meddles with beauty, not deformity. It soars ; it does not stoop.

I shall, therefore, paint you as an Apollo Belvidere."

Now this absurdity is committed every day in sculpture. coat and trowsers, says the artist, “are ugly vulgar things, destitute of all grace and beauty. I shall, therefore, represent you in a toga and buskins.” But it is not beauty or ideality we look for in statues of men, but truth. We want to see good portraits in stone or bronze. I should laugh at a Cromwell tricked out as might be a Centurion of the Fifth Legion. I want him as he lived and was seen by his contemporaries. I want him as he led his Iron Sides, or dictated to John Milton-jack boots on his legs, and a wart on his nose.

Let me not be misunderstood. I do not disparage the ideal. I only want to keep the ideal from trespassing on the truthful. I quarrel not with fancy; but in cases where the mixture of fancy with fact would tend to mislead. I want to keep fancy distinct from fact. Both are good, but one may spoil the other.

Erect a monument to a man, and idealise as much as you please -erect, if you are incurably toga-mad, a statue of à Roman, dedicated to an English hero ; but if your design be to cut or mould the statue of an Englishman, let him be clothed as an Englishman, Copy his costume as you copy his features. You have no more right to take liberties with the one than with the other.

The Romans did not clothe their statues with the dress of the Etrurians or the Egyptians ; they left us the effigies of their statesmen and their warriors as they harangued in the senate, or conquered in the field. Let us do likewise. What is good enough for ourselves ought to be good enough for statues of ourselves. If the

eye be offended by our unpicturesque costume cut in marble, why is the eye not equally offended at it cut in broad cloth? The admitted fact of the national dress not being remarkable for its display of the line of beauty, may or may not be a very good argument for changing the national dress, and putting the whole population into the costumes of Patricians, Equites, and Plebeians; but it is no argument at all for changing the offending habiliments merely in a few statues. Taste is none the gainer, and truth is all the loser by the arrangement.

I can only imagine one thing more utterly ludicrous and preposterous than the fashion of putting female statues of the present day into mediæval, and male statues into Roman costumes—and it is the converse of the arrangement. Just fancy Cato in a registered paletot, a figured shirt, and a winner of the Derby handkerchief; and Joan of Arc adorned with a jupon de crinoline, and a polka jacket!

At present most of our statues seem to be nothing more or less than blocks for the display of “ Old Clo!”

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DIVINITY FROM RAGS.

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“ HUMPH ! only this metal tea-spoon, two combs, this pewter pot (vich, mum, I've dodged round a corner for a precious hour), a twopenny coral necklace, and this—this bit o' bacon, rated Togg, touching each article with the bowl of a small black pipe just taken from the mouth, and leering upon three or four miserable little urchins who had deposited these matters on the filthy, rickety table for inspection : "yer precious, ain't ye, for yer edication?

“Well, mums, I could do no more," spoke the most precocious of the four, drawing back from the table to avoid an expected blow.

Peoples is uncommon wide awake now to their wittles, and don't lit a nothing out o' the shadder o' their noses, that I'se knows, as was a-dodging for four hours for a chickun; and win jist as I'se got it in grab, the missis took it in her own hed that was pretty clear--to have a precious tit-bit for her own supper, and off she walks, and lit them as cotch it as would.” Togg moved uneasily in her dilapidated, arm-chair, gave her head and its filthy tattered cap a shake, and, leering viciously on her precious pupils, aimed a furious blow, which, as is very often the case in human affairs,

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