mental base for the bronze. It is well to remember the date of the Farragut, 1880-81. At that time we were still more or less held in thrall by the facile makers of “soldiers' monuments," those dreary, lifeless productions which cheered our patriotism and ought to have shocked our taste. Saint-Gaudens pointed a way to a better order of things. To do this was to do much, but the sculptor did more when the commission for the Lincoln at Chicago was given to him. Under the pressure of a greater inspiration than Farragut supplied, his art leaped forward, rising to a more imposing height.

The Lincoln has always seemed to me one of the salient statues of the world, a portrait and a work of art of truly heroic mould. Simplicity is its predominating characteristic. Precisely in this attitude does one prefer to see Lincoln portrayed, with no hint of dramatic movement, with nothing of the orator, but with everything of the quiet, self-contained genius that was the same under all circumstances, in all crises. There is more eloquence in the grip of the left hand on the edge of the coat than in any gesture which an artist of melodramatic tendencies might possibly have invented. Invention, indeed, has no place here. It is as if Saint-Gaudens had divined Lincoln's very soul and had imaged him forth as men saw him under the stress of the war, and as he