me, the General Winfield Scott who lived so much in our
eyes then. The oddity may well even at that hour have been present to me
of its taking so towering a person to produce such small
"drawing-cards"; it was as if some mighty bird had laid diminutive eggs.
Mr. Coe, of a truth, laid his all over the place, and though they were
not of more than handy size--very small boys could set them up in state
on very small desks--they had doubtless a great range of number and
effect. They were scattered far abroad and I surmise celebrated; they
represented crooked cottages, feathery trees, browsing and bristling
beasts and other rural objects; all rendered, as I recall them, in
little detached dashes that were like stories told in words of one
syllable, or even more perhaps in short gasps of delight. It must have
been a stammering art, but I admired its fluency, which swims for me
moreover in richer though slightly vague associations. Mr. Coe practised
on a larger scale, in colour, in oils, producing wondrous neat little
boards that make me to this day think of them and more particularly
smell them, when I hear of a "panel" picture: a glamour of greatness
attends them as brought home by W. J. from the master's own place of
instruction in that old University building which partly formed the east
side of Washington Square and figures to memory, or to fond imagination,
as throbbing with more offices and functions, a denser chiaroscuro, than
any reared hugeness of to-day, where character is so lost in quantity.
Is there any present structure that plays such a part in proportion to
its size?--though even as I ask the question I feel how nothing on earth
is proportioned to present sizes. These alone are proportioned--and to
mere sky-space and mere amount, amount of steel and stone; which is
comparatively uninteresting. Perhaps our needs and our elements were
then absurdly, were then provincially few, and that the patches of
character in that small grey granite compendium were all we had in
general to exhibit. Let me add at any rate that some of them were
exhibitional--even to my tender years, I mean; since I respond even yet
to my privilege of presence at some Commencement or Commemoration, such
as might be natural, doubtless, to any "university," where, as under a
high rich roof, before a Chancellor in a gown and amid serried admirers
and impressive applause, there was "speaking," of the finest sort, and
where above all I gathered in as