left,--if there should be so many.
Meanwhile we offer a premium to the production of great men in a small
way, by inviting each State to set up the statues of two of its
immortals in the Capitol. What a niggardly percentage! Already we are
embarrassed, not to find the two, but to choose among the crowd of
candidates. Well, seventy-odd heroes in about as many years is pretty
well for a young nation. We do not envy most of them their eternal
martyrdom in marble, their pillory of indiscrimination. We fancy even
native tourists pausing before the greater part of the effigies, and,
after reading the names, asking desperately, "Who was _he_?" Nay, if
they should say, "Who the devil was _he_?" it were a pardonable
invocation, for none so fit as the Prince of Darkness to act as
_cicerone_ among such palpable obscurities. We recall the court-yard of
the Uffizj at Florence. That also is not free of parish celebrities; but
Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Macchiavelli,--shall the inventor of the
sewing-machine, even with the button-holing improvement, let us say,
match with these, or with far lesser than these? Perhaps he was more
practically useful than any one of these, or all of them together, but
the soul is sensible of a sad difference somewhere. These also were
citizens of a provincial capital; so were the greater part of Plutarch's
heroes. Did they have a better chance than we moderns,--than we
Americans? At any rate they have the start of us, and we must confess
that

"By bed and table they lord it o'er us,
Our elder brothers, but one in blood."

Yes, one in blood; that is the hardest part of it. Is our provincialism
then in some great measure due to our absorption in the practical, as we
politely call it, meaning the material,--to our habit of estimating
greatness by the square mile and the hundredweight? Even during our war,
in the midst of that almost unrivalled stress of soul, were not our
speakers and newspapers so enslaved to the vulgar habit as to boast ten
times of the thousands of square miles it covered with armed men, for
once that they alluded to the motive that gave it all its meaning and
its splendor? Perhaps it was as well that they did not exploit that
passion of patriotism as an advertisement in the style of Barnum or
Perham. "I scale one hundred and eighty pounds, but when I'm mad I weigh
two ton," said the Kentuckian, with a true notion of moral avoirdupois.
That ideal kind of weight is wonderfu