ddresses his fellow-citizens in his colloquial, yet
dignified way, we dispute whether he was not, at the time of the speech,
a martyr to those life-long habits of abstinence from which he is known
to have once suffered calamities spared the confirmed wine-bibber. Once,
indeed, we seemed as a nation to rise to the appreciation of those
beautiful interests which occupy our Roman friends, and once, not a
great while ago, we may be said to have known an aesthetic sensation. For
the first time in our history as a people, we seemed to feel the
necessity of art, and to regard it as a living interest, like commerce,
or manufacturing, or mining, when, shortly after the close of the war,
and succeeding the fall of the last and greatest of its dead, the
country expressed a universal desire to commemorate its heroes by the
aid of art. But we do not husband our sensations as our Roman friends do
theirs: the young Hercules lasted them two months, while a divorce case
hardly satisfies us as many days, and a railroad accident not longer. We
hasten from one event to another, and it would be hard to tell now
whether it was a collision on the Saint Jo line, or a hundred and thirty
lives lost on the Mississippi, or some pleasantry from our merry Andrew,
which distracted the public mind from the subject of monumental honors.
It is certain, however, that, at the time alluded to, there was much
talk of such things in the newspapers and in the meetings. A popular
subscription was opened for the erection of a monument to Abraham
Lincoln at his home in Springfield; each city was about to celebrate him
by a statue in its public square; every village would have his bust or a
funeral tablet; and our soldiers were to be paid the like reverence and
homage. Then the whole affair was overwhelmed by some wave of novel
excitement, and passed out of the thoughts of the people; so that we
feel, in recurring to it now, like him who, at dinner, turns awkwardly
back to a subject from which the conversation has gracefully wandered,
saying, "We were speaking just now about"--something the company has
already forgotten. So far as we have learned, not an order for any
memorial sculpture of Lincoln has been given in the whole country, and
we believe that only one design by an American sculptor has been offered
for the Springfield monument. There is time, however, to multiply
designs; for the subscription, having reached a scant fifty thousand
dollars, rests at that