e as well as art; and if Story did
not quite practise the perfection he was somewhat fond of preaching, it
was because of his very versatility, which absorbed his talent in so
many directions that it could not be concentrated in any. His
imagination outran his achievement, and the most famous of his works,
his statue of Cleopatra, owes its reputation not so much to its own
merit, which is far from overwhelming, as to the ecstatic description of
it which Nathaniel Hawthorne included in "The Marble Faun." A master of
literature is not necessarily an inspired critic of art, and it is to be
suspected that Hawthorne permitted some of the fire of his imagination
to play about the cold and uninspired marble.

"Cleopatra" marked Story's culmination. He fell away from it year by
year, producing a long line of figures whose only impressive features
were the names he gave them--"The Libyan Sibyl," "Semiramis," "Salome,"
"Medea," and so on. However, he did much to increase the popularity of
sculpture, for the stories he attempted to tell in stone by means of
heavy-browed, frowning women in classic costume and with classic names,
were exactly suited to the child-like intelligence of his public. He
gave art, too--as William Penn gave the Quakers--a sort of social
sanction because of his own social position. If the son of Chief Justice
Story could turn sculptor, surely that profession was not so irregular,
after all!

Another sculptor who shared with Story the admiration of the public was
Randolph Rogers, born at Waterloo, New York, in 1825. Until the age of
twenty-three such modelling as he did was done in the spare moments of a
business life; but when he gave an exhibition of the results of this
labor, his employers were so impressed that they provided the money
needed to send him to Italy, where he was to spend the remainder of his
life, with the exception of five years' residence in New York. Two of
his earlier figures are his most famous, his "Nydia" and his "Lost
Pleiad." Scores of replicas in marble of these two figures were made
during their author's life time, and they still retain for many people a
simple and pathetic charm. Nearly every one, of course, has made the
acquaintance of Nydia, the blind girl, in Bulwer-Lytton's "The Last Days
of Pompeii," and so gaze at Rogers's fleeing figure with eyes too
sympathetic to see its faults.

Far more important is the work of William H. Rinehart, of the same age
as Rogers, and res