lly have so many? Can't they help growing twelve feet high in this
new soil, any more than our maize? I suspect that Posterity will not
thank us for the hereditary disease of Carrara we are entailing on him,
and will try some heroic remedy, perhaps lithotripsy.

Nor was I troubled by what Mr. Vandal said about the late Benjamin
Webster. I am not a Boston man, and have, therefore, the privilege of
thinking for myself. Nor do I object to his claiming for women the right
to make books and pictures and (shall I say it?) statues,--only this
last becomes a grave matter, if we are to have statues of all the great
women, too! To be sure, there will not be the trousers-difficulty,--at
least, not at present; what we may come to is none of my affair. I even
go beyond him in my opinions on what is called the Woman Question. In
the gift of speech, they have always had the advantage of us; and though
the jealousy of the other sex have deprived us of the orations of
Xantippe, yet even Demosthenes does not seem to have produced greater
effects, if we may take the word of Socrates for it,--as I, for one,
very gladly do.

No,--what I complain of is not the lecturer's opinions, but the
eloquence with which he expressed them. He does not like statues better
than I do; but is it possible that he fails to see that the one nuisance
leads directly to the other, and that we set up three images of Talkers
for one to any kind of man who was useful in his generation? Let him
beware, or he will himself be petrified after death. Boston seems to be
specially unfortunate. She has more statues and more speakers than any
other city on this continent. I have with my own eyes seen a book called
"The Hundred Boston Orators." This would seem to give her a fairer title
to be called the _tire_ than the _hub_ of creation. What with the
speeches of her great men while they are alive, and those of her
surviving great men about those aforesaid after they are dead, and those
we look forward to from her _ditto ditto_ yet to be upon her _ditto
ditto_ now in being, and those of her paulopost _ditto ditto_ upon her
_ditto ditto_ yet to be, and those--But I am getting into the house that
Jack built.

And yet I remember once visiting the Massachusetts State House and being
struck with the Pythagorean fish hung on high in the Representatives'
Chamber, the emblem of a silence too sacred, as would seem, to be
observed except on Sundays. Eloquent Philip Vandal, I appeal t