foes, and the epithets "miraculous" and "mechanical."

It is possible that the highest type of portrait-sculpture is beyond the
limit of this specialty; indeed, it is almost impossible that with the
elements constituting it there should be associated the still rarer
power to achieve the most exalted ideal Art; and such Art we believe the
highest portraiture to be.

A consummate representation of a man in his divinest development, the
last refined ideal of him _then_, would be indeed somewhat miraculous!

The world asks less. It claims to know of a man what the face of him
became under the influences of human, temporal relations. It wants
preserved of the statesman the statesman's face, of the merchant the
merchant's face; and this demand, when governed by a cultivated taste,
is a legitimate one,--as legitimate as is the demand for any history.
The public requires the image of the man whom the public knew, and
they regard as valuable that which can be received as a definite and
trustworthy statement of a great man, or of one whom it esteemed great.
It requires this, has a right to such information; and the generation
which fails to demand of its artists a true record of its prominent men
fails utterly in its duty. The bust of a man goes down to posterity, not
only the history which it is in itself, but as an interpreter of the
history of its age. Were it not for Art, an age would recede into the
unknown, to be recorded as dark, or into the shadowy world of myth.
Portraiture, more than aught else, serves to elucidate the tradition or
story of a people. How impossible to explain to the twentieth century
the bad mystery of our present, without the aid of Powers's head of
Calhoun, the less adequate bust of Stephen A. Douglas, and the one which
_should_ be modelled of Mr. Buchanan! A faithful delineation of the