There are two considerations which may have misled Mr. Powers. One, a
pecuniary one, which he should have disposed of as did Agassiz, when
such was advanced to induce him to give lyceum lectures:--"Sir, I
cannot afford to make money!" The other may have been the weight of the
prevailing error that portrait-sculpture is a less honorable branch of
Art.

Less than what? The historical? What finer history than Titian's Paul
III., Raphael's Leo X., Albert Dürer's head of himself? What finer than
the Pericles, the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, the Demosthenes of the
Vatican, Chantrey's Scott, Houdon's Voltaire, Powers's Jackson?--Heroic?
what more heroic than the Lateran Sophocles, the Venetian Colleoni, or
Rauch's statue of Frederick the Great?--Poetical? What picture more
sweetly poetical than Raphael's head of himself in the Uffizi, or
Giotto's Dante in the Bargello? What _ideal_ statue surpasses in
poetical power Michel Angelo's De' Medici in the San Lorenzo Chapel?
What ideal head is more beautiful than the Townley Clytie of the British
Museum, or the Young Augustus of the Vatican? What grander than Da
Vinci's portrait of himself?

No,--when the sculptor has wrought the adequate representation of the
individual in its best estate, he may rest assured that he has achieved
"high Art."

Let us not be unjust to Mr. Powers's ideal works. In the qualities of
chasteness of conception, delicacy of treatment, temperate grace, and
that rarer, finer quality of dignified repose, they have not been
surpassed since the time of Greek Art. When the subject chosen has not
been foreign to the artist's nature, as in the "Eve," nor foreign to the