provincial newspapers.


LETTER FROM...

But enough! I never thought I should be so strong in this line. I had
not foreseen such copiousness and fatal fluency. Never again will I
tap these deep dark reservoirs in a character that had always seemed
to me, on the whole, so amiable.



MOBLED KING
1911.

Just as a memorial, just to perpetuate in one's mind the dead man in
whose image and honour it has been erected, this statue is better than
any that I have seen.... No, pedantic reader: I ought not to have said
`than any other that I have seen' Except in shrouded and distorted
outline, I have not seen this statue.

Not as an image, then, can it be extolled by me. And I am bound to say
that even as an honour it seems to me more than dubious. Commissioned
and designed and chiselled and set up in all reverence, it yet serves
very well the purpose of a guy. This does not surprise you. You are
familiar with a host of statues that are open to precisely that
objection. Westminster Abbey abounds in them. They confront you
throughout London and the provinces. They stud the Continent. Rare
indeed is the statue that can please the well-wishers of the person
portrayed. Nor in every case is the sculptor to blame. There is in the