April 3d.--A few days ago we visited the studio of Mr. ------, an
American, who seems to have a good deal of vogue as a sculptor. We found
a figure of Pocahontas, which he has repeated several times; another,
which he calls "The Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish," a figure of a smiling
girl playing with a cat and dog, and a schoolboy mending a pen. These
two last were the only ones that gave me any pleasure, or that really had
any merit; for his cleverness and ingenuity appear in homely subjects,
but are quite lost in attempts at a higher ideality. Nevertheless, he
has a group of the Prodigal Son, possessing more merit than I should have
expected from Mr. ------, the son reclining his head on his father's
breast, with an expression of utter weariness, at length finding perfect
rest, while the father bends his benign countenance over him, and seems
to receive him calmly into himself. This group (the plaster-cast
standing beside it) is now taking shape out of an immense block of
marble, and will be as indestructible as the Laocoon; an idea at once
awful and ludicrous, when we consider that it is at best but a
respectable production. I have since been told that Mr. ------ had
stolen, adopted, we will rather say, the attitude and idea of the group
from one executed by a student of the French Academy, and to be seen
there in plaster. (We afterwards saw it in the Medici Casino.)

Mr. ------ has now been ten years in Italy, and, after all this time, he
is still entirely American in everything but the most external surface of
his manners; scarcely Europeanized, or much modified even in that. He is
a native of ------, but had his early breeding in New York, and might,
for any polish or refinement that I can discern in him, still be a
country shopkeeper in the interior of New York State or New England. How
strange! For one expects to find the polish, the close grain and white
purity of marble, in the artist who works in that noble material; but,