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nothing of all this—I doubt whether they even do so now.
They wanted to get the nearest thing they could to a stuffed
man whose stuffing should not grow mouldy. They should
have had some such an establishment as our Madame Tus-
saud’s, where the figures wear real clothes, and are painted
up to nature. Such an institution might have been made self-
supporting, for people might have been made to pay before
going in. As it was, they had let their poor cold grimy co-
lourless heroes and heroines loaf about in squares and in
corners of streets in all weathers, without any attempt at
artistic sanitation—for there was no provision for burying
their dead works of art out of their sight—no drainage, so
to speak, whereby statues that had been sufficiently assimi-
lated, so as to form part of the residuary impression of the
country, might be carried away out of the system. Hence
they put them up with a light heart on the cackling of their
coteries, and they and their children had to live, often
enough, with some wordy windbag whose cowardice had
cost the country untold loss in blood and money.
At last the evil reached such a pitch that the people rose,
and with indiscriminate fury destroyed good and bad alike.
Most of what was destroyed was bad, but some few works
were good, and the sculptors of to-day wring their hands
over some of the fragments that have been preserved in mu-
seums up and down the country. For a couple of hundred
years or so, not a statue was made from one end of the king-
dom to the other, but the instinct for having stuffed men
and women was so strong, that people at length again began
to try to make them. Not knowing how to make them, and

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