They
should have had some such an establishment as our Madame Tussaud'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 colourless 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 assimilated, 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 museums up and down the country.
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