tatue. Women generally sit for their own statues, from a natural
disinclination to admit the superior beauty of a friend, but they expect
to be idealised. I understood that the multitude of these statues was
beginning to be felt as an encumbrance in almost every family, and that
the custom would probably before long fall into desuetude.

Indeed, this has already come about to the satisfaction of every one, as
regards the statues of public men--not more than three of which can be
found in the whole capital. I expressed my surprise at this, and was
told that some five hundred years before my visit, the city had been so
overrun with these pests, that there was no getting about, and people
were worried beyond endurance by having their attention called at every
touch and turn to something, which, when they had attended to it, they
found not to concern them. Most of these statues were mere attempts to
do for some man or woman what an animal-stuffer does more successfully
for a dog, or bird, or pike. They were generally foisted on the public
by some coterie that was trying to exalt itself in exalting some one
else, and not unfrequently they had no other inception than desire on the
part of some member of the coterie to find a job for a young sculptor to
whom his daughter was engaged. Statues so begotten could never be
anything but deformities, and this is the way in which they are sure to
be begotten, as soon as the art of making them at all has become widely
practised.

I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a
very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to
decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they
cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living
organism--better dead than dying. There is no way of making an aged art
young again; it must be born anew and grow up from infancy as a new
thing, working out its own salvation from effort to effort in all fear
and trembling.

The Erewhonians five hundred years ago understood 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 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.