out of his learned abstraction, owl-like, yet benevolent at
heart. The statue is immensely massive, a vast ponderosity of stone, not
finely spiritualized, nor indeed, fully humanized, but rather resembling a
great stone-boulder than a man. You must look with the eyes of faith and
sympathy, or possibly, you might lose the human being altogether, and find
only a big stone within your mental grasp. On the pedestal are three
bas-reliefs. In the first, Johnson is represented as hardly more than a
baby, bestriding an old man's shoulders, resting his chin on the bald head
which he embraces with his little arms, and listening earnestly to the
high-church eloquence of Dr. Sacheverell. In the second tablet, he is seen
riding to school on the shoulders of two of his comrades, while another
boy supports him in the rear.

The third bas-relief possesses, to my mind, a great deal of pathos, to
which my appreciative faculty is probably the more alive, because I have
always been profoundly imprest by the incident here commemorated, and long
ago tried to tell it for the behoof of childish readers. It shows Johnson
in the market-place of Uttoxeter, doing penance for an act of disobedience
to his father, committed, fifty years before. He stands bare-headed, a
venerable figure, and a countenance extremely sad and wo-begone, with the
wind and rain driving hard against him, and thus helping to suggest to the
spectator the gloom of his inward state. Some market-people and children
gaze awe-stricken into his face, and an aged man and woman, with clapsed
and uplifted hands, seem to be praying for him. These latter personages
(whose introduction by the artist is none the less effective, because, in
queer proximity, there are some commodities of market-day in the shape of
living ducks and dead poultry,) I interpreted to represent the spirits of
Johnson's father and mother, lending what aid they could to lighten his
half-century's burden of remorse.

I had never heard of the above-described piece of sculpture before; it
appears to have no reputation as a work of art, nor am I at all positive
that it deserves any. For me, however, it did as much as sculpture could
under the circumstances, even if the artist of the Libyan Sibyl had
wrought it, by reviving my interest in the sturdy old Englishman, and
particularly by freshening my perception of a wonderful beauty and
pathetic tenderness in the incident of the penance.

The next day I left Lichfield f