glaring in
lattice-work, bosses, scrolls and frets, and trickling everywhere over
the efflorescence of the plaster decorations. There are two or three
committee-rooms, likewise, very elaborately, though very questionably,
decorated, and usually on exhibition to rural visitors, who gape at
them with a happy sense of the proprietorship of such pomp. The least
unworthy of these is the room set apart for the Committee on Military
Affairs: vivid wreaths of laurel decorate the ceiling much more
effectively than do the sprawling females of most of the other places;
a couple of large battle-pieces illuminate the walls, and cornice,
panel and pilaster are simply adorned with frescoed arms and muniments
of war. Another is the room of the Agricultural Committee, where, with
his group of Romans, Cincinnatus, called from the plough, fills the
upper section of one end, and confronts his modern compeer, Israel
Putnam; above two side doors little scenes of grain-harvesting
illustrate the difference between the old and the new way of
going afield; and circling overhead are the Seasons and their
attendants--Spring, with armfuls of blossoms and cherubs letting loose
the doves; Summer, whose sprites are shooting down arrows of fervid
heat; Autumn, with his grapes and sheaves, and his followers festive
with lute and tambourine; and old Winter, moving through angry clouds,
while his children pour out the showers and blow blasts from their
shells. In the room of the Committee on Naval Affairs on both sides
as you enter rise grayly the vestibules of vast temples, typifying,
perhaps, the sea as the gateway of all nations: above them, much
foreshortened, Neptune and Amphitrite, AEolus, Oceanus, Nereus and
Thetis, accompany a new sea-goddess, America, with scores of nymphs
interspersed--all of them riding on sea-horses and simpering sadly;
while in the great panels around the sides of the room other nymphs,
painted at full length in lively colors, are bearing aloft various
symbols of the sea--this one a sextant, that a chart, another a
compass, a fourth a bannerol, sufficiently prosaic in idea, though
not ungraceful in fact, as witness the floating damsel who carries a
barometer lightly as a mermaid carries her glass, or the figure with
the red-gold hair whose back alone we see as she unrolls her map.
But it is not easy to say why we should recur to mythology for our
national ornamentation, or why the ancient Greeks should be called
in where our