ects, but it makes us falsify the present when we do take it
for our subject. I said just now that portrait-painters were historical
painters;--so they are; but not good ones, because not faithful ones.
The beginning and end of modern portraiture is adulation. The painters
cannot live but by flattery; we should desert them if they spoke
honestly. And therefore we can have no good portraiture; for in the
striving after that which is _not_ in their model, they lose the inner
and deeper nobleness which _is_ in their model. I saw not long ago, for
the first time, the portrait of a man whom I knew well--a young man, but
a religious man--and one who had suffered much from sickness. The whole
dignity of his features and person depended upon the expression of
serene, yet solemn, purpose sustaining a feeble frame; and the painter,
by way of flattering him, strengthened him, and made him athletic in
body, gay in countenance, idle in gesture; and the whole power and being
of the man himself were lost. And this is still more the case with our
public portraits. You have a portrait, for instance, of the Duke of
Wellington at the end of the North Bridge--one of the thousand
equestrian statues of Modernism--studied from the show-riders of the
amphitheater, with their horses on their hind-legs in the saw-dust.[38]
Do you suppose that was the way the Duke sat when your destinies
depended on him? when the foam hung from the lips of his tired horse,
and its wet limbs were dashed with the bloody slime of the battle-field,
and he himself sat anxious in his quietness, grieved in his
fearlessness, as he watched, scythe-stroke by scythe-stroke, the
gathering in of the harvest of death? You would have done something had
you thus left his image in the enduring iron, but nothing now.

[Footnote 38: I intended this last sentence of course to apply to the
thousand statues, not definitely to the one in immediate question,
which, though tainted with the modern affectation, and the nearest
example of it to which I could refer an Edinburgh audience, is the work
of a most promising sculptor; and was indeed so far executed on the
principles asserted in the text, that the Duke gave Mr. Steele a sitting
on horse-back, in order that his mode of riding might be accurately
represented. This, however, does not render the following remarks in the
text nugatory, as it may easily be imagined that the action of the Duke,
exhibiting his riding in his own grounds, wou