alues. Yet he found her opinion
worthy of attention, as evincing her real love of beautiful things, and
her great desire to understand the high significance of art. He makes
some quotations from her notes on the Athenaeum Gallery of sculpture in
1840.

Here she finds marble busts of Byron and Napoleon. The first, with all
its beauty, appears to her "sultry, stern, all-craving, all-commanding,"
and expressive of something which accounts for what she calls "the grand
failure of his scheme of existence." The head of Napoleon is, she says,
not only stern but ruthless. "Yet this ruthlessness excites no aversion.
The artist has caught its true character, and given us here the Attila,
the instrument of fate to serve a purpose not his own." She groups the
poet and the warrior together as having, "the one in letters, the other
in arms, represented more fully than any other the tendency of their
time; [they] more than any other gave it a chance for reaction." Near
these she finds a head of the poet Ennius, and busts also of Edward
Everett, Washington Allston, and Daniel Webster. Her comment upon this
juxtaposition is interesting.

"Yet even near the Ennius and Napoleon our American men look worthy to
be perpetuated in marble or bronze, if it were only for their air of
calm, unpretending sagacity."

Mr. Henry James, Jr., writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne, speaks of the
Massachusetts of forty or more years ago as poor in its aesthetic
resources. Works of art indeed were then few in number, and decorative
industry, in its present extent, was not dreamed of. But in the
intellectual form of appreciative criticism the Boston of that day was
richer than the city of our own time. The first stage of culture is
cultivation, and the art lovers of that day had sowed the seed of
careful study, and were intent upon its growth and ripening. If
possession is nine points of the law, as it is acknowledged to be, the
knowledge of values may be said to be nine points of possession, and
Margaret and her friends, with their knowledge of the import of art,
and with their trained and careful observation of its outward forms, had
a richer feast in the casts and engravings of that time than can be
enjoyed to-day by the amateur, who, with a _bric-a-brac_ taste and
_blase_ feeling, haunts the picture-shops of our large cities, or treads
the galleries in which the majestic ghosts of earnest times rebuke his
flippant frivolity.

We have lingered over these