asm which it excited.

The "Greek Slave" was only the beginning. Powers turned out one statue
after another with considerable rapidity, but his reputation rests
mainly to-day on his portrait busts of men. It is characteristic of
artists that the things they do best and easiest they value least, and
this was so with Powers. His portrait busts were, in a sense, mere
pot-boilers; he lavished himself upon his ideal figures. But these are
now ranked as unimaginative and commonplace.

Third among our early sculptors of importance was Thomas Crawford, born
eight years later than Greenough and Powers, and preceding the latter to
the grave by many years, yet leaving behind him a mass of work which, if
it shows no great imagination, displays considerable poetic refinement.
Driven to Italy because it was only there that marble work could be
well and economically done, he lived there for some years, earning a
bare subsistence by the production of second-rate portrait busts and
copies of antique statuary. Then he attracted the attention of Charles
Sumner, and with his help, was enabled, in 1839, to produce his first
important work, the "Orpheus," now in the Boston Museum. Many others
followed, but they were of that ideal and sentimental type, very foreign
to modern taste.

Crawford was an indefatigable workman, and few American museums are
without one or more examples of his product. In the public square at
Richmond, Virginia, stands one of his most important monuments, crowned
by an astonishing equestrian figure of Washington, which he himself
executed. Two of the subordinate statues are also his--those of Patrick
Henry and Thomas Jefferson--and represent the best work he ever did.

Another of his productions is the great figure of Freedom which crowns
the dome of the Capitol at Washington, not unworthily. By a fortunate
chance, which the sculptor could hardly have foreseen, the bulky and
roughly modelled figure gains airiness and majesty from its lofty
position, where its sickly-sweet countenance and clumsy adornment are
refined by distance. It has become, in a way, a national ideal, a part
of the Republic.

The success of these three men and the immense reputation which they
attained naturally attracted others to a profession whose rewards were
so exalted. The first to achieve anything like an enduring reputation
was Henry Kirke Brown, born in Massachusetts in 1814. He early displayed
some talent for portrait painting, and w