This design, also, is intended only _in terrorem_, and will
be suppressed for an adequate consideration.
I find one comfort, however, in the very hideousness of our statues. The
fear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone may
deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves
into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel a
wholesome dread of this posthumous retribution. I cannot in any other
way account for that nightmare of the solitary horseman on the edge of
the horizon, in his Hartford Speech. His imagination is infected with
the terrible consciousness, that Mr. Mills, as the younger man, will, in
the course of Nature, survive him, and will be left loose to seek new
victims of his nefarious designs. Formerly the punishment of the wooden
horse was a degradation inflicted on private soldiers only; but Mr.
Mills (whose genius could make even Pegasus look wooden, in whatever
material) flies at higher game, and will be content with nothing short
of a general.
Mr. Cushing advises extreme measures. He counsels us to sell our real
estate and stocks, and to leave a country where no man's reputation with
posterity is safe, being merely as clay in the hands of the sculptor. To
a mind undisturbed by the terror natural in one whose military
reputation insures his cutting and running (I mean, of course, in marble
and bronze), the question becomes an interesting one,--To whom, in case
of a general exodus, shall we sell? The statues will have the land all
to themselves,--until the Aztecs, perhaps, repeopling their ancient
heritage, shall pay divine honors to these images, whose ugliness will
revive the traditions of the classic period of Mexican Art.
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