The first man born in America who was foolhardy enough deliberately to choose sculpture as a profession was Horatio Greenough, born in 1805, of well-to-do parents, and carefully educated. It is difficult to say just what it was that turned the boy to this difficult and exacting art--an unknown art, too, so far as America was concerned. But he seems to have begun woodcarving at an early age, and to have progressed from that to chalk and on to plaster of Paris. The American national habit of whittling was perhaps responsible for the development of more than one sculptor. At any rate, by the time he was twelve years old, Horatio Greenough had produced some portrait busts in chalk, and, after having tried unsuccessfully to learn clay-modelling from directions in an old encyclopedia, took some lessons from an artist who chanced to be in Boston, and from a maker of tombstones, got a little insight into the method of carving marble. These lessons, elementary as they must have been, were very valuable to the boy, and his work showed such promise that his father finally consented to his adopting this strange profession, insisting only that he first graduate from Harvard, on the ground that a college education would be of value, whatever his vocation. So he entered college at the age of sixteen, devoting all his spare time to reading works of art, to drawing and modelling, and the study of anatomy. He had also the good fortune to meet and win the friendship of Washington Allston, who advised him as to plans of study. Immediately upon graduation, he sailed for Italy, which was, sadly enough, to be the Mecca of American sculptors for many years to come. For Italian sculpture was bound hand and foot by the traditions of classicism, to which our early sculptors soon fell captive. Greenough was no exception, and some years of study in the Italian studios rivetted the chains. His first commission was given him by J. Fenimore Cooper. It was a group called the "Chanting Cherubs," and when it was sent home for exhibition, it awakened a tempest of the first magnitude. Puritan ideas were outraged at sight of the little naked bodies, the group was declared indecent, and the bitter controversy was not stilled until it was withdrawn from view. Greenough wrote of Cooper, "he saved me from despair; he employed me as I wished to be employed; and has, up to this moment, been a father to me in kindness"--a singularly interesting addition to the portrait of the great novelist, famous for his enmities rather than for his friendships.