carved out of a block of pine, is remarkable for a realistic force and character that entitle it to a permanent place in the records of American sculpture. Sculpture, however, was much more backward in gaining a foothold in the country than the sister arts; for it was not until 1824 that the first portrait in marble by a native was executed--that of John Wells, by John Frazee, a stone-cutter, whose sole art education was obtained during an apprenticeship in a yard where rude monumental work was turned out for the bleak cemeteries in use before such sumptuous retreats as Greenwood and Mount Auburn were planned. There was a feeling after the ideal in the nature of this unassisted artist which enabled him to be potential in influencing younger artists; while his opportunities were unfavorable to the just development of his own abilities. Rush began to model in clay in 1789, and at that time not one of the artists who have since given celebrity to our native sculpture had seen the light. Frazee was born in 1790; and Hezekiah Augur, of New Haven, in 1791. The latter was engaged in the grocery trade, and failing in that, took up modelling and wood-carving, without any guide except his natural instincts. Like many of our first sculptors, his efforts are interesting rather as evidences of what talent entirely uninstructed and untrained can accomplish, than for any intrinsic value in his work. Many of the artists who have succeeded him have also begun life in some trade or profession altogether at variance with the art to which they afterward consecrated their lives. It was not till the year 1805, long after Copley, West, Malbone, Allston, and Stuart had demonstrated our capacity for pictorial art, that the genius of the country seemed inclined to allow us a plastic art of our own. In that year Hiram Powers was born, one of the best known sculptors of the century. The same year witnessed the birth of Horatio Greenough. In the remote wilds of Kentucky, still harried by the Indians, Hart was born in 1810; and Clevenger, Crawford, and Mills followed in 1812, 1813, and 1815--all artists of note, even if of unequal merits, and important as pioneers in the art rather than the creators of a great school of sculpture. Thus we see that without any apparent previous preparation a strong impulse toward glyptic art and the men to direct and give it strength simultaneously sprung up in the land. When one considers the disadvantages under which they labored, and that, so far as can be known, they were not even aided by any heredity of genius in this direction, criticism is tempered by surprise that they achieved the results they did, and that two of them at least--Powers and Crawford--succeeded in winning for themselves a European renown which made them almost the peers of some of the leading foreign sculptors of the age, who were born amidst the trophies of classic and Renaissance art.