I am glad to be able in these pages to render tribute, however feeble, to one of the great but unappreciated geniuses of his time; a man of powerful intellect as well as powerful frame, a true artist of heroic mould and thought, who dwarfed the poor pigmies of the day in which his lot was cast by conceptions too grand to find a market: Patric Park, sculptor, who concealed under a somewhat rude and rough exterior as tender a heart as ever beat in a human bosom. Had he been an ancient Greek, his name might have become immortal. Had he been a modern Frenchman, the art in which he excelled would have brought him not only bread, but fortune. But as he was only a portrayer of the heroic in the very prosaic country in which his lot was cast, it was as much as he could do to pay his way by the scanty rewards of an art which few people appreciated, or even understood, and to waste upon the marble busts of rich men, who had a fancy for that style of portraiture, the talents, or rather the genius, which, had encouragement come, might have produced epics in stone to have rivalled the masterpieces of antiquity. Patrick, or, as he usually signed himself, Patric, Park was born in Glasgow in 1809, and I made his acquaintance in the _Morning Chronicle_ office in 1842, when he was in the prime of his early manhood. He sent a letter to the editor to request the insertion of a modest paragraph in reference to a work of his which had found a tardy purchaser in Stirling, where it was destined to adorn the beautiful public cemetery of the city. The paragraph was inserted not as he wrote it, but with a kindly addition in praise of his work and of his genius. He came to the office next day to know the writer’s name. And when the writer avowed himself, a friendship sprung up between the two, which suffered no abatement during the too short life of the grateful man of genius, who, for the first time, had been publicly recognized by the humble pen of one who could command, in artistic and literary matters, the columns of a powerful journal. Park’s nature was broad and bold, and scorned conventionalities and false pretence. George Outram, a lawyer and editor of a Glasgow newspaper, author of several humorous songs and lyrics upon the odds and ends of legal practice, among which the “Annuity” survives in perennial youth in Edinburgh and Glasgow society, and brother of the gallant Sir James Outram, of Indian fame, used to say of Park, that he liked him because he was not smooth and conventional. “There is not in the world,” he said to me on one occasion, “another man with so many delightful corners in his character as Park. We are all of us much too smooth and rounded off. Give me Park and genuine nature, and all the more corners the better.”