Subscriptions are advertised for the purpose of raising monuments to Sir Robert Peel; and a motion has been made in Parliament for one in Westminster Abbey at the public expense, Whatever may be the precedents, surely the house of God should contain no object but such as may remind us of His presence and our duty to Him. Long ago I proposed that ranges of statues and busts should commemorate the great worthies of our country. All the lower part of our National Gallery might be laid open for this purpose. Even the best monuments in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's are deformities to the edifice. Let us not continue this disgrace. Deficient as we are in architects, we have many good statuaries, and we might well employ them on the statues of illustrious commanders, and the busts of illustrious statesmen and writers. Meanwhile our cities, and especially the commercial, would, I am convinced, act more wisely, and more satisfactorily to the relict of the deceased, if, instead of statues, they erected schools and almshouses, with an inscription to his memory. We glory in about sixty whose busts and statues may occupy what are now the "deep solitudes and awful cells" in our national gallery. Our literary men of eminence are happily more numerous than the political or the warlike, or both together. There is only one class of them which might be advantageously excluded, namely, the theological; and my reasons are these. First, their great talents were chiefly employed on controversy; secondly, and consequently, their images would excite dogmatical discord. Every sect of the Anglican Church, and every class of dissenters, complaining of undue preferences. Painture and sculpture lived in the midst of corruption, lived throughout it, and seemed indeed to draw vitality from it, as flowers the most delicate from noxious air; but they collapsed at the searching breath of free inquiry, and could not abide persecution. The torch of Philosophy never kindled the suffocating fagot, under whose smoke Theology was mistaken for Religion. Theology had, until now, been speculative and quiescent: she abandoned to Philosophy these humbler qualities: instead of allaying and dissipating, as Philosophy had always done, she excited and she directed animosities. Oriental in her parentage, and keeping up her wide connections in that country, she acquired there all the artifices most necessary to the furtherance of her designs: among the rest was ventriloquism, which she quite perfected, making her words seem to sound from above and from below and from every side around. Ultimately, when men had fallen on their faces at this miracle, she assumed the supreme power. Kings were her lackeys, and nations the dust under her palfrey's hoof. By her sentence Truth was gagged, scourged, branded, cast down on the earth in manacles; and Fortitude, who had stood at Truth's side, was fastened with nails and pulleys to the stake. I would not revive by any images, in the abode