The authority of Professor Godebski of St. Petersburg is given for the extraordinary statement that the Russian authorities in Poland have prohibited the contemplated erection of a monument to Chopin in his native Warsaw, on the ground that it might become an occasion for a political manifestation. M. Godebski was to have executed the statue, a plan had been submitted and accepted, musical admirers of Chopin had favored the project, Prince Orloff, Princess Czartoryska and many ladies of the Polish nobility had contributed the necessary funds, when the whole scheme was vetoed by Count von Berg, on the pretext already stated. Surely this was pushing caution to extremes, even in Poland. It was Chopin's fate to be driven from his country in 1836 by revolutionary disorders; but the very composition of the monumental committee, which was under the direction of Madame Mouchanoff, an ardent admirer of the master, indicated that the enterprise was an artistic, not a political one. Chopin, reposing between Bellini and Cherubini in the Pere la Chaise, his chosen burial-place, has long since passed from the narrow confines of his Polish nationality to the worldwide and immortal realm of art. In pretending, thirty years after his death, that the genius of the artist is of less account than the accident of his birthplace, and in reviving against this memorial project the entirely secondary facts of the revolutionary epoch (when Chopin's career was not in politics, but in art), the Russian authorities are wondrously sensitive, to say the least. A chagrined friend of the sculptor has proposed that a piece of ground should be bought, a temporary wooden house built on it, the statue set up as if in a private courtyard or gallery, and the doors then thrown open to the public, while, after some days or months, the building could be taken down, leaving the statue substantially on a public square. But the prohibition which vetoed the original project would of course cover this stratagem also, and besides, it would be rather too petty a device to engage in. LITERATURE OF THE DAY. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. By George Eliot. Vol. II. New York: Harper & Brothers.