It is modeled from the Roman Pantheon, and its roof, at least, is like it. We have no proof that the Roman Pantheon was set apart for such a purpose as that to which our own is dedicated; indeed, in the beginning it was supposed to be connected with the Roman baths. To-day it is chiefly sacred to art as the burial-place of Raphael. The French Pantheon, also, was comparatively poor in statues, though boasting of immense compositions in painting, by David and Gros. Herein the great men who have illustrated France appear in the forms of Fenelon, Malesherbes, Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau, Lafayette, and others; while at their feet, as befits their sex, sit History and Liberty, properly employed making wreaths for the heads of these masculine heroes. From the dome look down Clovis, Charlemagne, St. Louis, Louis XIV., XVI., XVII., Marie Antoinette, Madame Elizabeth, with a central glory to represent Deity. The dome of our own rotunda is a florid imitation of this. We have Franklin, Washington, and troops of goddesses, who look like bar-maids; but from the focal apex we have omitted God, whose eye is needed for such an assembly. The magnificent facade which leads to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster Palace is nine hundred feet long, paneled with tracery and decorated with rows of majestic statues of the kings and queens of England, from the conquest to the present time. Let us hope that it will never be defiled from beginning to end, as our own magnificent legislative halls, with tobacco-juice from the mouths of demoralized men. The earth has never had but one absolutely perfect building, in itself the final consummate flower of art—the Parthenon—consecrated first to woman, the Virgin House, sacred to Athena. Beneath its pure and perfect dome there was nothing to divert the gazer’s contemplation from the simplicity and majesty of mass and outline. The whole building, without and within, was filled with the most exquisite pieces of sculpture, executed under the guidance of Phidias. The grand central figure was the colossal statue of the Virgin Goddess, wrought by the hand of Phidias himself. The weight of gold which she carried, says Thucydides, was forty talents. Could a wooden fence guard so much gold in our Christian Pantheon to-day? It was a happy thought which dedicated this old hall of the nation to national art, but it far outleaped its century. That which shall truly be the Pantheon of America is not for us. The children of later generations, a far-off procession, may come up hither to worship the diviner forms of the future, the majestic statues of the nation’s best—its sons grand in manhood, its daughters divine in womanhood; but, with here and there a rare exception, our eyes who live to-day will see them not. CHAPTER XII. WOMEN WITH CLAIMS.