It would be well if some central advisory board could be established--a central authority can hardly be expected, and indeed would not even be desirable. The nature of memorials should be carefully scrutinised. We are always weak in allegorical representation, and perhaps for that very reason have a great fondness for it. Our civic heraldry, for instance, is woefully weak, not by excess of symbolism, so much as by a desperate inclusiveness of all local tradition, till the shield becomes a landscape in which a company of travellers have hung their private property on every bush. Thus with our taste for representing and explaining and accounting and cataloguing, our memorials become architectural first, with every cornice loaded with precarious figures, like the painting described by Dickens of six angels carrying a stout gentleman to heaven in festoons with some difficulty. Our inscriptions become biographies. Again, the surrounding scene is little regarded. A statesman in a bronze frock-coat and trousers reading aloud a bronze manuscript behind the railings of a city square, embowered in acacias, has no power over the mind except the power of a ludicrous sense of embarrassment. A statue, majestic enough in a pillared alcove, is only uncomfortable in a storm of wind and rain. We ought, I believe, to fight shy of elaborate _designs_, because the pantomime of allegory at once begins. What we rather need is simplicity of statement, with perhaps a touch of emblem, no more, of characteristic material, of perfect gravity, so that the gazer can see at once that the matter recorded is great and significant, and desires to know more. It is said that an inscription was once to be seen in India, marking one of the farthest points of the advance of Alexander the Great. It was a slab with the words: ΕΝΤΑΥΘΑ · ΕϹΤΗΝ ‘Here I stood’--upon it. What could be more impressive, what more calculated to sow a seed of wonder in an imaginative mind? These memorials should, I believe, evoke the spirit of the artist, as a craftsman, rather than as a designer. Alike in inscriptions and in representations, the wholesome and humble appeal must be direct and personal, avoiding rhetoric and over-emphasis, as well as elaborate conventions which other hands will dully and mechanically reproduce. If, as in cast metal-work, reproduction is natural and inevitable, let the designs be perfectly simple and sincere; if again it be painter, sculptor, carver, or builder that is called upon to create a memorial, let the responsibility and originality of the craft be his, and not be superseded or overruled by the authority of the design--for this indeed is, as Professor Prior said wittily to me the other day, as though a surgeon should provide a specification and an estimate for an operation, and leave the execution of it to other hands.