than we know,” he would say. He refused to join in any of our modern merriment at the expense of the Olympian Zeus. _Esprit de corps_ compelled him to recognize in Greenough some large trace of the artist as well as the craftsman. II Consider for a moment the attractive young Irish-American sculptor Crawford standing rapt before his splendidly blank Senate pediment, with his theme of the Past and Present of the Republic in his eye. Those were our blithe beginning days when a sculptor might confront his pediment with a heart unburdened by the remembrance of other men’s failures in pediments, and with a mind undisciplined by any previous knowledge of the needs of pediments. He did not dread those bitter acuities of space at right and left, those angles which to modern discrimination often seem so grossly overstuffed when filled, so tragically vacant when left “to let.” He had never heard of the “orchestration of shadows,” or of “musical repetitions,” or of “blonde modeling,” or of “keeping the masses white,” or of “the creative spiral,” or of “mastery through the golden diagonal.” He had never been adjured, like the young student Saint-Gaudens, to “beware the _boule de suif_”; on the other hand, he had never been advised, with students coming after Saint-Gaudens, to seek richness of modeling by means of “fatty ends.” Sculptural color he would probably have regarded as having something to do with paint. He of course had his own patter, blown abroad by the writers of a too prosaic poetry and a too poetic prose. The real writers, too, used to lend a hand in presenting art to the public. When the genius of Edward Everett sprang to the rescue of Greenough’s Washington, and when Hawthorne sent out winged words about little Miss Hosmer’s Zenobia, sculpture was receiving from scholarship a needed sort of first aid. To return to the Capitol pediment, Crawford’s intention and attitude were quite uncomplicated. He had but to snatch the largest theme in sight, and to do his best with shaping its figures one by one inside his triangle of grandeur. The marvel is that he came so near to success. The thing has a kind of distinction from the man’s singleness of aim. Since then, scores of our sculptors from coast to coast have solved the pediment problem with varying success. Many of them bring a highly personal and interesting solution. Ward, Bartlett, French, O’Connor, Bitter, Weinman, the Piccirillis,--these names but begin the list. The world calls us a wasteful nation, a nation that unbuilds as it builds. In the face of this, it is pleasant to know that only a few months ago, Mr. Bartlett’s handsome Peace Protecting Genius has been set up in the House pediment, to match Crawford’s Past and Present of the Republic at the Senate wing. Nearly a century has elapsed since the Capitol first busied itself with pedimental decorations. Our sculpture has had time to learn in these years. III