Looking at the general assembly of portrait statues here, we see at once that these works are freer and happier when their subjects, to alter Washington’s historic words, permit “some little deviation in _disfavor_ of modern costume.” Mr. Quinn, in his statue of Edwin Booth, and Mr. Weinman, in his spirited Macomb, have profited sculpturally by such permissions. Most of the bronze statues in the Rotunda of the Library of Congress have an added chance at immortality because personages like Solon in his _himation_ and the Droeshout Shakespeare in his doublet and hose, Michelangelo with his angry leather apron and Columbus with his sea-coat and world-map, and Joseph Henry in his gown are freed from the tyranny of modern tailoring. They evade the question; they have every opportunity to look as good as they are. But the statue of a plain blunt modern man rarely looks as good as it is; clothes bewray it; and so we shall find all our modern artists using one subterfuge or another to relieve the bleak dulness of modern manly dress seen at full length in the round. [Illustration: STATUE OF MAJ. GEN. MACOMB BY ADOLPH A. WEINMAN] Saint-Gaudens seats his Peter Cooper king-like within a Renaissance portico, and places a curule chair behind his standing Lincoln. Though Lincoln is a greatly revered subject in American sculpture,--a subject of exceedingly rugged force,--few sculptors are satisfied to present Lincoln, plain in his usual garb; they give the hero a background, or a cloak, or an exedra, or a top hat on a bench, so keenly do they feel the lack of amplifying circumstances. Yet certainly Lincoln’s bronze clothing offers more of interest than that of today’s captains of destiny, soldiers excepted. And how distinctively American is the note sounded in all our portrait statues of Lincoln! Saint-Gaudens, French, MacNeil, Weinman, Barnard, Borglum, and O’Connor have made some of the best of these. One sees that a good statue of Lincoln _must_ be “distinctively American”; let all “viewers with alarm” be comforted by observing that Frenchification or Italianization slips away from a Lincoln statue like water from a duck’s back. IV