[Illustration: JOHN BRIGHT, BY HAMO THORNYCROFT, R.A. _From a Photo._] Mr. Thornycroft has succeeded very well with the trousers of his John Bright statue. As trousers, and as characteristic trousers, we defy the most captious hypercritic to urge anything against them. They are precisely the sort of leg-covering the late eminent statesman ought to have worn, nor do we doubt that, had he been actuated by that due regard for sartorial proprieties which the artist seeks at the hands, or rather at the legs, of eminent persons, he would have worn them. But an intimate friend of Mr. Bright's, who has, at our request, minutely surveyed the bronze statue at Rochdale, readily pronounces his opinion that the trousers are not by any means his fellow-townsman's. "The material is too thin," he writes. "John Bright's trousers were of extra heavy West of England cloth. They bagged a lot at the knees, but fitted rather tightly at the calves. The boots are certainly not his," he adds; and then, as if to justify this oracular style of speech, "I know because there was no carpet on the floor of the room where Mr. Bright and myself habitually met; so I studied his lower extremities while he spoke to me instead." [Illustration: THE GAMBETTA STATUE, PARIS. _From a Photo._] In the course of a conversation with the French sculptor, M. Jean Carries, that artist once defined to the writer the whole position of the French school of to-day. "Its aim is life--animation--drama. To leave anything dormant is to leave the stone as you found it, and to acknowledge the futility of your genius. All the characteristics of life might be imparted to even a modern street costume. "Only a tailor or a person deficient in culture would criticise the trousers of the Gambetta statue. Such a person would say, 'But I have never seen them in the Boulevards or in the Palais Bourbon.' Of course he has not; and what then? Did Raphael ever see an angel, or Michael Angelo a faun? No. A pair of widely-cut trousers with a single crease or fold might answer very well for a tailor's dummy; but it would not do at all for a chiselled human figure, which must express potential life."