Printed portraits of the present President and of former Presidents, and plaster busts of these personages, of course. That many of the articles for "remembrance" should be touched with a patriotic design, of course, too. But why today should so many millions of the "souvenir spoons" (with the Capitol in relief on the bowl), the "hand painted" plates (presenting a comic valentine likeness of George Washington), the paper-weights (with a delirious lithograph of the Library of Congress showing through), the "napkin rings," butter knives, and so on and so on--why should such millions of these things be precisely in the style of such articles proudly displayed in the home of my grandmother when I was a boy in the Middle West? Outside of Washington, as far as I know in the world, any considerable exhibition of wares so reminiscent of the taste of the past can only be found along the water fronts of a city where men of ships shop. And there, along water fronts, you always find that same idea of ornament. Another thing. Where in Washington are shops where real art is sold--paintings of reputable character and rare specimens of antique furniture? They may be there; I do not swear that they are not, but they are remarkably difficult to find. Painting reminds me. The Corcoran Gallery is, of course, a justly famous museum of art. But a minor museum, containing no Old Masters, but an excellent collection of American painting, particularly excellent in its representation of the period immediately preceding the present, the period of the men called our impressionist painters. Its best canvas, I should say, is the painting by John H. Twachtman, called (I believe) "The Waterfall." My point is, that visitors there certainly are seeing what they are supposed to be seeing there--art. What I am coming to (and I do not know why someone does not come to it oftener) is this: That hordes of people who come to Washington will look at with wonder as something fine anything which is shown to them. The numerous beautiful works of architecture--to which is now added the very noble Lincoln Memorial--they see, and probably derive something from. But the cultural benefits of their visits to their Mecca of patriotic interest must be weirdly distorted when they are led gaping through the Capitol and are charged twenty-five cents apiece to be told by a guard who knows as much about paintings as an ashman a quantity of imbecile facts about prodigious canvases atrociously bad almost beyond belief. The Embarkation of the Pilgrims and Washington Resigning his Commission, and so forth, indisputably are historic moments for the American breast to recall with solemn emotion. And the iniquity of these paintings here to minds uninstructed in works of art is that by reason of their appeal to sentiments of love of country these nightmares of ugliness are put over on the visitor as standards of beauty.