We are not watching a combat, only an assault, for these demonstrations call forth no response. On the champion--taking everything, giving nothing--the only effect they produce is a change of color from snowy white to ashen gray. Even that is but for a moment. As the storm of hail melts into a shower of limpid raindrops to which the relieved trees open their palms, the wind ceases its wailing, and the wall of cloud falls apart to let the sun’s rays through once more. The Monument is, of course, only one of many memorials to great men in Washington. We have heroes and philanthropists, poets and physicians, soldiers and men of science, mounted and afoot, standing and sitting. We have horses in every posture that will hold a rider: Jackson’s balanced on its hind legs like the toy charger on the nursery mantelpiece; Washington’s getting ready to try the same trick; Sheridan’s dashing along the line to the lilt of Buchanan Read’s poem; Pulaski’s, Greene’s and McPherson’s, Hancock’s and McClellan’s and Logan’s, walking calmly over the field; Scott’s and Sherman’s watching the parade. The best equestrian statue is that of General George H. Thomas, by Quincy Ward, at the junction of Massachusetts Avenue with Fourteenth Street. Here we have the acme of art in treating such a subject: spirit coupled with repose. The horse has been moving, but has been checked by the rider to give him a chance to look about; they could go on the next moment if need be, or they could stand indefinitely just as they are. The Scott statue, at Massachusetts Avenue and Sixteenth Street, is good if we take it apart and examine it piecemeal; but the massive rider threatens to break down his slender-limbed steed, which is, by some mischance, of the mare’s build and not the stallion’s. General Sheridan, who used to live within a stone’s throw of this statue, lay while ill in a bedroom commanding a view of it. “I hope,” he remarked one day, “that if a grateful country ever commemorates me in bronze, it will give me a better mount than old Scott’s!” It is hard to find anything new to do with a general officer and a horse without putting them into some impossible attitude. A sculptor who attempts a reasonable innovation is liable to be snubbed for it, as one was not long ago when he offered in competition a statue of General Grant, dismounted, with his bridle swung over one of his arms while he used the other hand to hold his field-glass.