Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/65

 beyond the mere prospect of winning a certain number of bank-notes. What is this feeling which urges the queen on her throne to put her thoughts into merchantable shape and offer them to be sold at a stall alongside the book of some humble writer starving in a garret? What induces a princess of the blood to hang her pictures in the great exhibitions, laying aside her royalty for the nonce, and claiming equality with her artist subjects? It is a strange instinct, this; it seems like an acknowledgment that in proportion as a thing is salable, so is it valuable. And yet Theodore Winthrop died broken-hearted, his three noble books, still in manuscript, rejected by every publisher in the land, while authors of certain dime-novels of his time have grown rich through the sale of their very unsavory works.

Why Margaret was so happy, the recorder of her triumph cannot say, and must leave the question to the reader, trusting that he may find the proper solution of this problem.

It was a curious order, the like of which it is doubtful if ever sculptor was intrusted with.

Perhaps the nearest parallel to it that the history of art affords is the snow statue commanded from Michael Angelo by the Medici. Tradition says that though Angelo received the order of his patron with a very bad grace, he