Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/135

Rh Lord Rodney.—Figure of Lord Rodney up in the background. Angel standing on right, with hand thrown back towards Rodney's waistcoat, and dictating to angel on left, who sits with a book and pencil, and looks up at angel as if to ask, "You surely don't want me to write down that?" The whole suggests the designing of a new uniform on a tailor's dummy.

Lord Rodney wears the indignant and dignified expression of a local magnate who is stopped by a beggar in his own grounds. Sir Thomas Picton wears something more like a string of small sausages bunched up than a beard, and an expression of quiet annoyance. Others regard their angels with looks more or less pained and idiotic, though some of the expressions would be natural to men accosted by strange ladies wearing wings.

Now, let any intelligent Englishman who reads this go into St. Paul's and look at these groups, and decide as to whether the sculptors were impudent humbugs, or I'm one.

How contemptible this "art" would seem by the side of the statue of Burke and Wills (the Australian explorers) in Melbourne, or of Bobbie Burns in Ballarat (the statue with a twinkle in the eye), or a hundred others in Australia.

Talking of statues, there is often, from one point of view, an unforeseen effect which is not possible in pictures—a point of a cocked hat, for instance, which suggests a beak, or a rapier sticking out behind, and giving the figure a tail. There is in the statue of Lord