authority, though but for a moment, to be violated and infringed by a power meant originally to rescue and confirm them.

"For those rewards and blessings which you have invoked for me in this world, and for the fruition of that happiness which you pray for in that which is to come, you have, gentlemen, all my thanks and all my gratitude. I wish I could insure them to you, and the state you represent, a hundredfold."

Benjamin Harrison was governor of Virginia when the General Assembly requested the executive to take measures for procuring a statue of Washington; and a little more than a month after the date of that resolution, he wrote to Doctor Franklin and Mr. Jefferson, then in Paris, on the subject, requesting them to attend to the matter, and acquainting them that he had ordered Mr. Peale to send them a full-length portrait of the general, to be used as a model for the sculptor.

The only method by which a perfect likeness of the great patriot might be secured, was to have the artist make a model from the living face; and Messrs. Franklin and Jefferson accordingly engaged Houdon, a portrait sculptor, then without a rival in the world, to go to America for the purpose. Houdon was a small, active, and exceedingly industrious Frenchman; careful and prudent, and disposed to make an excellent bargain for himself. "The terms," Mr. Jefferson wrote, "are twenty-five thousand livres [about $4,620], one thousand English guineas (the English guinea being worth twenty-five livres), for the statue and pedestal. Besides this, we pay his expenses 'going and returning, which we expect will be

between four and five thousand livres; and if he dies on the voyage, we pay his family ten thousand livres. This latter proposition was disagreeable to us; but he has a father, mother, and sisters, who have no resource but in his labor; and he is himself one of the best men in the world." To insure the state against loss in case of his death, Mr. Jefferson, through Mr. Adams, procured an insurance upon Houdon's life, in London, at an additional expense of five hundred livres, or about ninety-two dollars.

It was more than a year after the order for the statue was given before Houdon arrived. He came over in the same vessel that brought Doctor Franklin home. On the 20th of September, 1785, the Doctor gave Houdon a letter of introduction to Washington, and, at the same time, he wrote to the general to apprise him of the sculptor's arrival. Washington immediately wrote to Houdon, saying, "It will give me pleasure, sir, to welcome you to this seat of my retirement; and whatever I have or can procure that is necessary to your purposes, or convenient and agreeable to your wishes, you must freely command, as inclination to oblige you will be among the last things in which I shall be deficient, either on your arrival or during your stay."

Houdon arrived at Mount Vernon on the 3d of October, furnished with all necessary materials for making a bust of Washington. He remained there a fortnight, and made, on the living face of our illustrious Friend, a plaster mould, preparatory for the clay impression, which was then modelled into the form of a bust, and immediately, before it could shrink from drying, moulded and cast in plaster, to be afterward copied in marble, in Paris. That clay model was left at

HOUDON'S BUST OF WASHINGTON.

Mount Vernon, where it may be seen upon a bracket in the library, white-washed, so as to resemble marble or plaster of Paris.

In the presence of Mr. Madison, Houdon made exact measurements of the person of Washington, and with ample memoranda concerning costume, et cetera, he returned to France. The statue was not completed until 1789, when to the inscription upon the pedestal were added the words: "Done in the year of CHRIST one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, and in the year of the commonwealth, twelve."

Houdon's statue stands in the rotunda of the capitol at Richmond. It is of fine Italian marble, size of life. The costume is the military dress of the Revolution. The right

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hand of the general rests upon a staff; the left is upon the folds of a military cloak thrown over the end of a bundle of fasces, with which are connected a sword and plough. Gouverneur Morris, who was in Paris when the statue was executed, stood as a model for the person of Washington. "Of what use," says Dunlap, "his person could be to the artist I cannot conceive, as there was no likeness, in form or manner, between him and the hero, except that they were both tall men." Yet such was the fact. Morris, in his diary, under date of "June 5, 1789," says: "Go to M. Houdon's. He's been waiting for me a long time. I stand for his statue of General Washington, being the humble employment of a manikin. This is literally taking the advice of St. Paul, to be all things to all men."

The foregoing facts are presented in contrast with the creations of fancy which an orator recently put forth as the forms of real history, in the following words: "Houdon, after taking a mould of Washington's face, persisted to make a cast of his entire person. * * * The hero and the sage the man of supreme dignity, of spotless purity and the most veiled modesty, laid his sacred person bare and prone before the * of art and affection! * * eyes * The cast of the body was left to the care of his workmen, but that of the head was reserved in his own hands." All this is utterly untrue. The workmen of Houdon, it is known, never joined him, and no such scene as above described ever occurred at Mount Vernon.

Six months before Houdon's arrival at Mount Vernon, another artist was domiciled there. It was Robert Edge Pine, a very small, morbidly irritable Englishman, who came to America in 1784, with the rare reputation of "king's painter," and with the lofty design of procuring portraits of