 their dead, though in
former ages their practice was much as ours, but they have a custom which comes
to much the same thing, for the instinct of preserving the name alive after the
death of the body seems to be common to all mankind. They have statues of
themselves made while they are still alive (those, that is, who can afford it),
and write inscriptions under them, which are often quite as untruthful as are
our own epitaphs - only in another way. For they do not hesitate to describe
themselves as victims to ill temper, jealousy, covetousness, and the like, but
almost always lay claim to personal beauty, whether they have it or not, and,
often, to the possession of a large sum in the funded debt of the country. If a
person is ugly he does not sit as a model for his own statue, although it bears
his name. He gets the handsomest of his friends to sit for him, and one of the
ways of paying a compliment to another is to ask him to sit for such a statue.
Women generally sit for their own statues, from a natural disinclination to
admit the superior beauty of a friend, but they expect to be idealized. I
understood that the multitude of these statues was beginning to be felt as an
encumbrance in almost every family, and that the custom would probably before
long fall into desuetude.
    Indeed, this has already come about to the satisfaction of every one, as
regards the statues of public men - not more than three of which can be found in
the whole capital. I expressed my surprise at this, and was told that some five
hundred years before my visit, the city had been so overrun with these pests,
that there was no getting about, and people were worried beyond endurance by
having their attention called at every touch and turn to something, which, when
they had attended to it, they found not to concern them. Most of these statues
were mere attempts to do for some man or woman what an animal-stuffer does more
successfully for a dog, or bird, or pike. They were generally foisted on the
public by some coterie that was trying to exalt itself in exalting some one
else, and not unfrequently they had no other inception than desire on the part
of some member of the côterie to find a job for a young sculptor to whom his
daughter was engaged. Statues so begotten could never be anything but
deformities, and this is the way in which they are sure to be begotten, as soon
as the art of making them at all has
