Memoirs of Anne C.L. Botta,: written by her friends. With selections from her correspondence and from her writings in prose and poetry.

;elections from 1Der Mrttingo
work is remarkable not only for its excellence, but from the
fact that it is the first piece of statuary of any magnitude in
this material that has ever been cast in this country. The
artist, Mr. Mills of Charleston, previously known only as the
sculptor of a bust of Mr. Calhoun, and some others, when applied to by the committee to furnish a model for this work,
declined to do so, feeling himself incompetent to the task,
having never even seen an equestrian statue. But, haunted
by the idea, he commenced the design, and after some months
of labor, submitted a model to the committee, which was at
once adopted. It was said by all connoisseurs that it would
be impossible to cast such a statue in this country, and the
price offered by the committee did not warrant its being done
abroad. Mr. Mills, nothing daunted by the difficulties in
his way, with true American enterprise and energy, set about
removing them. He remembered that when a boy he had seen
a heavy iron chain melted when by accident exposed to the heat
of a coal-pit, and on this suggestion he constructed a furnace,
and found it entirely successful. With less than half a cord of
pine-wood he melted sixteen hundred pounds of metal. Leaving
his valuable invention to be perfected at some future time, he
has gone on with his work, which is now nearly completed.
The whole group is entirely sustained by the two legs of the
horse upon which it rests, an experiment which has never before been tried in any similar work. The figure of Jackson, in
this statue, if erect, would be eight feet in height, and the whole
is cast of the bronze of condemned cannon. This production of
Mr. Mills, executed under so many disadvantages, as well as
many other works of our native artists, indicate that a talent for
sculpture is one of the peculiar gifts of our countrymen, and
that the time is not far distant when our public edifices and
squares will be peopled by these bronze and marble resemblances of our great and good, which, though mute, will yet
speak and awaken in the youth of our country a purer patriotism
and a higher virtue.
The Departments of State and of War, near the President's
house, are wholly unworthy of notice in any architectural point
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