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It
is a pleasing duty to place tablets over the doorways of houses
in which remarkable men or women were born or may have lived,
as the London County Council are now occasionally doing. It
is, I think, still more pleasing to place memorial busts of
such people, executed by competent artists, in public halls
or institutions, as houses, and particularly in London, pass
away in obedience to changing circumstances. In the one case
we have the record of a fact, which is desirable; in the other
case we have not only a similar record, but a fac simile, in
marble or in bronze, of the head and features of the memorialised
man or woman.
Such portraits so placed are as interesting as they are instructive,
and as commemorative as they are enduring. Hence for many years
I have been privileged to place in town halls, or other public
buildings, medallions or busts of famous men or women near where
they were born, or where they lived or died. In so doing we
gratefully remember illustrious and useful lives into whose
labours we have entered, and keep before us examples worthy
of admiration.
I have placed medallions of Charles Lamb and John Keats in the
Public Library, Edmonton; of Sir Henry Austin Layard and Sir
William Molesworth in the Public Library, Borough Road; and
of Leigh Hunt in the Public Library, Shepherd's Bush.
I have also placed marble busts of John Ruskin, G. F. Watts,
R.A., Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the
Camberwell Art Gallery; of William Morris in the Town Hall,
Walthamstow; of Hogarth in the Town Hall, Chiswick; of Richardson,
the novelist, in St. Bride's Institute; of Elizabeth Fry in
the New Municipal Buildings, East Ham; of Emerson, James Martineau,
Charles Dickens, Sir Wm. Herschel, Matthew Arnold, and Benjamin
Jowett in the Settlement, Tavistock Place ; of Richard Trevithick
in the Public Library, Camborne; of Adams, the mathematician,
in the Public Library, Launceston; of Charles Buller in the
Public Library, Liskeard; of William Ewart, the author and promoter
of the Public Libraries Act in Parliament, in the Westminster
Public Library; of John Milton, Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan, and
Oliver Cromwell in the Cripplegate Institute; of George Whitefleld
in the Tabernacle, Tottenham Court Road; and of Michael Faraday
and Joseph Lancaster in the Borough Road Polytechnic.
These will be followed by many others entitled to similar commemoration. |
