Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 January 1884 — The Rage for Monuments. [ARTICLE]

The Rage for Monuments.

In truth, the present rage for erecting “monuments” is fast becoming a nuisance. Every week or so busybody, who has been studying the almanac, discovers that on such and such a day a person of more or less note was born, or died, or-, did something more or less notorious, and instantly he begs the world to join them in “erecting a monument to his memory.” When only a moiety of mankind could read, wlieh engravings and photographs and books did not exist a “monument” was the only means of appealing to the public eye. This is no longer the case. A'man must be an uninteresting person indeed who does not obtain the attention of those literary hodmen whose persooal histories, have made not bo much the the Eves of statesmen , bitter, and certainly a library is likely to survive the worst monstrosities in marble or in bronze which we could rear to their memories. We have, moreover, not been fortunate in this description of art. Better, if we desire to do honor to the prophets, to marie the houses in which they lived or died, or penned their great poems, or painted their great pictures, than to build their tombs afresh. The Society of Arts has indeed dope something in this direction; but if we are not to lag behind the more reverend continental nations, much still remains to be done. Within the last few days the house in Fox court, in which a very worthless man of fame, Richard Savage, the early friend of Johnson, was born, was pulled down. The house in which Johnson lived in Gough square is still standing; the various Fleet street taverns which lie haunted are, for the most part, in existence, and his chambers in Bolt court and the Inner Temple lane - may perhaps still be visited. But though the garden of the Thrales at Streatham. is now covered with rows of ' red-roofed villas, we fail to find one of these endless avennes named in his honor. This carelessness not to bestow civic honors on our great men ’ is, according to our latest French critics, a bad British fault We have Buggin’s buildings and Jobson’s rents. There are George streets in London until we become bewildered, and how many Chapel streets only the poor postmen know. But in vain we search this directory for a Doctor Johnson street or Shakespeare squares, and there is, perhaps, not in all England the poorest little Btreet bearing the illustrious name of Chaucer or Dryden. —London Standard. Robert Emmet has been dead flighty years.