Text: Edgar Allan Poe (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), March 15, 1845, vol. 1, no. 11, p. ???-???

[page 173, column 2, continued:]

LITERARY NOTICES.

Inaugural Address, delivered before the Mechanics’ Institute of the State of New York, by James J. Mapes, President. 1845.

Unlike the greater part of the addresses which we have heard and read, this impresses us less with the importance of the speaker than of his subject. Indeed, we have rarely read an essay in which the writer has contrived so completely to overshadow himself in the greatness of his theme. Mr. Mapes is too much of an enthusiast in the cause of science to waste his own, or his hearer's time, with any superfluous flourishes of rhetoric, or by introducing in a practicn1 discourse any extrinsic subject. He is plain, direct, and impressive. His great aim is to impress upon the minds of his hearers the importance of cultivating the intellect by storing it with facts. He makes a forcible appeal in behalf of the arts of design, which we trust will not be without an influence upon those who heard it. The importance of an artistic education to our mechanics, is but imperfectly under. stood. Without an ability to design, the most stringent tariff would do little towards aiding our manufactures. The address contains an idea, not altogether new, but new in its application, respecting the use of Caryatides in architecture. We should be glad to see it adopted by way of an experiment; to substitute the form of some living thing [page 174:] in the place of the eternal columns which disfigure so many of our public buildings. Anything would be a relief to the wearisome effect of the five orders, even though it were disorder itself.

We congratulate the Mechanics’ Institute on having for a President a gentleman who unites to extensive information an original genius, and a disinterested zeal in the propagation of knowledge. We have hardly a right to expect wit in a discourse like this, but we see little scintillations of it bursting forth here and there, as if by stealth, and without the consciousness of the lecturer.

With a president like Mr. Mapes, and so intelligent an officer as Mr. Barritt, the actuary, the Mechanics’ Institute must exert in the community an influence of inestimable benefit.