1 DECEMBER 1883, Page 3

The Carlyle statue on the Chelsea Embankment appears to be

much disfigured by a great framework of notice-boards, on which the public are solemnly warned of the rules and regulations under which public gardens are to be used by them,—rules and regulations printed, nevertheless, in letters so small that the public cannot read them without a field.glass, though they can see the full ugliness of the staring boards on which these regu- lations are inscribed. Mr. Frederick W. Foster, writing to Thursday's Times, proposes to have these boards lowered or removed, that Carlyle's statue may be seen without this ugly margin of emphatic officialism; but we are not sure that he is right. The effigy of the " Latter-Day " pamphleteer will not be made at all the less effective for his admirers, by being thus set in an artistic framework, as it were, of bureaucracy and red- tape. We suspect that the Metropolitan Board of Works have expressly designed this framework for his statue, in order to set the significance of the grim Philosopher of Chelsea in an appro- priate and striking light.