1830.] 



Domestic and Foreign. 



113 



ture, or rather he introduced a new taste, that 

 of allegorical personages, or, as Mr. C. puts 

 it, poetic personations of sentiment and feel- 

 ing, which it is now perhaps high time to get rid 

 of again. His monuments in honour of Admiral 

 Warren and Marshal Wade, however beauti- 

 ful in point of workmanship, are mere con- 

 ceits of the most contemptible description. 

 His Trinity busts are among the best of his 

 performances, but especially the statue of Sir 

 Isaac Newton, in the chapel of the same col- 

 lege. The Shakspeare now in the British 

 Museum does not match it. It was a com- 

 mission from Garrick, who bargained with 

 the sculptor for a price barely sufficient to 

 cover the model and the marble ; nor was 

 Roubilliac left to his own conception. Gar- 

 rick, it is said, put himself into countenance, 

 and then into posture, and desired the 

 astonished sculptor to model away " for, 

 behold," said he, ''the poet of Avon." Rou- 

 billiac had much of the vanity and vivacity 

 of his nation ; and this, and his indulging in 

 the vagaries of enthusiasm, occasioned many 

 curious little anecdotes, which Mr. C. de- 

 lights to retail. 



Wilton, undoubtedly an Englishman, was 

 born in 17^2; and though educated in Bra- 

 bant, Paris, and Rome, with every advan- 

 tage of professional instruction, turned out 

 but a one-eyed monarch among the blind. 

 His independent circumstances enabled him 

 to resist the control of architects, who before 

 tyrannised over sculptors; but the emancipa- 

 tion gave no buoyancy to the leaden wings of 

 his genius. Some copies of the antique 

 showed he could copy ; but the best speci- 

 men of his own productions is Wolfe's monu- 

 ment in WestminsterAbbey,with lions below 

 and angels above, &c. He was a very success- 

 ful man, gave good dinners, and was highly 

 respected. His beautiful daughter became 

 the celebrated Lady Chambers. 



Banks was born in 1735, and was a man of 

 a higher order. He had genius and poetry in 

 him, and made, as usual, but a very indiffer- 

 ent man of business. The royal academy, 

 then recently instituted, sent him to Rome 

 with 50/. a-year, and there it was he executed 

 his exquisite figure of Love pursuing a butter- 

 fly. In pursuit of patronage, which he did 

 not find at home, he went, when fifty years 

 of age, to Russia, where he met with nothing 

 but disappointment. The empress gave him 

 a subject the armed neutrality ! when he 

 was thinking of nothing but Homer's heroes. 

 He soon left Russia, probably expecting, 

 says Mr. C., to be called upon to do into 

 stone the last treaty with the Turk. Return- 

 ing to London, he modelled his Mourning 

 Achilles, which was smashed to atoms by 

 the overturn of a waggon, but afterwards put 

 together again, and now stands in the en- 

 trance of the British Institution. In the lat- 

 ter years of his life, he was very much with 

 Mr. Johnes at Hafod, and some of his most 

 beautiful pieces perished in the destruction 

 of that building a few years ago. Banks 

 was the first English sculptor who gave him- 



M.M. New Scries VOL. X. No. 55. 



self up soul and body to classic subjects. 

 That he felt poetically, the results prove ; 

 but his cold description of the Venus de 

 Medici contrasts curiously with his own 

 glowing executions. His daughter, Mrs. 

 Forster, is still living, and has written a very 

 agreeable account of her amiable father. 



Nollekens's life is made up of Smith's 

 "ungentle" memoirs; but though a little 

 softened in the detail, the effect remains pretty 

 much the same. Nollekens was a mere 

 matter-of-fact copier : he had an eye for 

 living forms, and copied them faithfully. 



Bacon, though a self-educated man, was 

 thoroughly a mechanical sculptor. His in- 

 ventiveness was shown in mechanical matters, 

 in improving the "pointing-machine," by 

 which the figure of the model is transferred 

 to stone with an accuracy before scarcely con- 

 cevable, though his machine has been still 

 farther improved by Chantrey. 



To enrol Mrs. Darner in the list of di- 

 stinguished and executive artists is merely a 

 compliment Her vanity, says Mr. C., led 

 her into the labyrinth of art : pride forbade 

 her to retreat ; but the fortitude of her perse- 

 verance cannot be too much admired. The 

 memoir is a very agreeable one ; though but 

 an indifferent artist, her beauty, talents, and 

 spirit, with her rank and wealth, make her a 

 singularly interesting person. 



But the chef-d'o2iivre of the volume is 

 Flaxman's life. Mr. C. estimates him very 

 high as an artist ; something above the mark, 

 we think: but we have not space for another 

 word. 



The True Plan of a Living Temple. By 

 the Author of Farewell to Time, $c. 3 vols. 

 12mo. With a fixed conviction that we are 

 destined for a consecutive and superior state 

 of existence, the purpose of the very earnest 

 and eloquent author of these volumes of 

 enlightened devotion is to determine in what 

 light we should regard the occupations and 

 pursuits of this life. Strange notions on 

 these matters seem everywhere prevalent. 

 In the minds of the most serious, there is a 

 perpetual struggle between the interests of 

 this world and the next forced by inevitable 

 circumstances to attend to what is before 

 them bound by the most imperative obliga- 

 tions to regard what is in expectation, and all 

 the while distrusting the compatibility of the 

 two. These notions and suspicions are en- 

 forced by divines and moralists. Listen to 

 them and it must puzzle the acutest of us to 

 discover what we are here for at all, if we are 

 to separate ourselves from that into which we 

 find ourselves plunged, and from which we 

 cannot, while we stay, escape. In the mind 

 of the author, they teach what is wholly alien 

 from the doctrines of Christianity. They mis- 

 represent the matter miserably ; as if, in fact, 

 Christ proposed to withdraw men's affec- 

 tions from earth to heaven, while, all along, 

 his object was, and it is his language too, 

 rather to bring down heaven upon earth 

 not to teach them to betake themselves, in 



P 



