222 Josiah Wedgwood CHAP. 



the acquaintance of the English sculptor. It was on 

 this occasion, says the Magazine of Art, that he made 

 his well-known apophthegm as to the English method of 

 judging ; for when asked by one of the fashionable 

 celebrities who buzzed about him in swarms, to what 

 circumstance they were indebted for the honour of his 

 visit, he told him he had come to see their sculptor 

 Flaxman. " Flaxman ! " replied the magnate, " we think 

 very little of him here." "You in England," said 

 Canova, "judge through your ears, and not by your 

 eyes." 



While at Rome, Flaxman had much intercourse 

 with Mr. Deveare, one of Wedgwood's designers and 

 agents. He was a man of much ability. In a letter 

 to Byerley, London, written in the spring of 1788, 

 Flaxman says : " When you write to Mr. Wedgwood, 

 you will be so kind as to inform him that Mr. Deveare 

 has been at work with the utmost diligence, ever since 

 he has been here, on the bas-relief of the Borghese Vase, 

 in which he has succeeded very well, but it will still 

 take him some weeks to finish, and after he has done 

 I also shall have something to do with it. Mr. Wedg- 

 wood will easily concur, as this is new work to Mr. 

 Deveare, that he must needs be slow at first, especially 

 as he takes so much pains." 



Whilst in Rome, Deveare (afterwards, when he came 

 to Etruria, known as John de Vere) did his work in Flax- 

 man's studio, and thus his modelling was open to the sug- 

 gestions and improvements of the English sculptor, who 



