for shortcomings of a professional kind. His own elevation of character, and his profound sensibility, aided him in acting upon the feelings of others. through the medium of the pencil."[1]
One of the artists whom Scheffer most admired was Flaxman; and he once said to a friend, "If I have unconsciously borrowed from any one in the design of the 'Francesca,' it must have been from something I had seen among Flaxman's drawings." John Flaxman was the son of a humble seller of plaster casts in New Street, Covent Garden. When a child, he was such an invalid that it was his custom to sit behind his father's shop counter propped by pillows, amusing himself with drawing and reading. A benevolent clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Matthews, calling at the shop one day, saw the boy trying to read a book, and, on inquiring what it was, found it to be a Cornelius Nepos, which his father had picked up for a few pence at a bookstall. The gentleman, after some conversation with the boy, said that was not the proper book for him to read, but that he would bring him one. The next day he called with translations of Homer and Don Quixote,' which the boy proceeded to read with great avidity. His mind was soon filled with the heroism which breathed through the pages of the former, and, with the stucco Ajaxes and Achilleses about him, ranged along the shop shelves, the ambition took possession of him, that he too would design and embody in poetic forms those majestic heroes.
Like all youthful efforts, his first designs were crude. The proud father one day showed some of them to Roubilliac the sculptor, who turned from
- ↑ Mrs. Grote's 'Memoir of the Life of Ary Scheffer,' p. 67.
