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EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SCULPTOR

found that the ground on which it stood had been known originally as "Strawberry-Hill-Shot." "You shall hear from me," he tells Mann in June, 1748, "from STRAWBERRY HILL, which I have found out in my lease is the old name of my house; so pray, never call it Twickenham again."

The transformation of the toy-woman's "villakin " into a Gothic residence was not, however, the operation of a day. Indeed, at first, the idea of rebuilding does not seem to have entered its new owner's mind. But he speedily set about extending his boundaries, for before 26 December, 1748, he has added nine acres to his original five, making fourteen in all—a territory prodigious in a situation where land is so scarce." Among the tenants of some of the buildings which he acquired in making these additions was Richard Francklin, the printer of the Craftsman, who, during Sir Robert Walpole's administration, had been taken up for printing that paper. He occupied

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a small house in what was afterwards known as the Flower Garden, and Walpole permitted him to retain it during his lifetime.

(Horace Walpole-A Memoir.)

AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SCULPTOR

As a sculptor, Roubillac retains the traces of his foreign training as markedly as he retains the impress of his foreign nationality. To the last he is the pupil of Coustou and Balthazar; and he had little temptation to be otherwise. Neither from Rysbrack nor

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SCULPTOR

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Scheemakers-aliens like himself, and schooled upon alien models-was he likely to learn anything, even if they had been his superiors in ability, which they certainly were not; and there was no English master of sufficient importance to influence him in any way. Indeed, to define him accurately, one has to go back to the old distinction between Greek and Roman art-between the type and the individual. It is not to the school of Phidias or Praxiteles that Roubillac belongs; it is to the school of Lysippus, or rather of his brother Lysistratus. With the lover in the old song, it is not Beauty he demands ”. -at all events it is not Beauty exclusively; it is Character first. One can understand how opposed his “ tormented and dramatic manner must have been to the restrained and stately style of Flaxman,-Flaxman who could see in Roubillac nothing but conceits and epigrams of the chisel. One can understand also how infinitely Roubillac would have preferred to Flaxman's Greek severities what Northcote calls "the captivating and luxuriant splendours of Bernini.” Roubillac, in short, besides being a Frenchman in grain, which was much, was also an eighteenth-century realist, which was more. He delighted in the seizure of fugitive expression, the fixing of momentary gesture, the indication of moods of mind, the ingenious reproduction of costume, detail, surface, texture. He copies the marks of small-pox, the traces of ancient scars, the clocks of a stocking, the petty folds and trivial wrinkles of material. In his work it is idle to look for repose, for gravity, for dignity. But he will give you action, even to gesticulation; expression, even to grimace. He is most happy in his busts; and these again are

A FLOWER SONG OF ANGIOLA

best of their kind when, like those of Pope and Hogarth, they are modelled from the life. Of his elaborate monumental and sepulchral efforts, the day is past. Still, they had their day; and those to whom the Nightingale tomb now seems bizarre and exotic, may nevertheless take pleasure in remembering that it was once admired by a great authority on the Sublime and Beautiful-by the critic and orator, Edmund Burke.

(Eighteenth Century Vignettes. Second Series.)

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A FLOWER SONG OF ANGIOLA

Straightway the Blue-bell stooped,
Paler for pride,

Down where the Violet drooped,

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Shy, at her side :

Sweetheart, save me and you,

Where has the summer kist
Flowers of as fair a hue,-
Turkis or Amethyst ? "

Therewith I laughed aloud,
Spake on this wise,

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"O little flowers so proud,

Have ye seen eyes

Change through the blue in them,

Change till the mere

Loving that grew in them

Turned to a tear?

"Flowers, ye are bright of hue,

Delicate, sweet;

Flowers, and the sight of you

Lightens men's feet;
Yea, but her worth to me,

Flowerets, even,

Sweetening the earth to me,

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Sweeteneth heaven.

This, then, O Flowers, I sing ;

God, when He made ye,
Made yet a fairer thing

Making my Lady;-
Fashioned her tenderly,
Giving all weal to her ;-

Girdle ye slenderly,

Go to her, kneel to her,

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HORACE WALPOLE AS A LETTER WRITER BUT it is not by his [Walpole's] professedly literary work that he has acquired the reputation which he retains and must continue to retain. It is as a letterwriter that he survives; and it is upon the vast correspondence, of which, even now, we seem scarcely to have reached the limits, that is based his surest claim volitare per ora virum. The qualities which are his defects in more serious productions become merits in his correspondence; or, rather, they cease to be defects. No one looks for prolonged effort in a gossiping epistle; a weighty reasoning is less important than a light hand; and variety pleases more surely than symmetry of structure. Among the little band of those who have distinguished themselves in this way, Walpole is in the foremost rank; nay, if wit and brilliancy, without gravity or pathos, are to rank highest, he is first. It matters nothing whether he wrote easily or with difficulty; whether he did, or did not, make minutes of apt illustrations or descriptive incidents: the result is delightful. For diversity of interest and perpetual entertainment, for

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