hands in despair and feels his heart fail him.
Canova is said to have been so discouraged by
the result of his first attempt at modelling, as
to have exclaimed that moulding pats of butter
was all he should ever be fit for. But these
qualms of despondency are easily combated
with a little courage; a resolute man
perseveres, for he knows that no really good thing
is ever accomplished without trouble. When
he has obtained a miniature that satisfies him,
and has got the plaster cast of it, he sets to
work again with his clay, and fashions another
model of the exact size of his proposed statue.
The limbs of this new clay figure are usually
copied from nature. Sitting to artists is a
regular profession, and those who follow it, like
great doctors, great barristers, or great
surgeons, raise their demands in proportion as
their fame makes their services more
valuable. A certain Moor, of wonderful beauty,
who exists in Paris to this day, was so
much in request among French painters and
sculptors, some twenty years ago, that he
would never consent to "pose," for less
than forty francs. He was rarely to be met
with except in the studios of very well-to-do
artists, or in the pupil studios, where, perched
on a platform, he was the "cynosure" of some
fifty or sixty beginners, all of whom had
clubbed together to pay him his couple of louis
d'or. This personage wore kid gloves and
smoked Havana cigars; but a great number of
male sitters are stalwart cavalry soldiers, who
spend their earnings as soon as they have got
them, and have seldom foresight enough to
make a fortune out of the exhibiting of thews
and sinews.

When the process of modelling has been
brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and a new
plaster cast taken whilst the clay is still moist,
as in the instance of the first miniature designs,
the artist can judge of the effect of his future
statue, for this plaster cast is the exact prototype
of it. He can fold his arms, too, for the
moment; for the next steps to be taken do not
concern him, but are the business of another
artist, known technically as the "statuary."

Some great sculptors, Michael Angelo among
them, have occasionally, themselves, hewn
their statues straight out of the block of
marble, without going through the preliminary
courses of modelling in clay, and casting in
plaster; but this is very rarely done, for in
the first place the work would be too long for
any artist who has a regard for his time, and
in the second the hewing of marble demands
a special practical experience, which makes it
an art apart. A sculptor would probably spoil
a hundred blocks of marble, before making so
much as a statuette a foot high, were he to trust
himself only in the matter. Even Michael
Angelo, when he tried to dispense with the
"statuary," or "practitioner," succeeded only in
making fragments of figures. Not being an
adept in judging of the size of the block he
needed, he was constantly finding that he had
miscalculated, and that an arm, a leg, or a
head, must remain unfinished in consequence.

The "statuary," who is often an artist of
great merit, and possessed of as much talent in
his way as the sculptor in his, sets the plaster
model on a platform, measures it, and places it
side by side with a block of marble of the
requisite height and breadth. This done, he
applies to the model an instrument of
mathematical precision, by which he obtains the
detailed measure of every part and angle of the
statue. He then returns to the marble, and
roughly sketches on the outside of it, by means
of points, a sort of outline of the figure or
group. Upon each of the spots where he has
marked a point with his pencil, a workman
bores a hole with an awl, taking great care,
however, not to bore a fraction of an inch
deeper than he is told. When the statuary
has inspected all the sides of the block, and
when the holes have all been bored according
to his directions, the marble looks as though it
had been riddled by bullets. A second workman
now appears, with a chisel and hammer to
hew away the fragments of marble between
the different holes, and along the pencil lines
drawn as guide marks. This work is more or
less easy, according as the attitude of the
statue is simple or fanciful. If the figure be
one of a modern personage standing placidly
with his arms by his sides, attired in the clothes
of our day, and with nothing eccentric in the
posture of his legs, the task offers no difficulties,
and may be entrusted to a very ordinary workman;
but if the subject be a group or a figure
in an attitude—for instance, like that of Ajax
defying the lightning—the chisel cannot be
entrusted to any but a practised hand, and
every blow of the hammer must be struck
with the greatest caution. The appearance
presented by the marble when the preparatory
hewing has ended, is that of some person or
persons thickly wrapped up in a shroud. The
outlines of head and body can be vaguely
detected under the white covering, but nothing
more; and it is not until the statuary himself
has set to work with his finer chisel and more
delicate hand, that a tangible form begins to
emerge from the hard mass. First the head,
then the shoulders and trunk, then the legs,
and then the arms and hands appear. The
arms and hands, if outstretched, are reserved
to the last; if detached first from the block, the
oscillations caused by the chisel in hewing the
other parts of the marble might shake and
crack them. This is a very necessary
precaution, and it is even usual to keep the arms,
the fingers, and other projecting parts of
marble statues continually supported by props
of wood, until the moment when the work is
set upon its pedestal, and uncovered.

When the statue is handed over again to the
sculptor that he may give the final touches to
it, there sometimes remains scarcely anything
for him to do. This is the case when the
"statuary" is himself a first-rate artist, and
can trust himself to imitate to a nicety, the
slightest details of form and expression in the
plaster model. But such examples are rare:
less because of the incapacity of statuaries,