Indeed, what Flaxman intended as a reproach, may sound in modern ears much more like approval. 'He copied vulgar nature with zeal, and some of his figures seem alive.' Roubiliac constantly had recourse to the living forms about him; Flaxman preferred instead to turn to the antique. We hear of Roubiliac's fondness for modelling the arms of Thames watermen and the legs of chair-porters: in each case the particular employment inducing great muscular development of the limbs to be moulded. And this desire for independent study was really creditable to the artist. He sought to arrive at the correctness of the ancients by a pathway of his own: to check, by a distinct reckoning, an individual reference to nature, and, if need was, fearlessly to depart from, what they had registered as the result of their investigations. A more legitimate charge against him was that he was negligent in his choice of forms for imitation; undervalued refinement of idea; took altogether a somewhat mean view of nature, or adulterated it with too large an infusion of the dancing-master. Certainly he was fonder of _fritter_ than of breadth; and his draperies are often meagre in effect from the multiplicity of their folds, and his attempt at rendering _texture_ in marble. This may be noticed in his statue of Sir Isaac Newton, at Cambridge, where an excess of labour, seems expended on the silk mantle of the figure--all the small creases and plaitings of the light material being represented, and the surface highly polished, still further to increase the resemblance. This statue, however, was highly admired by Chantrey,[5] and to it, in his _Prelude_, Wordsworth has dedicated laudatory lines.