“The amount of labour, thought, and attention,” says Mrs. Grote, “which Scheffer brought to the production of the ‘Francisca,’ must have been enormous. In truth, his technical education having been so imperfect, he was forced to climb the steep of art by drawing upon his own resources, and thus, whilst his hand was at work, his mind was engaged in meditation. He had to try various processes of handling, and experiments in colouring; to paint and repaint, with tedious and unremitting assiduity. But Nature had endowed him with that which proved in some sort an equivalent 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.” {173} 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 ‘Francisca,’ 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 them with a contemptuous “pshaw!” But the boy had the right stuff in him; he had industry and patience; and he continued to labour incessantly at his books and drawings. He then tried his young powers in modelling figures in plaster of Paris, wax, and clay. Some of these early works are still preserved, not because of their merit, but because they are curious as the first healthy efforts of patient genius. It was long before the boy could walk, and he only learnt to do so by hobbling along upon crutches. At length he became strong enough to walk without them.