Born in the city of York in 1755, a few months before the Flaxmans settled in London, there were times when his father and mother hardly believed they would be able to "rear" the delicate child. Attacks of illness and weakness were common to him. Indeed, one day he was seized with a fit of gasping so severe that the breath seemed to leave his body, and they even laid him out for dead, but he revived, and his breath came again, and by-and-by he even grew. Few amusements, no childish games were open to the little cripple. The green fields, the blue of the country skies were to him things unknown. The dingy four walls of the narrow cramped shop had to serve him instead. But day by day he grew quick to note the familiar beauty of his father's casts. He came to see the shape of these white things with the eye of the poet and the artist. There came into his mind the strong desire to copy, inborn in most children, and the baby fingers set to work to mould, and fashion, and make some likeness--if even a dim one--to those of his father's models. In these old days gentlemen were accustomed to wear bunches of seals dangling from their watch-chains, and the child used to keep a stock of wax, and when he thought a customer seemed kind, he would summon courage to ask him to let him take the impression on the soft wax. In little John's early years, when he was as yet a baby of five, a great ceremony took place in London, the coronation of King George III. Rumour went that to celebrate the great event there was to be a coronation medal struck, and that hundreds of these were to be thrown to the crowd. The cripple child in the dingy side street of the great city set his little heart on possessing one of these treasures, and begged his father to get him one. But Flaxman was not successful. On the way home, with his mind full of his disappointment, his eye happened to light on a plated button on the pavement, stamped with a horse and jockey. He picked it up. Would he disappoint his little son, or deceive him? He decided on deceiving him, and gave the eager and expectant child the button. The boy received the trophy in wonderment. He was glad to get it, but he remarked that it seemed a strange medal for a coronation! Customers who came to Flaxman's house could hardly help noticing the child who sat behind the counter, the big head on the lame body, the high shoulders, the beautiful pure eyes, the sensitive, proud face. They spoke to him, and they found him no common child. One day, by good luck, when little John was hardly more than seven, a customer, a Mr. Matthew, a clergyman, came to Flaxman's shop. Writing of that visit, when it had become a memory and the child a great man, Mr. Matthew says--