brought him some little dainties to eat:  meat pasties they were, nicely peppered, and I made him take down four full goblets of wine.  He was a man quite out of the ordinary, this, and a most lovable old thing, and what with my caresses and the virtue of the wine, I found him soon moaning away as much with joy as he had moaned before with grief.”  Cellini displayed in this incident his belief in the great principle that the artist should find pleasure in his work in order to impart to that work a really satisfactory quality, and did exactly the right thing at the right minute; instead of trusting to a faltering effort in a disheartened man, he cheered the old bronze founder up to such a pitch that after a day or two the work was completed with triumph and joy to both.

In the famous statue of Perseus, Cellini experienced much difficulty in keeping the metal liquid.  The account of this thrilling experience, told in his matchless autobiography, is too long to quote at this point; an interesting item, however, should be noted.  Cellini used pewter as a solvent in the bronze which had hardened in the furnace.  “Apprehending that the cause of it was, that the fusibility of the metal was impaired, by the violence of the fire,” he says, “I ordered all my dishes and porringers, which were in number about two hundred, to be placed one by one before my tubes, and part of them to be thrown into the furnace, upon which all present perceived that my bronze was completely dissolved, and that my mould was filling,” and, such was the relief that even the loss of the entire pewter service of the family was sustained with equanimity; the family, “without delay, procured earthen vessels to supply the place of the pewter dishes and porringers, and we all dined together very cheerfully.”  Edgecumb Staley, in the “Guilds of Florence,” speaks of the “pewter fattened Perseus:”  this is worthy of Carlyle.

Early Britons cast statues in brass.  Speed tells of King Cadwollo, who died in 677, being buried “at St. Martin’s church near Ludgate, his image great and terrible, triumphantly riding on horseback, artificially cast in brass, was placed on the Western gate of the city, to the further fear and terror of the Saxons!”

In 1562 Bartolomeo Morel, who made the celebrated statue of the Giralda Tower in Seville, executed a fifteen branched candelabrum for the Cathedral.  It is a rich Renaissance design, in remarkably chaste and good lines, and holds fifteen statuettes, which are displaced to make room for the candles only during the last few days of Lent.

A curious form of mediaeval trinket was the perfume ball; this consisted of a perforated ball of copper or brass, often ornamented with damascene, and intended to contain incense to perfume the air, the balls being suspended.

The earliest metal statuary in England was rendered in latten, a mixed metal of a yellow colour, the exact recipe for which has not survived.  The recumbent effigies of Henry III. and Queen Eleanor are made of latten, and the tomb of the Black Prince in Canterbury is the same, beautifully chased.  Many of these and other tombs were probably originally covered with gilding, painting, and enamel.