John Gibson’s life is very different in many respects from that of most other great working men whose story is told in this volume.  Undoubtedly, he was deficient in several of those rugged and stern qualities to which English working men have oftenest owed their final success.  But there was in him a simple grandeur of character, a purity of soul, and an earnestness of aim which raised him at once far above the heads of most among those who would have been the readiest to laugh at and ridicule him.  Besides his exquisite taste, his severe love of beauty, and his marvellous power of expressing the highest ideals of pure form, he had one thing which linked him to all the other great men whose lives we have here recounted—­his steadfast and unconquerable personal energy.  In one sense it may be said that he was not a practical man; and yet in another and higher sense, what could possibly be more practical than this accomplished resolve of the poor Liverpool stone-cutter to overcome all obstacles, to go to, Rome, and to make himself into a great sculptor?  It is indeed a pity that in writing for Englishmen of the present day such a life should even seem for a moment to stand in need of a practical apology.  For purity, for guilelessness, for exquisite appreciation of the true purpose of sculpture as the highest embodiment of beauty of form, John Gibson’s art stands unsurpassed in all the annals of modern statuary.

IV.

William Herschel, bandsman.

Old Isaac Herschel, the oboe-player of the King’s Guard in Hanover, had served with his regiment for many years in the chilly climate of North Germany, and was left at last broken down in health and spirits by the many hardships of several severe European campaigns.  Isaac Herschel was a man of tastes and education above his position; but he had married a person in some respects quite unfitted for him.  His good wife, Anna, though an excellent housekeeper and an estimable woman in her way, had never even learned to write; and when the pair finally settled down to old age in Hanover, they were hampered by the cares of a large family of ten children.  Respectable poverty in Germany is even more pressing than in England; the decent poor are accustomed to more frugal fare and greater privations than with us; and the domestic life of the Herschel family circle must needs have been of the most careful and penurious description.  Still, Isaac Herschel dearly loved his art, and in it he found many amends and consolations for the sordid shifts and troubles of a straitened German household.  All his spare time was given to music, and in his later days he was enabled to find sufficient pupils to eke out his little income with comparative comfort.