three hours firing,
make this metal run, like so much batter, and without any exertion
at all.' The old fellow drank and then I 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 fi