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His intimate and fellow-sculptor a painter also Adrien Charpentier, executed a characteristic portrait of Roubiliac. He is represented at work upon a small-size model of his Shakespeare. He is touching the eye of the figure with his modelling tool, and the task, one of some delicacy and difficulty, adds to the animation of the operator.
Goldsmith looked over the paper afterwards with seeming great attention, said it was quite correct, and that if he had not seen him do it he never could have believed his friend capable of writing music after him. Roubiliac had jotted down notes at random. Neither had any real knowledge of music, and Goldsmith played entirely by ear.
He lies in Westminster Abbey among the great poets, warriors, and statesmen, a giant memory in his noble art. A few hours after death the sculptor Roubiliac took a cast of his face, which he wrought into imperishable marble; "moulded in colossal calm," he towers above his tomb, and accepts the homage of the world benignly like a god.
Yet it was hardly to be expected that Roubiliac, at the height of a successful career, would admit his whole system of art to have been founded on error would consent humbly to recommence his profession, and forthwith prostrate himself at the feet of ancient sculpture. His admiration for Bernini whom of course Flaxman cordially detested was genuine enough.
The walks, the bridges, the quadrangles, the historic college buildings, all conspired to make the place a delight and a fascination. The library of Trinity College, with its rows of busts by Roubiliac and Woolner, is a truly noble hall.
Still Roubiliac was rich in thought and reason, for, in his monument in Westminster Abbey, where he has represented Death as a skeleton, he felt that the thin and meagre bones would be as offensive as impracticable; therefore judiciously involved the greater part of the emblem in a shroud or drapery, adding thereby to his allegory and aiding his art.
This gateway introduces into a noble court, called the Great Court, with a carved stone fountain or canopied well in the center, and buildings of irregular sizes and different ages inclosing it. The chapel which forms the northern side of this court dates back to 1564. In the ante-chapel, or vestibule, stands the statue of Sir Isaac Newton, by Roubiliac.
Thereupon the world argued: geniuses are not as we are; this person is not as we are; therefore he must be a genius. Consequently, we find Roubiliac a thin, olive-skinned Frenchman, with strongly-marked, arching eyebrows, mobile features, and small, sharp, dark eyes liable at all times to fits of abstraction, attacks of inspiration.
Roubiliac was content to live that easy pleasant tavern life favoured by the men of letters and artists of the eighteenth century, and with which Johnson and Boswell have made us so intimately acquainted.
It is said, that when Roubiliac was erecting the Nightingale monument in Westminster Abbey, described on page 86, "he was found one day by Gayfere, the Abbey mason, standing with his arms folded, and his looks fixed on one of the knightly figures which support the canopy over the statue of Sir Francis Vere; as Gayfere approached, the enthusiastic Frenchman laid his hand on his arm, pointed to the figure, and said in a whisper, 'Hush! hush! he vil speak presently." Can we conceive that Rubens painted the "Dead Jesus" without sobs and tears?
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