his art, and rising gradually but surely to the very first place among
then living sculptors. His studio now became the great centre of all
fashionable visitors to Rome. Still, he made no effort to get rich,
though he got rich without wishing it; he worked on merely for art's
sake, not for money. He would not do as many sculptors do, keep several
copies in marble of his more popular statues for sale; he preferred to
devote all his time to new works. "Gibson was always absorbed in one
subject," says Lady Eastlake, "and that was the particular work or part
of a work--were it but the turn of a corner of drapery--which was then
under his modelling hands. Time was nothing to him; he was long and
fastidious." His favourite pupil, Miss Hosmer, once expressed regret to
him that she had been so long about a piece of work on which she was
engaged. "Always try to do the best you can," Gibson answered. "Never
mind how long you are upon a work--no. No one will ask how long you have
been, except fools. You don't care what fools think."

During his long life at Rome, he was much cheered by the presence and
assistance of his younger brother, Mr. Ben, as he always called him, who
was also a sculptor, though of far less merit than John Gibson himself.
Mr. Ben came to Rome younger than John, and he learned to be a great
classical scholar, and to read those Greek and Latin books which John
only knew at second hand, but from whose beautiful fanciful stories of
gods and heroes he derived all the subjects for his works of statuary.
His other brother, Solomon, a strange, wild, odd man, in whom the family
genius had degenerated into mere eccentricity, never did anything for
his own livelihood, but lived always upon John Gibson's generous bounty.
In John's wealthy days, he and Mr. Ben used to escape every summer from
the heat and dust of Rome--which is unendurable in July and August--to
the delightfully cool air and magnificent mountain scenery of the Tyrol.
"I cannot tell you how well I am," he writes on one of these charming