Tabletalk Or Original Essays Author:William Hazlitt Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ESSAY XIV. ON THE OLD AGE OF ARTISTS. " And theic old age is beautiful and free." Wobdswqkth. Mr. Nollekens died the other day at the age of eighty, ... more »and left 2400 pounds behind him, and the name of one of our best English sculptors. There was a great scramble among the legatees, a codicil to a will with large bequests unsigned, and that last triumph of the dead or dying over those who survive—.-hopes raised and defeated without a possibility of retaliation, or the smallest use in complaint. The King was at first said to be left residuary legatee. This would have been a fine instance of romantic and gratuitous homage to Majesty, in a man who all his life-time could never be made to comprehend the abstract idea of the distinction of ranks or even ofpersons. He would go up to the Duke of York or Prince of Wales (in spite of warning), take them familiarly by the button like common acquaintance, ask them how their father did.; and express pleasure at hearing he was well, saying, "when he was gone, we should never get such another." He once, when the old king was sitting to him for his bust, fairly stuck a pair of compasses into his nose to measure the distance from the upper lip to the forehead, as if he had been measuring a block of marble. His late Majesty laughed heartily at this, and was amused to find that there was a person in the world, ignorant of that vast interval which separated him from every other man. s Nollekens, with all his loyalty, merely liked the man, and cared nothing about the King (which was one of those mixed modes, as Mr. Locke calls them, of which he had no more idea than if he had been one of the cream-coloured horses)—handled him like so much common clay, and had no other notion of the matter, but that it was his business to make the best bust of...« less