'Where Glunis and Gawries wear mysterious things,
That serve at once for jackets and for wings,'—
to wit, 'The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins,' * he cares very much indeed. He is not surprised that they gained their designer the friendship of Flaxman; and if he is not able to say with Elia,—
'In several ways distinct you make us feel,—
Graceful as Raphael, as Watteau genteel,'—
epithets which, in our modern acceptation of them, sound singularly ill-chosen, he can at least admit that if his favourite is occasionally a little monotonous and sometimes a little insipid, there are few artists in England in whose performances the un-English gift of grace is so unmistakably present. **
* Coleridge is also extravagant on this theme in his 'Table
Talk.' 'If it were not for a certain tendency to
affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high,' he
says, 'for Stothard's designs [to Peter Wilkins].'
* * Strangely enough he set little more by this quality, but
apparently valued himself more for his 'correctness' ('Bryan
Waller Procter,' Bell, 1877, pp. 83-90).
Fifty years ago there were but few specimens of Stothard's works in the Print Room of the British Museum, and even those were not arranged so as to be easily accessible. To-day, this complaint, which Pye makes in that miscellany of unexpected information, his 'Patronage of British Art,' can no longer be renewed. In the huge Balmanno collection, a labour of five-and-twenty years, the student may now study his Stothard to his heart's content. Here is brought together his work of all sorts, his earliest and latest, his strongest and his feeblest, from the first tentative essays he made for the 'Lady's Magazine' and Hervey's 'Naval History' to those final designs, which, aided by the supreme imagination of Turner, did so much to vitalise the finicking and overlaboured blank verse of his faithful but fastidious patron at St. James's Place.
'Of Roger's "Italy," Luttrell relates,
It-would surely be dished, if 'twere not for the plates,'