indicating uncertain application to the practice of art. He was then living at 44, Great Marlborough Street. Mr. Palmer, one of Blake's young disciples in those days, well remembers a visit to the Academy in Blake's company, during which the latter pointed to a picture near the ceiling, by Wainwright, and spoke of it as 'very fine.' It was a scene from Walton's Angler, exhibited in 1823 or 4. 'While so many moments better worthy to remain are fled,' writes Mr. Palmer to me, 'the caprice of memory presents me with the image of Blake looking up at Wainwright's picture; Blake in his plain black suit and rather broad-brimmed, but not quakerish hat, standing so quietly among all the dressed-up, rustling, swelling people, and myself thinking " How little you know who is among you!"'
During the first years of The London Magazine, 1820—23, Wainwright was a contributor, under various pseudonyms, of articles, not, as Talfourd mistakenly describes them, 'of mere flashy assumption,' full of 'disdainful notices of living artists;' but articles of real literary merit and originality; in a vein of partly feigned coxcombry and flippant impertinence, of wholly genuine sympathy with art (within orthodox limits), and recognition of the real excellencies of the moderns,—of Retsch, of Stothard, for example, and of Etty, then a young man. They are articles by no means obsolete yet, even in their opinions; in matter and style still fresh and readable; standing out in vivid contrast to the heavy common-place of the Editor's, now so stale and flat, in the same department of art-criticism. They attracted the notice and admiration of Lamb, whose personal regard he retained for many years; of De Quincey and of Procter—no mean judges.
In one of these smart, harum-scarum articles (Sept. 1820), entitled 'Mr. Janus Weathercock's Private Correspondence,'—a letter on topics so miscellaneous as Recent Engravings, Pugilism, and Chapman's Homer,—occurs incidental reference to Blake, the only one I have found in the series. 'Talking of articles, my learned
