Page:The Library (Lang).djvu/154

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124
THE LIBRARY.
[CHAP.

had boasted its "sculptures" of be-wigged and be-laurelled "worthies," its "prospects" and "land-skips," its nondescript monsters and its "curious antiques." But, despite the couplet in the "Dunciad" respecting books where

" . . . . the pictures for the page atone,
And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own;"—

illustrations, in which the designer attempted the actual delineation of scenes or occurrences in the text, were certainly not common when Pope wrote, nor were they for some time afterwards either very numerous or very noteworthy. There are Hogarth's engravings to "Hudibras" and Vanderbank's to "Don Quixote;" there are the designs of Hayman to Theobald's "Shakespeare," to Milton, to Pope, to Cervantes; there are Pine's "Horace" and Sturt's "Prayer-Book" (in both of which text and ornament were alike engraved); there are the well-known "Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for Six Poems by Mr. Gray;" and yet—notwithstanding all these—it is with Bewick's cuts to Gay's "Fables" in 1779, and Stothard's plates to Harrison's "Novelist's Magazine" in 1780, that book-illustration by imaginative compositions really begins to flourish in England. Those little masterpieces of the Newcastle artist brought about a revival of wood-engraving which continues to this