the "Odyssey," or that lovely group from AEschylus of the tender-
hearted, womanly Oceanides, cowering like flowers beaten by the
storm under the terrible anger of Zeus? In our day Flaxman's
drawings would have been reproduced by some of the modern facsimile
processes, and the gain would have been great. As it is, something
is lost by their transference to copper, even though the translators
be Piroli and Blake. Blake, in fact, did more than he is usually
credited with, for (beside the acknowledged and later "Hesiod,"
1817) he really engraved the whole of the "Odyssey," Piroli's plates
having been lost on the voyage to England. The name of the Roman
artist, nevertheless, appears on the title-page (1793). But Blake
was too original to be a successful copyist of other men's work, and
to appreciate the full value of Flaxman's drawings, they should be
studied in the collections at University College, the Royal Academy,
and elsewhere. {9}

Flaxman and Blake had few imitators. But a host of clever
designers, such as Cipriani, Angelica Kauffmann, Westall, Uwins,
Smirke, Burney, Corbould, Dodd, and others, vied with the popular
Stothard in "embellishing" the endless "Poets," "novelists," and
"essayists" of our forefathers. Some of these, and most of the
recognised artists of the period, lent their aid to that boldly-
planned but unhappily-executed "Shakespeare" of Boydell,--"black and
ghastly gallery of murky Opies, glum Northcotes, straddling
Fuselis," as Thackeray calls it. They are certainly not enlivening-
-those cumbrous "atlas" folios of 1803-5, and they helped to ruin
the worthy alderman. Even courtly Sir Joshua is clearly ill at ease
among the pushing Hamiltons and Mortimers; and, were it not for the
whimsical discovery that Westall's "Ghost of Caesar" strangely
resembles Mr. Gladstone, there would be no resting-place for the