prophetic books,' which have an energy like that of the elements, but are
rather rapid sketches taken while some phantasmic procession swept over
him, than elaborate compositions, and in whose shadowy adventures one
finds not merely, as did Dr. Garth Wilkinson, 'the hells of the ancient
people, the Anakim, the Nephalim, and the Rephaim ... gigantic
petrifactions from which the fires of lust and intense selfish passion
have long dissipated what was animal and vital'; not merely the shadows
cast by the powers who had closed the light from him as 'with a door and
window shutters,' but the shadows of those who gave them battle. He did
now, however, the many designs to Milton, of which I have only seen those
to _Paradise Regained_; the reproductions of those to _Comus_, published,
I think, by Mr. Quaritch; and the three or four to _Paradise Lost_,
engraved by Bell Scott--a series of designs which one good judge considers
his greatest work; the illustrations to Blair's _Grave_, whose gravity and
passion struggle with the mechanical softness and trivial smoothness of
Schiavonetti's engraving; the illustrations to Thornton's _Virgil_, whose
influence is manifest in the work of the little group of
landscape-painters who gathered about him in his old age and delighted to
call him master. The member of the group, whom I have already so often
quoted, has alone praised worthily these illustrations to the first
_eclogue_: 'There is in all such a misty and dreamy glimmer as penetrates
and kindles the inmost soul and gives complete and unreserved delight,
unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are like all this wonderful
artist's work, the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain, and the glimpse
which all the most holy, studious saints and sages have enjoyed, of the
rest which remains to the people of God.' Now, too, he did the great
series, the crowning work of his life, the illustrations to _The Book of
Job_ and the illustrations to _The Divine Comedy_. Hitherto he had
protested against the mechanical 'dots and lozenges' and 'blots and blurs'
of Woollett and Strange, but had himself used both 'dot and lozenge,'
'blot and blur,' though always in subordination 'to a firm and determinate
outline'; but in Marc Antonio, certain of whose engravings he was shown by
Linnell, he found a style full of delicate lines, a style where all was
living and energetic, strong and subtle. And almost his last words, a
letter written upon his death-bed,