Gems of English poetry. With illustrations by great artists
A gift anthology of English verse published in London in 1865, its plates engraved on steel after paintings by Royal Academy men such as C. R. Leslie and Thomas Lawrence, sold to middle-class drawing-room readers. The 39 plates are soft-toned single-figure subjects — a veiled bride, a girl reading, a boy on a rock, mother and child in an archway — each floated on a blank page with painter-and-engraver credit lines and a small capitalised title, useful for stipple shading, vignetted figures and plate captioning.
