Price Thirty Shillings, Printed at Strawberry Hill, Anecdotes of Painting in England, with incidental Notes on other Arts. Collected by the late Mr George Vertue, and now first digested and published from his original Manuscripts. By Mr Horace Walpole. Vol. I. and II. With above forty Copper plates, four of which are taken from antient Paintings; the rest, heads of Artists, engraved by Grignion, Muller, Chambers, and Bannerman.
To be had of W. Bathoe, Bookseller, in the Strand, near Exeter Exchange.
As we have no wish whatever to paint the lily, we will, although the subject is a kindred one, leave Horace Walpole’s book without a fresh criticism to add to the thousand and odd already passed upon it, and will pass on to the land “where the men are all brave and the women all beautiful,” and where, in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, also of February 1762, we come upon the cry of a young man for his mother. In the advertisement is the nucleus of a story quite equal to “Tom Jones,” provided, of course, that its author possessed the fancy of a Fielding. We are not aware of any literary gentleman who would succeed, though we are acquainted with plenty who would most confidently make the attempt; their only doubt, if doubt possessed them at all, being not in their own powers, but in the discernment of the reading public. To them, therefore, we present the groundwork of a story which would naturally enlist the sympathies of England and Ireland. A little