The Literary Gazette, 12th May 1827, pages 299-300
SCULPTURE: EXTRAORDINARY GENIUS.
It has been the good fortune, and we trust the characteristic of the Literary Gazette, to bring forward talent under every circumstance in which it could be found; and as far as our powers and our judgment would allow, place merit in the view of the public: and we have not been in many instances without the satisfaction of finding that our labours have not been in vain.
We do not hunt for genius, nor travel to discover precocious powers, too often resembling the ignis fatuus, which astonishes for a while, and then is seen no more: but when we discover an individual in an obscure lodging, unknown and unpatronised, under every circumstance of privation and exclusion, occupied as a sculptor, and producing stupendous works of art, it becomes a duty, and it is our pride, to call the attention of the public, and of the lovers and patrons of the Fine Arts, to the case of so gifted an individual. The person to whom we allude is a Mr. Lough, the son, we believe, of a small farmer in Northumberland; who, we fear not to predict, is destined to become, at no distant day, one of the greatest sculptors of modern times. This young genius, for he is yet only twenty-four years of age, has already, at an age when others are little advanced in their studies, overleaped the bounds, and burst the trammels which confine ordinary men, and produced works of astonishing power. We have just seen him, in the obscurity of a paltry lodging, in a mean street (11, Burleigh-street, Strand); but in his poor apartment, surrounded with the wonders of his talent, and the proofs of his extraordinary character. There are two models,
