CHAPTER XXX.
DESIGNS TO PHILLIPS' 'PASTORALS.' 1820— 1821. [ÆT. 63—64.]
Blake was, in 1820—21, employed by Dr. Thornton for some illustrations to the Doctor's School Virgil—Virgil's Pastorals, that is. The result of the commission was a series of designs among the most beautiful and original of Blake's performances. These are the small woodcuts to Ambrose Phillips' imitation of Virgil's first Eclogue: designs simple, quaint, poetic, charged with the very spirit of pastoral.
Dr. Thornton, son of Bonnell Thornton of humorous memory, colleague with Colman in The Connoisseur, was a physician and botanist of note, in his day. He was the author of several very expensively illustrated folios and quartos on botany: A New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnæus, 1797; The Temple of Flora, or Garden of the Poet, Painter, and Philosopher, and other similar productions about botany in its picturesque aspect; costly books, illustrated in colours, which impoverished their amiable projector.
More successful in its generation was the Doctor's edition of the Pastorals of Virgil, 'with a course of English reading adapted for schools,' and other explanatory helps. All which was designed to enable youth 'to acquire ideas as well as words' with 'ease to the master and delight to the scholar.' One means to this end was ultimately added in a series of illustrative woodcuts. The first edition of 1812 had none: illustrations were issued as a supplementary volume in 1814.
