The answer to the lyre

In 1753 Robert Dodsley published Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for six poems by Mr. T. Gray. Sponsored by Horace Walpole, this luxurious quarto was the first major aesthetic expression for the Strawberry Hill circle and a landmark in English book illustration. Kenneth Clark has called it "the most graceful monument to Gothic Rococo." Its witty interplay between illustration and text anticipated Blake, who studied it some thirty years later. Among its poems is Gray's famous Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard. Loftus Jestin offers a facsimile of Designs (out of print since 1786) and a full-length interdisciplinary study of the collaboration of Bentley, Gray, and Walpole that produced this extraordinary book. He shows the way poems and illustration at once complement, compete with, and invigorate each other, and he examines Strawberry Hill, Walpole's house at Twickenham, where Bentley's genius flourished. He also considers the interplay of the sister arts in the work of Hogarth, Kent and Pine, and surveys the tastes, friendships, economics, and politics that helped shape the development of Bentley's book illustration. [This book] will porve to be a unique resource for students of both the graphic and literary arts of eighteenth-century England. -- Book Jacket.