E381028A. Findens’ Tableaux (1839).
The Examiner, 28 October 1838, p. 677.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 405.
Our heart failed us for a moment as our eye glanced at the title of this beautiful annual. Here, we thought, is another batch of the young ladies, manufactured of blancmange and white sugar—things whose rightful position is the top of a Twelfth cake—another bevy of “Beauties,” or “Flowers,” or “Gems,” or “Shells,” or “Pearls of Loveliness,” caricaturing good wholesome flesh and blood, and making it look like a confectioner’s journey-work, and not a thing of pulse and thought. Happy are we to say that we were in some sort agreeably disappointed; Mr Perring’s ladies—“women” is vulgar—are for the most part pleasing enough damsels, with varying character in their forms and faces; although, in one or two instances, he appears to have laboured under the “Beauty”-phobia. Miss Mitford has supplied several papers, in that attractive style which has won for her the admiration of those who love nature in its most graceful form; but she seems to have curtailed their fair proportions, to give “ample room and verge enough” for poems of higher tone and aim than are usually to be found in embellished publications. “The Romaunt of the Page,” by Elizabeth Barrett, is a poem with the spirit of the elder and better day of poetry in every line of it—in truth, a very sweet and noble composition, not unworthy of the author of the “Seraphim.” There is fine energy with high poetic power in “The Greek Wife,” by Mr Kenyon. Mrs Opie contributes a tale in her very best manner. We have no doubt, then, that Finden’s Tableaux will “be ordered to lie upon the table” of very many drawing-rooms. The engravings are certainly an improvement on the absurd collections of eyes, noses, and mouths, huddled up and called faces, and not only faces, but “Beauties” of the season; and the letter-press of the work is enriched by papers, both in prose and verse, worthy to outlive the short and brilliant day of the class to which it belongs.
[John Forster]
Reviewed:
Findens’ Tableaux, ed. M.R. Mitford, London: 1839.
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