Page:Essays and criticisms by Wainewright (1880).djvu/36

xxx have been improved by a little more shading. He also took Madeleine—only a head in crayon—it must have been a rather later piece of work, and, I am informed by those who should know best, that it is a less truthful resemblance. But he also devoted a good deal of time and attention to the treatment of subjects intended for his own private portfolio—exquisite delineations of the female form, and designs which, regarded from an unprofessional point of view, might have been characterized as decidedly erotic. The only specimen of this class which has fallen in my way is a study from the well-known leg-comparing episode related in Grammont's Memoirs, in which one of the Court beauties, Miss Price, is made to figure.

Charles Lamb's testimony surely favours the assumption that Wainewright had little or nothing to do with the London Magazine after 1823. In a letter to Bernard Barton of that year, he says:—"The 'London,' I fear, falls off. I linger among the creaking rafters, like the last rat; it will topple down, if they don't get some buttresses. They have pulled down three: Hazlitt, Procter, and their best stay, kind, light-hearted Wainewright, their Janus…;" and, again, to the same correspondent he remarks about the same time:—"I miss Janus, and O, how it [the Magazine] misses Hazlitt!"

Once more, the veiled author of "The Memoir of a Hypochondriac," in the London for October, 1822, takes occasion to apologise for his intrusion on Wainewright's familiar province:—"And so