Excellent, too, are John Gay's ambling _Journey to Exeter_., the
_Angler's Song_ from Walton (which gives its name to the collection),
and Fielding's rollicking "A-hunting we will go." Other "Cranford"
books, which now followed, were James Lane Allen's _Kentucky Cardinal_,
1901; Fanny Burney's _Evelina_, 1903; Thackeray's _Esmond_, 1905; and
two of George Eliot's novels--_Scenes of Clerical Life_, 1906, and
_Silas Marner_, 1907. In 1899 Mr. Thomson had also undertaken another
book for George Allen, an edition of Reade's _Peg Woffington_,--a task
in which he took the keenest delight, particularly in the burlesque
character of Triplet. These were all in the old pen-work; but some of
the designs for _Silas Marner_ were lightly and tastefully coloured.
This was a plan the author had adopted, with good effect, not only in a
special edition of _Cranford_ (1898), but for some of his original
drawings which came into the market after exhibition. Nothing can be
more seductive than a Hugh Thomson pen-sketch, when delicately tinted in
sky-blue, _rose-Du Barry_, and apple-green (the _vert-pomme_ dear--as
Gautier says--to the soft moderns)--a treatment which lends them a
subdued but indefinable distinction, as of old china with a pedigree,
and fully justifies the amiable enthusiasm of the phrase-maker who
described their inventor as the "Charles Lamb of illustration.
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