ABSTRACT
The first important plate which Blake designed for a book, Burger’s Leonora (tr. J.T.Stanley), was greeted with indignation by the critics, (a) The account in the British Critic for September 1796 protested at the distorted, absurd, and impossible monsters, exhibited in the frontispiece to Mr. Stanley’s last edition. Nor can we pass by this opportunity of execrating that detestable taste, founded on the depraved fancy of one man of genius, which substitutes deformity and extravagance for force and expression, and draws men and women without skins, with their joints all dislocated; or imaginary beings, which neither can nor ought to exist. 1
