Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. 242: January to June 1878
The great success of the Tower of London, which, in addition to the etchings, was graced by a host of delightful little vignettes drawn on wood by George in his best and mellowest manner, naturally led to the publication of Windsor Castle, another of Mr. Ainsworth's unwieldy and sensationally melodramatic romances. The literary portion of Windsor Castle was additionally marred by the introduction of a supernatural personage, our old friend Herne the Hunter, about the clumsiest fiend ever introduced on the stage of letters since Ben Jonson's dunderheaded demon in The Devil is an Ass. The conversations of Herne with King Henry VIII. And the Earl of Surrey are inexpressibly ludicrous but Heme wears even a more comical guise when George represents him as mounted on the celebrated Cruikshankian horse, an animal which certainly deserves a place in a Museum of Extraordinary Quadrupeds, between the historic steed on which Mr. Millais made Sir Isambras cross the ford and the celebrated camel evolved by the German artist out of his internal consciousness. George could draw the ordinary nag of real life well enough witness the memorable Deaf Postilion in Three Courses and a Dessert, the inimitable post boy in Humphrey Clinker, and the graphically weedy screw in Protestant Bill; but when he essayed to portray a charger, or a hunter, or a lady's back, or even a pair of carriage horses, the result was the most grotesque of failures. The noble animal has, I apprehend, forty-four points, technically speaking, and from the muzzle to the spavin-place, from the crest to the withers, from the root of the dock to the fetlock, George was wrong in5 66 Tim G antleman's Magus-inc.
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