3-000-293 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"The Tempest": Prospero adrift, 1860. 'This is a superbly got-up edition of that romantic play of our great bard which, as much as any, affords materials for illustration. In the present case, while every other accessory of a drawing-room book has been lavishly exhibited in its decoration, it is embellished by numerous excellent engravings by Birket Foster, Gustave Dore, Frederick Skill, Alfred Slader, and Gustave Janet...The subject-matter of the illustration is to be found in that scene of the play in which Prospero describes to Miranda his desertion in an open boat at sea by his treacherous brother and his co-conspirators, and which he tells in the following lines: "They hurried us aboard a bark; Bore us some leagues to sea; where they prepar'd A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg'd, Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats Instinctively had quit it; there they hoist us, To cry to the sea that roar'd to us; to sigh To the winds, whose pity, sighing back again, Did us but loving wrong".' Plate from Shakespeare's "Tempest", (Bell and Daldy), published in "Illustrated London News", 1860.