[Lamb is writing of Belshazzar’s Feast] are of the highest order of the material sublime.  Whether they were dreams or transcripts of some elder workmanship—­Assyrian ruins old—­restored by this mighty artist, they satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of the antique world.  It is a pity that they were ever peopled.”  “Literary” art critic as he was, Lamb put his finger on Martin’s weakest spot—­his figure painting.  The entire essay should be read, for it contains a study of the Joshua in which this most delicious of English prose writers speaks of the “wise falsifications” of the great masters.  Before his death the critics, tiring of him sooner than the public, called Martin tricky, meretricious, mechanical.  To be sure, his drawing is faulty, his colour hot and smoky; nevertheless, he was not a charlatan.  As David Wilkie wrote:  “Weak in all these points in which he can be compared to other artists,” he had the compensating quality of an imposing, if at times operatic, imagination.  Monkhouse justly says that in Martin’s illustrations to Milton the smallness of scale and absence of colour enable us to appreciate the grandeur of his conceptions with a minimum of his defects.

In sooth he lacked variety.  His pictures are sooty and apocalyptic.  We have seen the Mountain Landscape, at South Kensington, The Destruction of Herculaneum, at Manchester, another at Newcastle whose subject escapes us, and we confess that we prefer the mezzotints of Martin, particularly those engraved by Le Keux—­whose fine line and keen sense of balance corrected the incoherence of Martin’s too blackened shadows and harsh explosions of whites.  One looks in vain for the velvety tone of Earlom, or the vivid freshness of Valentine Green, in Martin.  He was not a colourist; his mastery consisted in transferring to his huge cartoons a sense of the awful, of the catastrophic.  He excelled in the delineation of massive architecture, and if Piranesi was his superior in exactitude, he equalled the Italian in majesty and fantasy of design.  No such cataclysmic pictures were ever before painted, nor since, though Gustave Dore, who without doubt made a study of Martin, has incorporated in his Biblical illustrations many of Martin’s overwhelming ideas—­the Deluge, for example.  James Ensor, the Belgian illustrator, is an artist of fecund fancy who, alone among the new men, has betrayed a feeling for the strange architecture, dream architecture, we encounter in Martin.  Coleridge in Kubla Khan, De Quincey in opium reveries, Poe and Baudelaire are among the writers who seem nearest to the English mezzotinter.  William Beckford’s Vathek, that most Oriental of tales, first written in French by a millionaire of genius, should have inspired Martin.  Perhaps its mad fantasy did, for all we know—­there is no authentic compilation of his compositions.  Heine has spoken of Martin, as has Theophile Gautier; and his name, by some kink of destiny, is best known to the present generation because of Macaulay’s mention of it in an essay.