In 1753 Robert Dodsley published Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray. Sponsored by Horace Walpole, this luxurious quarto was the first major aesthetic expression of the Strawberry Hill circle and a landmark in English book illustration. Kenneth Clarke called it "the most graceful monument to Gothic Rococo." Its witty interplay between illustration and text anticipated Blake, who studied it some thirty years later. Among its poems is Gray's famous Elegy Written in a Courtly Church-Yard. Loftus Jestin offers a facsimile of Designs (out of print since 1786) and a full-length interdisciplinary study of the collaboration of Bentley, Gray, and Walpole that produced this extraordinary book. He shows the way poems and illustration at once complement, compete with and invigorate each other, and he examines Strawberry Hill. Walpole's house at Twickenham, where Bentley's genius flourished. He also considers the interplay of the sister arts in the work of Hogarth, Kent, and Pine, and surveys the tastes, friendships, economics, and politics that helped shape the development of Bentley's book illustrations.

Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, better known as Horace Walpole, was an English writer, art historian, the man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician. He was also famous for the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), and his Letters, which became a valuable source of information on the political views and cultural views of intellectuals in the pre-Victorian era.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 2 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.