Wainewright died, in giving him birth, at the early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE tells us of her 'amiable disposition and numerous accomplishments,' and adds somewhat quaintly that 'she is supposed to have understood the writings of Mr. Griffiths, the editor and founder of the MONTHLY REVIEW, the partner in another literary speculation of Thomas Davis, that famous bookseller of whom Johnson said that he was not a bookseller, but 'a gentleman who dealt in books,' the friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood, and one of the most well-known men of his day. His mother was the daughter of the celebrated Dr. His father was the son of a distinguished solicitor of Gray's Inn and Hatton Garden. This remarkable man, so powerful with 'pen, pencil and poison,' as a great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at Chiswick, in 1794.
Sophocles held civic office in his own city the humourists, essayists, and novelists of modern America seem to desire nothing better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their country and Charles Lamb's friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age. Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell. Yet there are many exceptions to this rule. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems of much importance.
That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode of limitation. It has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and completeness of nature. PEN, PENCIL AND POISON - A STUDY IN GREEN
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