The title page for this book reads "A Gallery Of Illustrious Literary Characters (1830 - 1838) Drawn By The Late Daniel Maclise, R.A., And Accompanied By Notices Chiefly By The Late William Maginn, LL.D., Edited By William Bates, B.A., Professor Of Classics In Queen's College, Birmingham. With A Preface, And Copious Notes, Biographical, Critical, Bibliographical, And Generally Illustrative." and published in London by Chatto and Windus circa 1873 - it is actually undated, but has the date of August 1873 at the end of the Editor's Preface and the book is 239 pages long, which makes this a first edition according to WorldCat. Others say the first edition was published in 1874, but in either event, this book has the proper date on the preface page and the correct number of pages to be a first edition. The book is 3/4 bound with five raised bands, six gilt-ruled compartments with gilt lettering on the spine, marbled boards, marbled endpapers with the bookplate of James A Peasley on the front paste-down, the half-title, a portrait titled "The Fraserians" and a blank leaf followed by the title page, a page dedicated to Benjamin Disraeli, the Editor's Preface, a one-page List of Illustrations and 84 plates, counting the frontispiece, the text, which is 239 pages long, and all the edges are gilt. Daniel Maclise (1806 - 1870) was an Irish history painter who also did literary and portrait paintings and worked most of his life in London. He studied at the Cork School of Art in the early 1820's, and he got his lucky break in 1825, when Sir Walter Scott was travelling in Ireland and young Maclise saw him in a bookseller's shop, made a surreptitious sketch of the great author, which he afterwards lithographed; it became very popular and led to many commissions for pencil portraits. Maclise entered the Royal Academy in 1828 and eventually was awarded the highest prizes open to students. He also designed illustrations for several of Dickens's Christmas books and other works. (You can see the resemblance of some of the characters here to some of Dickens' characters.) Between 1830 and 1836 he contributed to Fraser's Magazine, and he was highly regarded as a caricaturist in his day. Maclise did most of the portraits in this book, but some were also done by "Alfred Crowquill", the pseudonym of Alfred Henry Forrester, another well-regarded illustrator at the time. The book is 4to. and measures 11 x 8 3/4 in. wide, with a tight binding and rubbing and wear on the spine and on the covers, the spine is a bit faded, and there are brown spots here and there. There are some later editions offered for sale online, but we could only find two first editions from 1873 offered for sale, and the book still has value if you want to know more about good portrait work from artists of the 1800's. #66 #7091