Cromek was not wrong in thinking that Stothard would make a successful picture of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_. He was famous at grouping, had an eye for horses, and was willing to drudge at the British Museum to clothe his figures correctly. There was some difficulty about the engraving, which Cromek had first intended to entrust to Bromley. It passed successively through the hands of Lewis Schiavonetti, Engleheart, Niccolo Schiavonetti, and was finally done by James Heath. The result justified Cromek's calculations. The _Pilgrimage to Canterbury_ was exhibited in all the great towns of England, and also in Edinburgh and Dublin. It had the most extensive sale of anything of the kind published within a hundred years. Everyone bought it and exhibited it, according to Mrs Bray, in their front parlour. It was reckoned Stothard's masterpiece. And when Harlow painted Stothard's portrait, he placed in the background a curtain just sufficiently drawn back to show the finest group of a picture in which the whole grouping was excellent. Meanwhile Blake, determined to dispense with a professional advertiser, engraved his own design, and put it up for sale at 28 Broad Street, the house of his birth where his brother James carried on the business. But it was not to stand alone. It was exhibited together with sixteen historical inventions, eleven frescoes, seven drawings. Blake wrote a prospectus to the _Canterbury Pilgrims_ and a _Descriptive Catalogue_ to the whole collection. One or two people, notably Crabb Robinson, found their way to the room; and while the praises of Stothard were being sung throughout the land for a design that had originated from Blake, Blake was tasting the bitter mortification of knowing that his attempt at self-advertisement and appeal to the public had failed. Although comparisons are odious, we may give ourselves the luxury of comparing these two rival treatments of a fine subject. Stothard's task was the easier of the two. His respect for and knowledge of Chaucer were much less than Blake's, and from the outset he had no mind to burden himself by attempting a servile copy of the poet. If the wife of Bath was just enjoying her fifth husband, then obviously she was no longer a pictorial subject, and Stothard took off as many years as the lady herself could have wished. His treatment of the religious types was even less faithful. The protestantism of the eighteenth century regarded monks, friars, abbesses, and nuns merely as odd curiosities of an odd past. Stothard had religious feeling, as is evident in his picture _Confirmation_, which Landseer admired so much, but for him a friar was the type of laziness, and the monk of gluttony, and his only idea in portraying them was to make the lines of their chins and stomachs as rotund as possible.