this opinion is considerably heightened by the recollection that your best work, the illustrations of "The Grave," was produced when you and Mrs. Blake were reduced so low as to be obliged to live on half a 'guinea a week!

'Before I conclude this letter, it will be necessary to remark, when I gave you the order for the drawings from the poem of "The Grave," I paid you for them more than I could then afford; more in proportion than you were in the habit of receiving, and what you were perfectly satisfied 'with; though I must do you the justice to confess much less than I think is their real value. Perhaps you have friends and admirers who can ' appreciate their merit and worth as much as I do. I am decidedly of opinion that the twelve for "The Grave" should sell at the least 'for sixty guineas. If you can meet with any gentleman who will give 'you this sum for them, I will deliver them into his hands on the publi'cation of the poem. I will deduct the twenty guineas I have paid 'you from that sum, and the remainder forty ditto shall be at your disposal.

6

6

'I will not detain you more than one minute. Why did you so furiously rage at the success of the little picture of "The Pilgrimage?" Three 'thousand people have now seen it and have approved of it. Believe me, "yours is "the voice of one crying in the wilderness !"

6

You say the subject is low, and contemptibly treated. For his excellent 'mode of treating the subject, the poet has been admired for the last 400 years! The poor painter has not yet the advantage of antiquity on his side, therefore wh some people an apology may be necessary for him. The 'conclusion of one of Squire Timkin's letters to his mother in the Bath Guide will afford one. He speaks greatly to the purpose :—

"I very well know,

Both my subject and verse is exceedingly low; But if any great critic finds fault with my letter, 'He has nothing to do but to send you a better."

With much respect for your talents,

I remain, Sir,

Your real friend and well-wisher,

R. H. CROMEK.'

It is one thing to read such a letter fifty years after it was written, though one can hardly do so without indignation; another to have had to receive and digest its low affronts. A poet had need have a world of visions to retire to when exposed to these 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.' Blake might well get irascible, might well give vent to his contempt and scorn in epigrams such as the following, which I find in that same MS. note-book wherein poor Hayley figures so ignominiously:

Cromek loves artists as he loves his meat;
He loves the art, but 'tis the art to cheat!

And again :

A petty sneaking knave I knew ;

Oh, Mr. Cromek! how do you do?

Here is a taste of Cromek's opinions put into rhyme.'

And yet is not a needy publisher to make that profit out of a needy painter he cannot for himself? May not the purchaser of twelve drawings at twenty pounds do what he likes with his own? That Cromek had no answer to the charge of 'imposition,' and of having tricked Blake, is obvious from his preferring to open up irrelevant questions: he defends by attacking. The artist's discouragement of Cromek's herculean labours in behalf of Blake's fame, refers to his infatuated preference for being his own engraver, according to agreement. Through Cromek's reluctance to part with four guineas, the Blair lost a crowning grace in the vignette or setting, as in Blake's hands it would have been, of the Dedication to the Queen.

Poor Blake, in asking four guineas instead of one, for a single sketch, had evidently felt entitled to some insignificant atonement for previous under-pay. Perhaps, on the hint at the close of Cromek's letter

'He has nothing to do but to send you a better,'

the indignant painter acted in executing, hereafter, his projected "fresco' from the Canterbury Pilgrimage, and exhibiting and engraving it.

Р

CHAPTER XXIII.

GLEAMS OF PATRONAGE. 1806-1808. [ET. 49-51.]

ANOTHER discoverer' of Blake's singular and ignored genius was Dr. Malkin, Head-Master of Bury Grammar School, to whose account of the artist's early years we were indebted at the outset. It was, probably, after the return from Felpham, and through Cromek, they were made known to one another. Dr. Malkin was the author of various now all but forgotten works,-Essays on Subjects connected with Civilization, 1795: Scenery, Antiquities, and Biography of South Wales, 1804, which was his most popular effort, reaching, in 1807, to a second edition: also, Almahide and Hamet, a Tragedy, 1804. His name may likewise be found to a current revision of Smollett's Translation of Gil Blas, the earlier editions of which contain illustrations by Smirke.

Blake designed, and originally engraved, the ornamental device' to the frontispiece for Malkin's Father's Memoirs of his Child, but it was erased before the appearance of the work, and the same design re-engraved by Cromek. The book was published February 1806; in which month, by the way, died Barry, whom Blake knew and admired. The frontispiece consists of a portrait of the precocious infant, when two years old, from a miniature by Page, surrounded by an emblematic. design of great beauty. An Angel is conducting the child heavenward; he takes leave, with consoling gesture, of his kneeling mother, who, in a half-resigned, half-deprecating attitude, stretches towards him her wistful, unavailing arms, from the edge of a cliff-typifying Earth's verge. It is in a rambling introductory Letter to Johnes of Hafod, translator of Froissart, the account in question of the

designer of the frontispiece is given, with extracts from his Poems: a well-meant, if not very successful, attempt of the kindly pedagogue to serve the 'untutored proficient,' as he terms Blake. The poor little defunct prodigy who is the subject of the Memoir, and who died in 1802, after little more than a six years' lease of life, was not only an expert linguist, a general reader, something of a poet, the historianand topographer of an imaginary kingdom, of which he drew an 'accurate map;' but was also a designer, producing 'copies from some of Raphael's heads so much in unison with the style and sentiment of the originals, as induced our late excellent and inge'nious friend, Mr. Banks, the sculptor, to predict, "that if he were to 'pursue the arts as a profession, he would one day rank among the 'more distinguished of their votaries."

He was also an original inventor of 'little landscapes; accustomed 'to cut every piece of waste paper within his reach into squares' an inch or two in size, and to fill them with 'temples, bridges, trees, 'broken ground, or any other fanciful and picturesque materials which 'suggested themselves to his imagination.' The father gives tracings from six of these as 'specimens of his talent in composition;' himself descrying a decisive idea attached to each, and that 'the buildings are placed firm on the ground;' not to mention a taste and variety, the result of a mind gifted with just feeling and fertile resources.'

The testimony of Mr. Blake' is added, who, being a man of imagination, can decipher more in these pre-Claudite jottings of pillar and post, arch and scrub, than his humble biographer can. What he says is, in its general tenor, interesting and true enough. But surely Mr. Blake saw double on the occasion,-for his sincerity never admits of doubt.

'They are all,' writes he, 'firm determinate outline, or identical 'form. Had the hand which executed these little ideas been that of 'a plagiary, who works only from the memory, we should have seen 'blots, called masses,' (Blake is girding at his own opposites in Art)