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press Books of Prophetic' poetry and design, such as we saw him busied with, year by year, in Hercules Buildings. The Milton and the Jerusalem were the only ones thus issued from South Molton Street, and his last in that class. Sibylline leaves of engraved writing were, however, now and then put forth such as that On Homer's Poetry, the Laocoon, the Death of Abel. As I have hinted, funds failed for the mere copper requisite to engrave lengthy productions like the Jerusalem; perhaps also, amid entire discouragement, the spirit for such weighty, bootless toil. He continued writing in the old strain till the end of his life,-wrote more, he declared himself, than Shakespeare and Milton put together. Scores of MSS. were produced, which never got beyond MS., and have since been scattered, most of them destroyed or lost. He could find no publisher here for writing or design. Many an unsuccessful application to the trade, as to undertaking some book of his he, in his time, had to make.. 'Well, it is published elsewhere,' he, after such an one, would quietly say, and beautifully bound.' Let the reader construe such words. with candour. Blake, by the way, talked little about 'posterity, an emptier vision far than those on which his abstracted gaze was ofttimes fixed. The invisible world, present to him even here, it was that to which his soul turned; in it found refuge amid the slights of the outward vulgar throng.

Many of the almost numberless host of Blake's water-colour drawings, on high scriptural and poetic themes, or frescos, as he called those (even on paper) more richly coloured, and with more impasto than the rest, continued to be produced; some for Mr. Butts, some to lie on hand; all now widely dispersed, nearly all undated, unhappily, though mostly signed. If men would but realize the possible value of a date! Still more numerous rough sketches were thrown off; for Blake's hand was ceaselessly at work. His was indefatigable industry. He thought nothing of entering on such a task as writing out, with ornamental letters, a MS. Bible as a basis

for illustration; and actually commenced one, in later years, for Mr. Linnell, getting as far as Genesis, chap. iv. verse 15. He cared not for recreation. Writing and design were his recreation from the task-work of engraving. I don't understand what you mean by the want of a holiday,' he would tell his friends. Art was recreation. enough for him. Work itself was pleasure, and any work, engraving, whilst he was at it, almost as much as design,-nay even what, to another, would have been the irksome task of engraving bad pictures. He was an early riser, and worked steadily on through health and sickness. Once, a young artist called, and complained of being very ill What was he to do?' 'Oh!' said Blake, 'I never stop for anything; I work on, whether ill or not.' Throughout life, he was always, as Mrs. Blake truly described him, either reading, writing, or designing. For it was a tenet of his, that the inner world is the all-important; that each man has a world within, greater than the external. Even while he engraved, he read,—as the plate-marks on his books testify. He never took walks for mere walking's sake, or for pleasure; and could not sympathise with those who did. During one period, he, for two years together, never went out at all, except to the corner of the Court to fetch his porter. That in-doors 'recreation' of his held him spell-bound. So wholly did the topics on which he thought, or dreamed, absorb his mind, that often,' Smith tells us, ' in the middle of the night he would, after thinking deeply upon a 'particular subject, leap from his bed and write for two hours " or more.'

Through his friend Linnell, Blake became acquainted with a new and sympathising circle of artists, which hereafter will include some very enthusiastic younger men. They, in part, filled the place of the old circle, now thinned by death and (in Stothard's case) by dissension. Of which, however, Flaxman and Fuseli remained; men friendly to him personally, and just to his genius, though, as respects the ormer, Blake did not always choose to think so. Once in these,

or later, years, Cary (Lamb's Cary, translator of Dante) was talking with his friend Flaxman of the few Englishmen who followed historical painting, enumerating Stothard, Howard, and others. Flaxman mentioned a few more, and among them Blake. But Blake is a wild enthusiast, isn't he?' Ever loyal to his friend, the sculptor drew himself up, half offended, saying, 'Some think me an enthusiast.'

Among Blake's new intimates were John Varley, Richter, and Holmes, the water-colour painters. From the works of the last two, Blake learned to add greater fulness and depth of colour to his drawings, such, indeed, as he, bred in the old school of slight tints, had hardly thought could have been developed in this branch of art. The painters in water-colours had, by this time, laid the foundation of that excellence, which has become an English speciality. An adventurous little band of now mostly forgotten men, whom their great successors, Turner, Copley Fielding, De Wint, Prout, David Cox, have pushed from their stools, had, in 1805 (tired of the Academy's cold shade) started their first separate Exhibition in Pall Mall, as a daring experiment.

Buyers for coloured copies of the Songs of Innocence and Experience would generally be found by Blake's artist friends, when no other encouragement could. Task-work as an engraver, Flaxman, still wishful to serve as of old, obtained him, in 1816, from the Longmans: a kind office Blake did not take quite in good part. He would so far rather have been recommended as a designer! So long ago as 1793, the author of the Songs of Innocence had engraved Flaxman's outlines to the Odyssey, as Piroli's substitute. Piroli's engravings of the sculptor's Eschylus and Iliad appeared in 1795 and 1796. And now, twenty-four years later, Blake, not a whit more prosperous with the world, had thankfully to engrave his friend's compositions from the Works and Days of Hesiod, published in 1817. January 1st, Blake dates his plates. They are

sweet and graceful compositions, harmonious and contenting so far as they go, but deficient in force, as Blake himself thought Flaxman to have always been, and as many now think. Some touch of natural sorrow Blake might well feel at having to copy, where he could have invented with far more power and originality. For Blake was as full of ideas as Flaxman of manner, a tender and eloquent, but borrowed idiom. And while Flaxman relied on the extraneous help (or impediment?) of a conventional, and in fact dead language or manner in art, and on archæological niceties, Blake could address us, in his rude, unpolished way, in an universal one and appeal to the Imagination direct.

During this period Blake engraved some plates for Rees' Encyclopædia, illustrative of the articles on Armour and Sculpture, the latter written by Flaxman, I believe. One example selected was the Laocoon, which carried our artist to the Royal Academy's antique school, for the purpose of making a drawing from the cast of that group. 'What! you here, Meesther Blake?' said Keeper Fuseli; we ought to come and learn of you, not you of us!' Blake took his place with the students, and exulted over his work, says Mr. Tatham, like a young disciple; meeting his old friend Fuseli's congratulations and kind remarks with cheerful, simple joy.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

JOHN VARLEY AND THE VISIONARY HEADS. 1818-20. [ÆT. 61-63.]

I HAVE mentioned John Varley as one in the new circle to which Mr. Linnell introduced Blake. Under Varley's roof, Linnell had lived for a year as pupil; with William Hunt, a since famous name, as a comrade.

John Varley, one of the founders of the New School of WaterColour Painting, a landscape designer of much delicacy and grace, was otherwise a remarkable man, of very pronounced character and eccentricities; a professional Astrologer in the nineteenth century, among other things, and a sincere one; earnestly practising judicial Astrology as an Art, and taking his regular fees of those who consulted him. He was the author of more than one memorable nativity and prediction; memorable, that is, for having come true in the sequel. And strange stories are told on this head; such as that of Collins the artist, whose death came, to the day, as the stars had

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