stance of the Cardinal of York."* Subsequent epistles abound in references to dowager and natural daughter, after the decease of ce dernier des Stuart. But it is only with any casual reference to Charles himself that our further citations from Walpole are concerned. As where he tells Lady Ossory that the King of Sweden, when last in Florence, found the Count of Albany in a wretched condition, destitute even of an exchequer to pay his household; and that his Majesty "imparted his sympathy at the opera-to whom, think you, Madam ? only to the minister of the Count's rival;"t-that is, to Sir Horace Mann, envoy to the Court of Florence, of his Britannic Majesty, George the Third, Defender of the Faith, and other good things, in the Stuart's room and stead. Or where mention is made of the validity accorded to Charles Edward's testamentary dispositions, by Papal authority: "The pantomime carrying on at Florence and Rome is entertaining. So, the Pope, who would not grant the title of King to the Pretender, allows his no-Majesty to have created a Duchess; and the Cardinal of York, who is but a rag of the Papacy, and who must think his brother a King, will not allow her title! Well! it is well they have not power to do worse, nor can spill the blood of others in their foolish squabbles."

The creating his daughter Duchess of Albany, which Lord Mahon calls "the last exercise of an expiring prerogative," was consequent upon the secession of his wife, and his reception of that daughter into the deserted home. The young lady was about twenty at the time, and survived her father only one year. Her presence in the house was the one consolation of his sexagenarian solitude, unless we take account of his doting interest in the prophecies of Nostradamus. To the last he cherished a flickering hope in the possibility of a summons to England, to accomplish in the eighteenth century a not less Glorious Restoration than his namesake and great-uncle enjoyed in the seventeenth. That he might obey the summons at an hour's notice, nay, without half an hour's delay, the poor old prince kept a strong-box, containing twelve thousand sequins, under his bed.

When he returned to Rome with his daughter in 1785, it was as a confirmed invalid, who had already, and more than once, been given over as a dead man. But he dragged on the lengthening chain of existence somehow, until the opening month of 1788, when a paralytic stroke removed him from the land of the living. It was a centenary of mournful import to the Stuarts, that of '88. And the day of his death was a tragical anniversary in the annals of that house-the thirtieth of January. So averse, indeed, were the dead Prince's attendants from recognising the ominous identity of date with that of his great-grandfather's execution at Whitehall, that the thirty-first of January was publicly announced to have been the actual day of Charles Edward's death.

His brother the Cardinal-who afterwards lived and died a pensioner of the House of Hanover-performed the funeral rites at Frascati, whence the coffin was afterwards removed to St. Peter's at Rome. And there a monument was erected-at the charges, it is said, of the same safelyenthroned House of Hanover-and from the chisel of Canova, in memoriam not only of Charles the Third, but of his father James the Third, and of his brother Henry the Ninth, all three of them titular (though neither by act of men, nor by grace of God) Kings of England. *Walpole to Lady Ossory, Aug. 19, 1784. Walpole to Mann, Jan. 4, 1785.

† Ibid., Nov. 12, 1784.

(309

"PICTOR IGNOTUS:" A BIOGRAPHY.*

NOTWITHSTANDING the words we have just transcribed, from the titlepage of Mr. Gilchrist's work, its subject-the painter-poet Blake-is sufficiently remembered, as an eccentric artist, an intolerant critic, and a poet of most obscure fancies. He had a high opinion of his own talents, and had little respect for those who ventured to make deductions from his estimate. In the words of his present biographer, he was “a vehement one-sided enthusiast."

That, after a lapse of between thirty and forty years, two portly volumes, richly embellished, should be devoted to the record of his life and labours, we should think incredible if they were not upon our table while we write. Unless, indeed, we are to consider them as an offering of friendship to his memory rather than a publisher's speculation. Few, however, of the circle in which his lengthened years were passed can yet be living. Mr. Gilchrist died before the completion of his work; but that two or three are still left we learn from a preface, written in a tone of subdued sorrow by his widow, as well as from passages in the volumes themselves.

The principal incidents of the life of Blake can be brought within a very narrow compass. He was born in 1757, the son of a small tradesman in the dingy neighbourhood of Broad-street, Golden-square. He began his career with Stothard and Flaxman as his contemporaries, and with Reynolds as President of the Academy, and he ended with the era of Wilkie and of Turner. Beyond reading and writing he had the merit of being self-educated; making progress even to the last. In acquiring a knowledge of languages-at least superficially-he seems to have always had considerable readiness. He learnt Italian when seventy-six years old. Though town-bred, his first boyish delights were

The pomp of groves and garniture of fields,

and he peopled them with imaginary beings: for one of his earliest manifestations of an ill-balanced mind was the habit of mistaking ideas for realities. On returning from his long rambles over the Surrey hills, he would tell them at home, in serious earnestness, of having seen a tree filled with angels, "bright angelic wings bespangling every bough with stars." At another time of having seen angelic beings walking amongst the haymakers-who were but bad company, we fear, for angels; and his prosaic father, being sure that he had seen nothing of the kind, was only prevented by the intercession of Mrs. Blake from thrashing him for telling falsehoods.

His childish love of art was not discouraged by his parents; but he had to cultivate it practically by being placed, at the age of fourteen, as

*Life of William Blake, "Pictor Ignotus," with Selections from his Poems and other Writings. By the late Alexander Gilchrist, of the Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law, Author of the "Life of William Etty, R.A." Illustrated from Blake's own Works, in fac-simile, by W. J. Linton, and in Photolithography; with a few of Blake's original Plates. Two Vols. London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co. 1863.

apprentice to an engraver. He was first taken by his father to Ryland, then in full prosperity, and the associate of men "of distinguished rank in letters and society." Himself a man of prepossessing manners and appearance. On their leaving his studio, "Father," said the strange boy, "I do not like the man's face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged!" It was a kind of prophecy; for, however improbable it might have seemed at the time, he certainly was hung, twelve years later, for a forgery on the East India Company. The negotiation with Ryland having for some reason failed, Blake was ultimately bound to James Basire-whose painstaking exactness made him a favourite engraver with the antiquaries-and who, in private life, was "a superior and liberalminded man, ingenuous and upright; and a kind master." "One day" (as Blake ever remembered) "Goldsmith was amongst the callers at Basire's place of business. It must have been during the very last years of his life; and the boy was struck, as he used to tell, with the great author's finely-marked head as he gazed up at it and thought to himself how much he should like to have such a head when he grew to be a man.'" A right feeling sprang up between Basire and his apprentice: the one being careful, industrious, and faithful, the other considerate and kind. His duties to his master, however, did not prevent the young enthusiast from turning, at intervals, to the higher grades of art. "During the evenings," says Mr. Gilchrist," and at over hours, he made drawings from his already teeming fancy, and from English history." He had become a poet some years earlier. When the seven years of his apprenticeship had expired, he subsisted by engraving for the booksellers, at the same time occupying himself-for he was an indefatigable worker with his wild attempts in verse, and strange imaginations in design; and he thus continued, with little variation, to the end of a life of ill-requited labour. After leaving Basire he studied for a while at the Academy, then only recently established, and was one of its unnoticed exhibitors. The chief advantage he seems to have derived from his connexion with it, was the friendship of Fuseli. Of his engravings, Mr. Gilchrist (chap. v.) gives us a very minute list. At the age of twenty-four he married a young woman in humble circumstances, uneducated, but of a teachable mind both in art and letters; and, during his long life of trial, she was his comfort and support. Her mode of obtaining the domestic supplies was peculiar. It was silent but effectual. Blake had enjoyed so little of what money can purchase that he had become indifferent to its possession. If she told him the money was going, "Oh, the money," he would shout; "it's always the money!" "Her method of hinting at the odious subject became, in consequence, a very quiet and expressive one. There was no discussion or appeal. She would set before him at dinner just what there was in the house, without any comment, until finally the empty platter had to make

*There are many of his plates in the early volumes of the "Archæologia." His style was stiff and wiry; and Blake did not rise much above the defects of his master. We may refer to one of his best examples, the "Fertilisation of Egypt," after a design by Fuseli, in Darwin's Economy of Vegetation. Works, vol. i. edition 1806.

His favourable impression of Goldsmith's personal appearance confirms the reminiscences of Miss Knight. (Autobiography, vol. i. p. 11.)

its appearance: which hard fact effectually reminded him that it was time to descend from his high fancies and go back to his engraving." She had two invaluable qualities for a poor man's wife-she was economical, and an excellent cook. Mr. Gilchrist's sixth chapter announces the artist's "introduction to the polite world ;" and to his first patrons. He was presented by Flaxman to Mrs. Mathews, one of his own earliest admirers, one of the most distinguished blue-stockings of her day, and the wife of a celebrated preacher, who officiated at the chapel in Charlotte-street, made famous in our own time by the tinsel eloquence of Montgomery. "Her drawing-room was frequented by most of the literary and known people" of her day. It was "C a centre of all then esteemed, enlightened, and delightful in society." This it may be supposed was not the most fitting place for a man so irrepressible in his impulses as Blake. Though entirely ignorant of music he used to sing, at these réunions, his own verses to airs of his own composition. If the airs were as strange as the verses, the assembled literati must have been surprised, however they may have admired them. The lady herself was so charmed that she induced her husband and Flaxman to print a volume of the young engraver's poems at their joint expense. They were not very carefully printed, and, as usual in such cases, can scarcely have been said to have been published. The name of their author remained as obscure as before. One of them, which Mr. Gilchrist ascertains to have been written before its author was fourteen, is at least remarkable as being better than most of the verses he afterwards produced. But he soon became tiresome. His unbending deportment; his strange originalities of thought; his pertinacity in defending his opinions when attacked; his high notion of the dignity of his calling, and its superiority to all mere worldly distinctions, made him an unsafe guest; and when it became clear to that well-regulated circle that he "perversely came to teach, not to be taught ;" to be admired as a prodigy, not "to be gently schooled into imitative proprieties, and condescendingly patted on the back," he was no longer acceptable at the receptions of Mrs. Mathews; and, after a time, his visits altogether ceased.

He next attempted to add to his means of subsistence by opening a print-shop; took a partner; quarrelled with him; and so brought the concern to an end. As an engraver, one of his most frequent employers was Johnson, of St. Paul's Churchyard; who seems to have been a publisher as liberal as Lord Byron's "absolute John." It was he who pressed upon Cowper 1000l. for poems that had already been assigned to him for the mere cost of publication. In what other walk of money-making should we seek for a like munificence? He was, at the same time, almost as eccentric as Blake himself; and used to go about the streets wearing the red cap of liberty. If we may judge of him by his associates, he must have been " a reformer and something more.' The circle of his friends and writers-who used to dine with him "in a little quaintlyshaped up-stairs room, with walls not at right angles, where his guests must have been somewhat straitened for space"-included Drs. Price and Priestly, Godwin, Fuseli, Holcroft, Mrs. Wollstonecraft, and Tom Paine. We shall not be surprised, therefore, that, like several of them, he was prosecuted by the government of the day; and in his case there was a conviction. His offence was having sold (as many others had sold) a

copy of Gilbert Wakefield's "Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff's Address." His punishment was being fined and imprisoned in the King's Bench. But the worthy bookseller, nothing daunted, continued to give his weekly dinners, and saw his friends at the house of the marshal instead of under the shadow of St. Paul's. Blake's trial for sedition came something later, and under very different circumstances. In the mean time Johnson had ventured to publish for him the first book of a poem on "The French Revolution," a kind of epic; which was as unnoticed either by the public or the reviewers as "the privately printed Poetical Sketches,' or the privately engraved Songs of Innocence."" As nobody would now print for him, and as he could not afford to "shame the fools" by printing at his own expense, he invented a new mode of working off both text and designs from prepared plates, from which he could take impressions in any tint he wished. It was an ingenious process, and ought to have been; for the mode of preparing the plates was communicated to him in a vision by his deceased brother; and the use of glue in mixing his colours was revealed to him in the same mysterious manner by Joseph of Nazareth. In this way he put forth, in addition to the "Songs of Innocence," many other works, of which Mr. Gilchrist, by fac-simile specimens or by impressions from the plates themselves, enables us to form our own opinions. The tinting of the plates was finished by hand, in which the artist had taught Mrs. Blake to assist him, and she was also both his printer and binder. A complete set of the "Songs of Innocence" and the "Songs of Experience," form fifty-four engraved pages. They were issued to the friends who constituted his only public, at the price of thirty shillings and two guineas. Later in his life, and as a delicate means of assisting him, five guineas and even more were given. Chantrey, for a highly-finished copy, paid twenty pounds. But in this there was nothing like fame. He only appeared fairly before the public in the designs purchased from him by the engraver Cromek for an edition of "Blair's Grave;" and it was the same engraver who caused him his bitterest mortification as an artist by preferring Stothard to himself as the painter of "Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims." Mr. Gilchrist takes up their quarrel more as a partisan than as an impartial judge. One of the parties he very greatly wrongs. We met Cromek in 1808, as the guest of Mr. Roscoe at Allerton, and knew him afterwards; and we do not believe him to have been the mercenary in literature or art that he is here described. In his dealings both with Blake and Stothard he gave them what they required for the works he purchased; he faithfully fulfilled his engagements; and if he knew better than they did how to attract the attention of the public, he had a right to use such knowledge for his own advantage. It was only in this way that he made more by their works than they could have made themselves. Whatever Blake may have had to complain of, in the matter of the Pilgrims, Stothardthough he angrily suspected him-was free from blame. If Blake had indeed shown Cromek his sketch in anything like a finished state, it is probable that Cromek had been struck with its capabilities in abler hands,

* For the 40%. that he was to pay Stothard for the "Pilgrims," in addition to the 607. originally named, his widow gave impressions of the engraving, which would easily have produced the amount. She was left in narrow circumstances, and was unable to do more.