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study of archangels. Why then should I be anxious about the riches or fame of mortality? The Lord our Father will do for us and with us according to his Divine will, for our good.

You, O dear Flaxman! are a sublime archangel,-my friend and companion from eternity. In the Divine bosom is our dwelling-place. I look back into the regions of reminiscence, and behold our ancient days before this earth appeared in its vegetated mortality to my mortal vegetated eyes. I see our houses of eternity which can never be separated, though our mortal vehicles should stand at the remotest corners of heaven from each other.

Farewell, my best friend! Remember me and my wife in love and friendship to our dear Mrs. Flaxman, whom we ardently desire to entertain beneath our thatched roof of rusted gold. And believe me for ever to remain your grateful and affectionate

Felpham, Sept. 21, 1800, Sunday Morning.

WILLIAM BLAKE.

For a time, all went well with the artist and his patron. Blake even entered into common ways so far as to paint likenesses and give lessons in drawing amongst neighbouring families. But no two natures could be more essentially opposed than those of the artist Blake and the dilettante Hayley. There was also an element of irritability and suspicion in Blake, such as, indeed, the self-made man is peculiarly exposed to-a sort of one-sided keenness and unbalanced sense of injustice, which led him afterwards to dissensions with more valuable friends than the Poet of Felpham. A curious village quarrel with a drunken soldier,reminding us somewhat of the story of a spy who was set, in those bitter political days, to report on Coleridge,—completed Blake's s annoyance; and the current of his life resumed its ancient way. He returned to London; there, amidst comparative neglect and noble poverty, to work out not only those visionary poems in which he thought his genius found its fullest expression, but to create, at the suggestion of others, those other works where his intensity of spiritual insight, restrained within intelligible limits, reached higher altitudes, and sounded deeper depths, by virtue of its enforced concentration.

Of the Jerusalem' and the 'Milton,' executed soon after what Blake called his 'three years' slumber on the banks of Ocean,' we have already spoken. The latter, amidst its incoherent philosophies, contains a lovely description of some spring morning at Felpham, which Mr. Gilchrist has judiciously reprinted. Grand and inventive as are the mystic designs of these two works, and highly as they are now prized by intelligent men (a copy of the 'Jerusalem' sold the other day for 507.), they were not works from which any artist could reasonably expect an immediate

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return.

Blake, indeed, endured penury with all the heroism which is ascribed to Epictetus, in that most noble and most touching of the many noble and touching epitaphs which the Greeks have left us :

Δοῦλος Ἐπίκτητος γενόμην, καὶ σῶμ ̓ ἀνάπηρος,

καὶ πενίην Ιρος, καὶ φίλος ἀθανάτοις.

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Even so the artist toiled on in the long laborious mechanical process of rendering his thickly crowding imaginations, within dingy lodgings in South Molton Street, poor, and sick in body, and beloved by the gods.'* If a man,' said Epictetus, 'desires to advance, for the sake of the inner life, he will endure to be thought a fool; for it is not easy to keep at once his own fixed purpose of following nature, and the things of this world. He who has the one, must neglect the other.' † In the spirit of this creed it was that Blake lived. His unconscious adoption of it is one of the many mental peculiarities which help us to comprehend the strangeness of his work as an artist; a phenomenon which no one phrase can adequately explain. We have noticed those features in his early training, which partly account for the singularities which, in the noble phrase of Jeremy Taylor, the world misesteemed as madness.' We have now to add that Blake may be also regarded as a man who was not, as most men must be, tied down to the century in which he lived. His mind dealt with the great elementary problems of all ages. His art ranged in a primary world, where the first forms of all created things were dimly seen emerging from a creative chaos. Blake himself may be said to have lived apart from chronology. In turn he was a philosopher of the early Hellenic world, with Heraclitus, when he uttered his dark sayings; or of the Roman time, in his practical life, with Epictetus; or, again, he seemed one of the Freemasons of the Middle Ages, in his passion for Gothic art and mysticism; or an anchorite in some mountain-cell, in his realistic belief in the world of dream and vision; or a poet of the Elizabethan age in his own exquisite lyrics. Whilst, in one sense, a markedly individual man, there is another in which we might say that he wanted individuality. Hence his incompleteness in art; hence,

*Art was recreation enough for Blake. Work itself was pleasure, and any work-engraving, while he was at it, almost as much as design. He 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."— Life,' Vol. I., p. 246.

Encheiridion,' ch. xvii. In Tŵv evròs we have followed the reading of Simplicius. May we express a wish that Mr. Matthew Arnold, whose beautiful criticism on Antoninus, published lately in one of the Magazines, gives proof also of his skill and taste as a translator, would render the little Handbook of Epictetus into scholarly and readable English? ;

Vol. 117.-No. 233.

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also, his manifold suggestiveness. Looking at life, as it were, à priori, his rendering of human character is feeble: 'his faces are almost all natural types, instead of giving infinitely blended shades of expression.' But these natural types are treated with such power and insight, that he claims no remote kinship, in this respect, with the mighty Buonarroti. It is useful to look at so singular and gifted a man as this, in the light of all the suggestions that appear to bear on him. But, meanwhile, the painter of this century, with all his industry, was in no remote prospect of ruin and starvation.

Cromek, an engraver and publisher, by commissioning Blake in 1805 to illustrate 'The Grave,' a poem by a Scottish minister named Blair, at once did something to rescue Blake from utter poverty, and gave occasion to the production of one of his best and sanest works. For this service we are so grateful to Cromek, that we would wish that the little disputes which arose, during and after the transaction, between the unworldly and irritable artist, and the keen but not unkindly or ungenerous speculator, had been passed over by Mr. Gilchrist, who enters into the controversy at some length. We are content with remarking that, in his zeal for Blake, the biographer puts a construction which the evidence does not require on Cromek's conduct, and which, from what we know of the honourableness of Mr. Gilchrist's nature, had he been spared to publish the book, he would probably have been willing to modify. Cromek, at any rate, was not deficient in zeal for the success of the work, and, by one step which annoyed Blake, he really did much to promote his popularity. The designs were engraved by the skilful hand of Schiavonetti. By this, no doubt, something of the first-hand quality which Blake would have thrown into his own work was sacrificed. But everyone who looks at Blake's Illustrations to Young, before noticed, will admit that the translation of his startling visions into the common language of engraving was a vast advantage in securing the attention of ordinary judges. It is probable that

*We cannot, however, pass over without a word of protest the violent language in which Mr. D. G. Rossetti (note on p. 118, Vol. II.) has endorsed Blake's charges against his brother-artists. Even were these accusations of plagiarism constant in the pages which follow (which we do not find to be the case), Mr. Rossetti should have remembered that something beyond the assertion of Blake is required when Stothard and Flaxman are the subjects of such an attack. His remark that justice perceives these words to be true' is unsupported by any evidence here adduced. It is not proved that even the idea of painting the 'Canterbury Pilgrims' was borrowed by Stothard; and the two pictures, as every one knows, and as Blake himself distinctly asserts, are totally dissimilar. The truth is, that Blake (to any except the distorted vision of partisanship) stands as little in need of certificates of inventiveness and originality as his two great contemporaries.

Schiavonetti

Schiavonetti corrected in some degree the Fuseli-like mannerism of Blake's drawing; at least, he mediated between the transcendental world of the artist and that decidedly more terrestrial region in which the British public has its being. This was no unworthy function. The end of all art is to please. It is well to meet halfway, as it were, the highest or most imaginative natures. But it is well, also, to raise less-gifted but still accessible minds by the medium of lofty pleasure. Blake's weak side, a noble weakness indeed, was that he worked too exclusively for the initiated. The Grave' rendered the 'Job' intelligible to learners.

Many years after, one of Blake's young friends, who has himself risen since to no common distinction in his art, Mr. Linnell, the landscape-painter, gave him the commission to execute the series of designs last named. In selecting for his subject the Book of Job, Mr. Linnell showed a discrimination worthy of his insight as an artist. He chose at once a poem, which, by its infinite spiritual suggestiveness, exactly suited Blake's best genius, and by its definite images, perhaps in part by the very sacredness of its text, confined that genius within rational limits. That these illustrations stand supreme amongst the artist's efforts seems generally admitted. The 'Songs of Innocence,' with their idyllic grace of design and charm of colour, might perhaps be placed nearest. But the Songs are amongst the rarest of rare books, whilst the 'Job' is less uncommon.* Photolithographic copies of all the plates have been wisely given in Mr. Gilchrist's second volume. These, it is true, cannot reproduce the peculiar combined sharpness and delicacy of Blake's own engraving, which, in this series, but only in this, shows more of the essential quality of the great old masters,

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DEATH'S DOOR.

*If, as we believe, the original plates, which cannot be seriously worn, are still in Mr. Linnell's possession, we would venture to urge on him a re-issue of the work. It could not be done under better auspices than those of Blake's most distinguished pupil. That it is a re-impression should be distinctly expressed on each plate, in any such case, to prevent subsequent fraud or uncertainty. Marc

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Marcantonio and Dürer, than any modern copperplates we know of. The study of Bonasoni, Marcantonio's ablest successor, is stated by Mr. Gilchrist to have been the reason of this change in style. The copies, however, are sufficient to give readers a fair idea of the original; and will, we think, be a source of deep interest to all, who, not discouraged by certain limitations rather than defects of style, are willing to make the effort needful to appreciate an originality of idea unsurpassed by any other artist, ancient or modern. Within Blake's own circle, we know no such spiritual veracity as his-no such intensity. On his frequent ascription of his designs to direct vision,-the one fact with which he is identified in the popular mind,-we shall have presently a few words to say. It is noteworthy that he nowhere lays claim to such an origin for the Job.' Yet, if any man, the author of these marvellous inventions might have been justified in ascribing them to some visionary inspiration,—in doubting whether they were the work of his own hands. Here, if anywhere, in the sublime language of Plato, is that possession and ecstasy with which the Muses seize on a plastic and pure soul, awakening it and hurrying it forth like a Bacchanal in the way of song and poetry in all her kinds, to set forth a thousand deeds of old for the instruction of those who come after.' Not without a full measure of this divine Mania did Blake 'approach the gates of poetry.' To quote a recent criticismt:

'As we turn these singular pages we find the spell which they have held over us from childhood powerful as ever. In the earlier scenes of the history, although perhaps less intimately suited than the later to Blake's visionary genius, yet from the very first he has mastered the most difficult point in such a task; he has transported us into a primæval atmosphere. The landscape has that vague, far off quality, neither indeed Syrian nor Egyptian, but infinitely old, poetical, and mysterious, which seems, as it were, natural to the "Land of Uz" and its primitive inhabitants. The architecture, half Druidic, half Cyclopean, belongs to no known style, but is of that elementary fashion which might have been practised in the world newly rising from the Deluge. The figures of the patriarch and his pastoral family exhibit the same imaginative propriety. The admirably touched vignette-borders which surround each print repeat or allude to the subject of it with a symbolism not inferior to the Greek in perfect poetical adaptation. They are the chorus to the drama enacted within. There have been artists who might have caught the dramatic character of the scene with equal force, and with more mastery in design and expression than Blake; but, since Christian art began, we doubt whether any one could have thrown himself into the spirit

*Phædrus,' c. xxii.

+ London Review.'

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