During the progress of Blake's lonely labours in the
Abbey, on a bright day in May, 1774, the Society for
which, through Basire, he was working, perpetrated by
royal permission, on the very scene of those rapt studies, a
highly interesting bit of antiquarian sacrilege : on a more
reasonable pretext, and with greater decency, than some-
times distinguish such questionable proceedings. A select
^T. I6-2I.] engraver's apprentice. 19
company formally and in strict privacy opened the tomb
of Edward the First, and found the embalmed body 'in
perfect preservation and sumptuously attired,' in ' robes of
royalty, his crown on his head, and two sceptres in his hands.'
The antiquaries saw face to face the 'dead conqueror of
Scotland ; ' had even a fleeting glimpse — for it was straight-
way re-inclosed in its cere-cloths — of his very visage : a
recognisable likeness of what it must have been in life. I
cannot help hoping that Blake may (unseen) have assisted
at the ceremony.
In winter the youth helped to engrave selections from
these Abbey Studies, in some cases executing the engraving
single-handed. During the evenings and at over hours, he
made drawings from his already teeming Fancy, and from
English History. 'A great number,' it is said, were thrown
off in such spare hours. There is a scarce engraving of his,
dated so early as 1773, the second year of his apprenticeship,
remarkable as already to some extent evincing in style — as
yet, however, heavy rather than majestic — still more in choice
of subject, the characteristics of later years. In one corner
at top we have the inscription (which sufficiently describes
the design), 'Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of
Albion;' and at bottom, 'engraved by W. Blake, 1773,
from an old Italian drawing;' 'Michael Angelo, Pinxit.'
Between these two lines, according to a custom frequent
with Blake, is engraved the following characteristic effusion,
which reads like an addition of later years : — ' This ' (he is
venturing a wild theory as to Joseph) ' is One of the Gothic
' Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark
'Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins; of
' whom the World was not worthy. Such w'ere the Christians
'in all ages.'
The 'prentice work as assistant to Basire of these years
(1773-78) may be traced under Basire's name in the ArchcBo-
logia, in some of the engravings of coins, &c., to the Memoirs
of Mollis (1780), and in Gough's Sepulchral Monuments, not
C 2
20 LIFE or WILLIAM BLAKE. [1773—78.
published till 1786 and 1796. The Antiquaries were alive
and stirring then ; and enthusiastic John Carter was laying
the foundations in English Archaeology on which better-
known men have since built. In the Sepiilchral Monuments,
'Vol. \, pt. 2 (1796), occurs a capital engraving as to drawing
and feeling, ' Portrait of Queen Philippa from her Monument,'
with the inscription Basire delineavit ct scidpsit ; for which, as
in many other cases, we may safely read ' W. Blake.' In fact,
Stothard often used to mention this drawing as Blake's, and
with praise. The engraving is in Blake's forcible manner
of decisively contrasted light and shade, but simple and
monotonous manipulation. It is to a large scale, and gives
the head and shoulders merely. Another plate, with a
perspective view of the whole monument and a separate
one of the effigy, accompanies it. In Part I. (1786), are
similar 'Portraits' of Queen Philippa, of Edward III. &c.
From Basire, Blake could only acquire the mechanical part
of Art, even of the engraver's art ; for Basire had little
more to communicate. But that part he learned thoroughly
and well. Basire's acquirements as an engraver were of a
solid though not a fascinating kind. The scholar always
retained a loyal feeling towards his old master ; and would
stoutly defend him and his style against that of more
attractive and famous hands, — Strange, Woollett, Bartolozzi.
Their ascendency, indeed, led to no little public injustice
being done throughout, to Blake's own sterling style of
engraving : a circumstance which intensified the artist's
aversion to the men. In a MS. descriptive Advertisement
(18 10) printed in VOL. II. with the title Public Address,
relating to the engraving of his own Canterbury Pilgrimage,
Blake expresses his contempt for them very candidly — and
intemperately perhaps. There too, he records the impression
made on him personally, when as a boy he used to see: soiTie
of them in Basire's studio. * Woollett,' he writes, ' I knew
' very intimately by his intimacy with Basire, and knew
' him to be one of the most ignorant fellows I ever met.
^T. 16—21.] engraver's apprentice. 21
' A machine is not a man, nor a work of art : it is destructive
' of humanity and of art, Woollett, I know, did not know
' how to grind his graver. / knotv this. He has often proved
'his ignorance before me at Basire's by laughing at Basire's
' knife-tools, and ridiculing the forms of Basire's other gravers,
' till Basire was quite dashed and out of conceit with what
' he himself knew. But his impudence had a contrary effect
* on me.' — West, for whose reputation Woollett's graver did
so much, ' asserted ' continues Blake, * that Woollett's prints
' were superior to Basire's, because they had more labour and
' care. Now this is contrary to the truth. Woollett did not
' know how to put so much labour into a hand or a foot as
* Basire did ; he did not know how to draw the leaf of a tree.
' All his study was clean strokes and mossy tints. . . . Wool-
' lett's best works were etched by Jack Brown ; Woollett
' etched very ill himself The Cottagers^ and Jocund Peasants,
' the Viezvs in Kew Gardens, Foot's Cray, and Diana and
' Act(2on, and, in short, all that are called Woollett's were
' etched by Jack Brown. And in Woollett's works the
' etching is all ; though even in these a single leaf of a tree
' is never correct. Strange's prints were, when I knew him,
* all done by Aliamet and his French journeymen, whose
' names I forget. I also knew something of John Cooke,
' who engraved after Hogarth. Cooke wished to give
' Hogarth what he could take from Rafifaelle ; that is, out-
' line, and mass, and colour ; but he could not' Again, in
the same one-sided, trenchant strain : — ' What is called the
' English st}de of engraving, such as proceeded from the
' toilettes of Woollett and Strange (for theirs were Fribble's
' toilettes) can never produce character and expression.
Drawing — ' firm, determinate outline ' — is in Blake's eyes,
all in all : — ' Engraving is drawing on copper and nothing
* else. But, as Gravelot once said to my master, Basire
* " De English may be very clever in deir own opinions, but
•' day do not draw!' '
Before taking leave of Basire we will have a look at the
22 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1773—78.
house in Great Queen Street, in which Blake passed seven
years of his youth ; whither Gough, Tyson, and many
another enthusiastic dignified antiquary, in knee-breeches
and powdered wig, so often bent their steps to have a
chat with their favourite engraver. Its door has opened
to good company in its time, to engravers, painters, men
of letters, celebrated men of all kinds. Just now we saw
Goldsmith enter. When Blake was an apprentice, the
neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn Fields, though already an-
tique, was a stately and decorous one, through which the
tide of fashionable life still swayed on daily errands of
pleasure or business. The house can yet be identified as
No. 31, one of two occupied by Messrs. Corben and Son, the
coach-builders, which firm, or rather their predecessors, in
Basire's time occupied only No. 30. It stands on the northern
side of the street, opposite — to the west or Drury Lane-ward
of — Freemasons' Tavern ; almost exactly opposite New Yard
and the noticeable ancient house at one side of that yard, with
the stately Corinthian pilasters in well wrought brick. Basire's
is itself a seventeenth century house refaced early in the
Georgian era, the parapet then put up half hiding the old
dormer windows of the third story. Originally, it must either
have been part of a larger mansion, or one of a uniformly-
built series, having continuous horizontal brick mouldings ; as
remnants of the same on its neighbours testify. Outside, it
remains pretty much as it must have looked in Blake's time ;
old-fashioned people having (Heaven be praised !) tenanted
it ever since the first James Basire and after him his widow
ended their days there. With its green paint, old casements
quiet old-fashioned shop-window, and freedom from the
abomination of desolation (stucco), it retains an old-world
genuine aspect, rare in London's oldest neighbourhoods, and
not at war with the memories which cling around the place.
CHAPTER IV.
A BOY'S POEMS. 1768—77. [^T. ri— 20.]
The poetical essays of the years of youth and apprentice-
ship are preserved in the thin octavo, Poetical Sketches by
W. B., printed by help of friends in 1783, and now so rare, that
after some years' vain attempt, I am forced to abandon the
idea of myself owning the book. I have had to use a copy
borrowed from one of Blake's surviving friends. In such
hands alone, linger, I fancy, the dozen copies or so still
extant. There is (of course) none where, at any rate, there
should be one — in the British Museum.
'Tis hard to believe these poems were written in the
author's teens, harder still to realize how some of them, in
their unforced simplicity, their bold and careless freedom of
sentiment and expression, came to be written at all in the
third quarter of the eighteenth century : the age ' of polished
phraseology and subdued thought,' — subdued with a ven-
geance. It was the generation of Shenstone, Langhorne,
Mason, Whitehead, the Wartons ; of obscurer Cunningham,
Lloyd, Carter. Volumes of concentrated Beauties of English
Poetry, volumes as fugitive often as those of original verse,
are literary straws which indicate the set of the popular
taste. If we glance into one of this date, — say into that
compiled towards the close of the century, by one Mr.
Thomas Tompkins, which purports to be a collection
(expressly compiled * to enforce the practice of Virtue ') of
* Such poems as have been universally esteemed the first
24
LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1768—77.
ornaments of our language,' — who are the elect .? We have
in great force the names just enumerated, and among older
poets then read and honoured, to the exclusion of Chaucer
and the Elizabethans, so imposing a muster-roll as— Parnell,
Mallett, Blacklock, Addison, Gay ; and, ascending to the
highest heaven of the century's Walhalla, Goldsmith, Thom-
son, Gray, Pope; with a little of Milton and Shakspere
thrown in as make-weight.
Where, beyond the confines of his own most individual
mind, did the hosier's son find his model for that lovely web
of rainbow fancy already quoted ? I know of none in English
literature. For the So/7£ commencing
' My silks and fine array,'
(see Vol. II.), with its shy evanescent tints and aroma as of
pressed rose-leaves, parallels may be found among the lyrics
of the Ehzabethan age, an alien though it be in its own. The
influence of contemporary models, unless it be sometimes
Collins or Thomson, is nowhere in the volume discernible ; but
involuntary emulation of higher ones partially known to him,
there is ; — of the Reliqiies given to the world by Percy in 1760 ;
of Shakspere, Spenser, and other Elizabethans. For the youth's
choice of masters was as unfashionable in Poetry as in Design.
Among the few students or readers in that day of Shakspere's
Venus and Adonis, Tarquin and Lucrece, and Sonnets, of Ben
Jonson's Undertvoods and Miscellanies, the boy Blake was,
according to Malkin, an assiduous one. The form of such a.
poem as
'Love and harmony combine,'
is inartificial and negligent ; but incloses the like intangible
spirit of delicate fancy ; a lovely blush of life as it were,
suffusing the enigmatic form. Even schoolboy blunders
against grammar, and schoolboy complexities of expression,
fail to break the musical echo, or mar the naive sweetness of
the two concluding stanzas ; which, in practised hands, might
JET. II— 20.] A boy's poems. . 25
have been wrought into more artful melody with little increase
of real effect. Again, how many reams of scholastic Pastoral
have missed the simple gaiety of one which does not affect to
be a ' pastoral ' at all : —
*I love the jocund dance.'
Of the remarkable Mad Song extracted by Southey in his
Doctor, who probably valued the thin octavo, as became a
great Collector, for its rarity and singularity, that poet has
said nothing to show he recognised its dramatic power, the
daring expression of things otherwise inarticulate, the unity
of sentiment, the singular truth with which the key-note
is struck and sustained, or the eloquent, broken music of its
rhythm.
The ' marvellous Boy' that 'perished in his pride,' (1770)
while certain of these very poems were being written, amid all
his luxuriant promise, and memorable displays of Talent pro-
duced few so really original as some of them. There are not
many more to be instanced of quite such rare quality. But
all abound in lavish if sometimes unknit strength. Their
faults are such alone as flow from youth, as are inevitable in
one whose intellectual activity is not sufficiently logical to re-
duce his imaginings into sufficiently clear and definite shape.
As examples of poetic power and freshness quickening the
imperfect, immature _/i?r;«, take his verses To the Evening Star
in which the concluding lines subside into a reminiscence, but
not a slavish one, of Puck's Night Song in Midsummer Night's
Dream; or the lament To tJie Muses, — not inapposite surely,
when it was written ; or again, the full-coloured invocation
To Summer.
In a few of the poems, the influence of Blake's contem-
porary, Chatterton, — of the Poems of Rowley, i.e., is visible.
In the Prologue to King John, Couch of Death, Samson, &c.,
all written in measured prose, the influence is still more con-
spicuous of Macpherson's Ossian, which had taken the world
26 - LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1768—77.
by storm in Blake's boyhood, and in his manhood was a ruHng
power in the poetic world. In the ' Prophetic ' and too often
incoherent rhapsodies of later years this influence increases
unhappily, leading the prophet to indulge in vague inpalpable
personifications, as dim and monotonous as a moor in a mist.
To the close of his life, Blake retained his allegiance to Ossian
and Rowley. 'I believe,' writes he, in a MS. note (1826) on
Wordsworth's Supplementary Essay, ' I believe both Mac-
pherson and Chatterton : that what they say is ancient, is so.'
And again, when the Lake Poet speaks contemptuously of
Macpherson, ' I own myself an admirer of Ossian equally
' with any other poet whatever ; of Rowley and Chatterton
* also.'
The longest piece in this volume, the most daring and
perhaps, considering a self-taught boy wrote it, the most
remarkable, is the Fragment or single act, of a Play on the
high historic subject of King Edward III. : one of the few in
old English history accidentally omitted from Shakspere's
cycle. In his steps it is, not in those of Addison or Home,
the ambitious lad strives as a dramatist to tread ; and, despite
halting verse, confined knowledge, and the anachronism of a
modern tone of thought, — not unworthily, though of course
with youthful unsteady stride. The manner and something
of the spirit of the Historical Plays is caught, far more nearly
than by straining Ireland in his forgeries. Of this performance
as of the other contents of the volume, specimens must be
deferred till Vol. II. ; not to interrupt the thread of our
narrative too much.
Fully to appreciate such poetry as the lad Blake composed
in the years \'j6'^-'j'j, let us call to mind the dates at which
first peeped above the horizon the cardinal lights which
people our modern poetic Heavens, once more wakening into
life the dull corpse of English song. Five years later than
the last of these dates was published a small volume of
Poems, * By William Cowper, of the Middle Temple.' Nine
years later (1786), Poems in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert
JET. II— 20.] A boy's poems. 27
Burns, appealed to a Kilmarnock public. Sixteen years later
(1793) came the poems Wordsworth afterwards named
Juvenile, written bety -sen the ages of eighteen and twenty-
two: TJie Evening lPa/^,s.nd the Descriptive Sketches, "with.
their modest pellucid merit, still in the fettered i8th century
manner. Not till twenty-one years later (1798), followed the
more memorable Lyrical Ballads, including for one thing,
the Tintern Abbey of Wordsworth, for another, The Ancient
Mariner of Coleridge.
All these Poems had their influence, prompt or tardy,
widening eventually into the universal. All were at any rate
pnblisJied. Some — those of Burns, — appealed to the feelings
of the people, and of all classes ; those of Cowper to the
most numerous and influential section of an English com-
munity. The unusual notes struck by William Blake, in any
case appealing but to one class and that a small one, were
fated to remain unheard, even by the Student of Poetry,
until the process of regeneration had run its course, and,
we may say, the Poetic Revival gone to seed again, since
the virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began
by bringing once more into the foreground are those least
practised now.
MORNI.MG, OR GLAU DAY.
CHAPTER V.
STUDENT AND LOVER. 1778—82. [^t, 21—25.]
Apprenticeship to Basire having ended, Blake, now
(1778) twenty-one, studied for a while in the newly formed
Royal Academy : just then in an uncomfortable chrysalis
condition, having had to quit its cramped lodgings in Old
y^T. 21—22.] STUDENT AND LOVER. 29
Somerset Palace (pulled down in 1775) and awaiting comple-
tion of the new building in which more elbow-room was to be
provided. Recommenced his course of study at the Academy
(in the Antique School) ' under the eye of Mr, Moser,' its first
Keeper, who had conducted the parent Schools in St. Martin's
Lane, Moser, like Kaufifman and Fuseli, was Swiss by birth :
a sixth of our leading artists were still foreigners, as lists of
the Original Fort^ testify. By profession he was a chaser un-
rivalled in his generation, medallist — he modelled and' chased
a great seal of England, afterwards stolen — and enamel-
painter, in days when costly watch-cases continued to furnish
ample employment for the enamel-painter. He was, in short,
a skilled decorative artist during the closing years of Decora-
tive Art's existence as a substantive fact in England, or Europe.
The thing itself — the very notion that such art was wanted —
was about to expire ; and be succeeded, for a dreary genera-
tion or two, by a mere blank negation. Miss Moser, after-
wards Mrs, Lloyd 'the celebrated flower painter,' another of
the original members of the Academy, was George Michael
IMoser's daughter. Edwards, in his Anecdotes of Painters,
obscurely declares of the honest Switzer that he was 'well
' skilled in the construction of the human figure and, as an
' instructor in the Academy, his manners, as well as his
' abilities, rendered him a most respectable master to the
' students.' A man of plausible address, as well as an in-
genious, the quondam chaser and enameller was, evidently :
a favourite with the President (Reynolds), a favourite with
royalty. On the occasion of one royal visit to the Academy,
after 1780 and its instalment in adequate rooms in the
recently completed portion of Chambers' ' Somerset Place,'
Queen Charlotte penetrated to the old man's apartment, and
made him sit down and have an hour's quiet chat in German
v;ith her. To express his exultation at such ' amiable con-
descension,' the proud Keeper could ever after hardly find
broken English and abrupt gestures sufficiently startling and
whimsical. He was a favourite, too, with the students ; many
30 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1778—79.
of whom voluntarily testified their regard around his grave in
the burial-ground of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, when the time
came to be carried thither in January, 1783.
The specific value of the guidance to be had by an in-
genuous art-student from the venerable Moser, now a man
of seventy-three, is suggestively indicated by a reminiscence
afterwards noted down in Blake's MS. commentary on Rey-
nolds' Discourses. ' I was once,' he there relates, ' looking
* over the prints from Raffaelle and Michael Angelo in the
' Library of the Royal Academy. Moser came to me, and
' said, — " You should not study these old, hard, stiff, and
* dry, unfinished works of art : stay a little and / will show
' you what you should study." He then went and took
* down Le Brun and Rubens' Galleries. How did I secretly
* rage ! I also spake my mind ! I said to Moser, — " These
' things that you call finished are not even begun : how then
' can they be finished .'' " The man who does not know the
* beginning cannot know the end of art.' Which observations
'tis to be feared Keeper Moser accounted hardly dutiful.
For a well-conducted Student ought, in strict duty, to spend
(and in such a case lose) his evening in looking through what
his teacher sets before him. It has happened to other
Academy students under subsequent Keepers and Libra-
rians, I am told, to find themselves in a similarly awkward
dilemma to this of Blake's.
With the Antique, Blake got on well enough, drawing with
* great care all or certainly nearly all the noble antique
figures in various views.' From the living figure he also
drew a good deal ; but early conceived a distaste for the
study as pursued in Academies of Art. Already ' life,' in so
factitious, monotonous an aspect of it as that presented by a
Model artificially posed to enact an artificial part — to main-
tain in painful rigidity some fleeting gesture of spontaneous
Nature's — became, as it continued, ' hateful ' looking to him,
laden with thick-coming fancies, ' more like death ' than life ;
nay (singular to say), ' smelling of mortality ' — to an imagin-
^T. 21— 22.] STUDENT AND LOVER. 3 1
ative mind ! ' Practice and opportunity,' he used afterwards
to declare, * very soon teach the language of art : ' as much,
that is, as Blake ever acquired, not a despicable if imperfect
quantum. ' It's spirit and poetry, centred in the imagination
alone, never can be taught ; and these make the artist : ' a
truism, the fervid poet already began to hold too exclusively
in view. Even at their best — as the vision-seer and in-
stinctive Platonist tells us in one of the very last years of
his life [MS. notes to Wordsworth) — mere * Natural Objects
' always did and do weaken, deaden and obliterate imagination
'in me!'
The student still continued to throw off drawings and verses
for his own delight ; out of his numerous store of the former,
engraving two designs from English history. One of these
engravings, King Edward and Queen Eleanor, ' published '
by him at a later date (from Lambeth), I have seen. It is a
meritorious but heavy piece of business, in the old-fashioned
plodding style of line-engraving, wherein the hand mono-
tonously hatched line after line, now struck off by machine.
The design itself and the other water-colour drawings of this
date, all on historical subjects, which now lie scattered among
various hands, have little of the quality or of the mannerism
we are accustomed to associate with Blake's name. They
remind one rather of Mortimer, t/ie historical painter (now
obsolete) of that era, who died, high in reputation with his
contemporaries for fancy and correct drawing of the human
figure, but neglected by patrons, about this very time, viz. in
1779, at the early age of forty. Of Mortimer, Blake always
continued to entertain a very high estimate. The designs of
this epoch in his life are correctly drawn, prettily composed,
and carefully coloured, in a clear uniform style of equally
distributed positive tints. But the costumes are vague and
mythical, without being graceful and credible ; what man-
nerism there is is a timid one, such as reappears in Hamilton
always, in Stothard often ; the general effect is heavy and
uninteresting, — and the net result a yawn. One drawing
32 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1779—82.
dating from these years (1778-9), TJie Penance of Jane Shore
in St. Paul's Church, thirty years later was included in Blake's