knowledge of the language for himself. She was an en-
courager of musicians, a kind friend to young artists. To
all of promising genius the doors of her house, 27, Rathbone
Place, were open. Rathbone Place, not then made over to
papier-mache, Artist's colours, toy-shops, and fancy-trades,
was a street of private houses, stiffly genteel and highly
respectable, nay, in a sedate way, quasi fashionable ; the
Westbourne Street of that day, when the adjacent district
of Bloomsbury with its Square, in which (on the countryward
side) was the Duke of Bedford's grand House, was abso-
lutely fashionable and comparatively new, lying on the
northern skirts of London ; when Great Ormond Street,
Queen's Square, Southampton Row, were accounted ' places
of pleasure,' being ' in one of the most charming situations
about town,' next the open fields, and commanding a ' beauti-
ful landscape formed by the hills of Highgate and Hampstead
and adjacent country.' Among the residents of Rathbone
Place, the rebel Lords Lovat, Kilmarnock, Balmarino had at
one time been numbered. Of the Mathews' house, by the



ALT. 26—27.] INTRODUCTION TO THE POLITE WORLD. 45

way, now divided into two, both of them shops, the library or
back parlour, garrulous Smith (Nollekens's biographer) in his
Book for a Rainy Day tells us, was decorated by grateful
Flaxman ' with models in putty and sand, of figures in niches
in the Gothic manner : ' qiicere if still extant ? The window
was painted 'in imitation of stained glass' — just as that in
Battersea church, those at Strawberry Hill, and elsewhere
were, the practice being one of the valued arts or artifices of
the day — by Loutherbourg's assistant, young Oram, another
protege. The furniture, again, ' bookcases, tables, and chairs,
' were also ornamented to accord with the appearance of those
'of antiquity.'

Mrs. Mathew's drawing-room was frequented by most of
the literary and known people of the last quarter of the
century, was a centre of all then esteemed enlightened and
delightful in society. Reunions were held in it such as Mrs.
Montagu and Mrs. Vesey had first set going, unconsciously
contributing the word bluestocking to our language. There,
in the list of her intimate friends and companions, would
assemble those esteemed ornaments of their sex, — unreadable
Chapone, of well improved mind ; sensible Barbauld ; ver-
satile, agreeable Mrs. Brooke, novelist and dramatist ; learned
and awful Mrs. Carter, a female Great Cham of literature, and
protectress of ' Religion and Morality.' Thither came
sprightly, fashionable Mrs. Montagu herself, Conyers Mid-
dleton's pupil, champion of Shakspere in his urgent need
against rude Voltaire, and a letter-writer almost as vivacious
and piquante in the modish style as her namesake Lady
Wortley ; her printed correspondence remaining still readable
and entertaining. This is the lady whose powers of mind
and conversation Dr. Johnson estimated so highly, and whose
good opinion he so highly valued, though at last to his sorrow
falling out of favour with her. It was she who gave the
annual May-Day dinner to the chimney sweeps, in commemo-
ration of a well-known family incident. As illustrative of
their status with the public, let us add, on Smith's authority,



46 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1783— 84.

that the four last-named beaux-esprits figured as Muses in the
Frontispiece to a Lady s Pocket Book for 1778 — a flattering
apotheosis of nine contemporary female wits, including
Angelica Kauffman and Mrs. Sheridan. Perhaps pious, busy
Hannah More, as yet of the world, as yet young and
kittenish, though not without claws, also in her youth a good
letter- writer in the woman-of-the-world style ; perhaps, being
of the Montagu circle, she also would make one at Mrs.
Mathew's, on her visits to town to see her publishers, the
Cadells, about some ambling poetic 4to. Florio and the Bas-
bleu, modest Sacred Drama, heavy 8vo. Strictures on Female
Education, or other fascinating lucubration on

" Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate : "

dissertations, which, after having brought their author in some
thirty thousand pounds sterling, a capricious public consumes
with less avidity than it did. Good heavens ! what a frowsy,
drowsy 'party sitting in a parlour,' /z^zy ' all silent and all
damned ' (in a literary sense), these venerable ladies and great
literary luminaries of their day, ladies once lively and chatty
enough, seem to an irreverent generation, at their present
distance from us. The spiritual interval is an infinitely
wider one than the temporal ; so foreign have mere
eighteenth-century habits of thought and prim conventions
become. Let us charitably believe the conversation of the
fair was not so dull as their books ; that there was the
due enlivenment of scandal and small talk ; and that
Mrs. Mathew — by far the most pleasant to think of, be-
cause she did not commit herself to a book — that she,
with perhaps Mrs. Brooke and Mrs. Montagu, took the
leading parts.

The disadvantages of a neglected education, such as
Blake's, are considerable. But, one is here reminded, the
disadvantages of a false one are greater : when the acquisi-
tion of a second nature of conventionality, misconception of



.ET. 26—27.] INTRODUCTION TO THE POLITE WORLD. 47

high models and worship of low ones, is the kind in vogue.
An inestimable advantage for an original mind to have
retained its freedom, the healthy play of native powers, of
virgin faculties yet unsophisticate !

Mrs. Mathew's husband was a known man, too, man of
taste and virtu, incumbent of the neighbouring Proprietary
Chapel, Percy Chapel, Charlotte Street, built for him by
admiring lay friends ; an edifice known to a later generation
as the theatre of Sata7i Montgomery's displays. Mr. Mathew
filled also a post of more prestige as afternoon preacher at St.
Martin's-in-the-Ficlds ; and ' read the church-service more
beautifully than any other clergyman in London,' a lady who ,
had heard him informs me — and as others too used to think,
Flaxman for one. With which meagre biographic trait, the
inquisitive reader must be satisfied. The most diligent search
yields nothing further. That he was an amiable, kindly man
we gather from the circumstances of his first notice of the
child Flaxman in the father's cast-shop, coughing over his
Latin behind the counter, and of his continued notice of
the weakly child during the years which elapsed before he
was strong enough to walk from the Strand to Rathbone
Place, and be received into the sunshine of Mrs. Mathew's
smiles.

To that lady's agreeable and brilliant conversazioni Blake
was made welcome. At one of them, a little later (in 1784),
Nollekens Smith, most literal, most useful of gossips, then a
youth of eighteen, first saw the poet-painter, and ' heard him
read and sing several of his poems' — ' often heard him.' Yes !
sing them ; for Blake had composed airs to his verses.
Wholly ignorant of the art of music, he was unable to note
down these spontaneous melodies, and repeated them by ear.
Smith reports that his tunes were sometimes ' most singularly
beautiiil,' and ' were noted down by musical professors ; ' Mrs.
Mathew's being a musical house. I wish one of these
musical professors or his executors would produce a sample.
Airs simple and ethereal to match the designs and poems of



48 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1783—84.

William Blake would be a novelty in music. One would fain
hear the melody invented for

How sweet I roam'd from field to field —

or for some of the Songs of Innocence. ' He was listened to
by the company,' adds Smith, ' with profound silence, and
allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extra-
ordinary merit.' Phcenix amid an admiring circle of cocks
and hens is alone a spectacle to compare mentally with
this!

The accomplished hostess for a time took up Blake with
much fervour. His poetic recitals kindled so much enthusiasm
in her feminine bosom that she urged her husband to join his
young friend Flaxman, in placing the poems — those of which ■
we gave an account at the date of composition — in the clear
light of print and to assume half the cost. Which, accord-
ingly, was done, in 1783 : the year in which happened the
execution for forgery of the gifted fellow-engraver — in whose
face the boy Blake, twelve years before, had so strangely
deciphered omens of his fate — Ryland. This unfortunate
man's prepossessing appearance and manners inspired, on the
other hand, so much confidence in the governor of the prison
in which he awaited trial, that on one occasion the former took
him out for a walk, implicitly trusting to his good faith that
he would not avail himself of the opportunity to run away.
Ryland's was the /asi execution at Tyburn, then still on the
outside of London. This was the year, too, in which Barry
published his Account of the Pictures in the AdclpJii. On one
copy I have seen a characteristic pencil recollection, from
Blake's hand, of the strange Irishman's ill-favoured face :
that of an idealized bulldog, with villainously low forehead,
turn-up nose, and squalid tout-ensemble. It is strong evidence
of the modest Flaxman's generous enthusiasm for his friend
that, himself a struggling artist, little patronized, he should
have made the first ofter of printing these poems, and at his



^T. 26—27.] INTRODUCTION TO THE POLITE WORLD. 49

own charge ; and that he now bore a moiety of the cost.
The book only runs to 74 pages, 8vo., and its unpretending
title-page stands thus: Poetical Sketches; by W. B., London:
Printed in the Year 1783. The clergyman 'with his usual
urbanity ' penned a preface stating the youthful authorship of
the volume, apologizing for ' irregularities and defects ' in the
poems, and ' hoping their poetic originality merits some
' respite from oblivion.'

The author's absence of the leisure, ' requisite to such a
* revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit
' to meet the public eye, is pleaded.' Little revisal certainly
they had, not even correction of the press, apparently. The
pamphlet, which has no printer's name to be discredited by
it, is as carelessly printed as an old English play, evidently at
an establishment which did not boast a ' reader.' Semi-colons
and fullstops where commas should be, misprints, such as
' beds of dawn ' for * birds,' by no means help out the meaning.
The whole impression was presented to Blake to sell to
friends or publish, as he should think best. Unfortunately, it
never got published and, for all purposes except that of preser-
vation, might as well have continued MS. As in those days
there still survived, singular to say, a bond fide market for
even mediocre verse, publishers and editors actually handing
over hard cash for it, just as if it were prose, Blaise's friends
would have done better to have gone to the Trade with his
poems. The thin octavo did not even get so far as the
Monthly Review ; at all events, it does not appear in the copious
and explicit Index of 'books noticed ' in that periodical, now
quite a manual of extinct literature.

The poems J. T. Smith, in 1784, heard Blake sing, can
hardly have been those known to his hearers by the printed
volume of 1783, but fresh ones, to the composition of which
the printing of that volume had stimulated him : some, doubt-
less, of the memorable and musical Songs of Innocence, as
they were subsequently named.

Blake's course of soirees in Rathbone Place was not long a

VOL. I. E



50 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1783—84,

smooth one. ' It happened unfortunately,' writes enigmatic
Smith, whose forte is not grammar, ' soon after this period ' —
soon after 1784, that is, the year during which Smith heard
him 'read and sing his poems' to an attentive auditory —
' that in consequence of his unbending deportment, or what
* his adherents are pleased to call his manly firmness of
' opinion, which certainly was not at all times considered
' pleasing by every one, his visits were not so frequent ' : — and
after a time ceased altogether, 'tis to be feared. One's know-
ledge of Blake's various originalities of thought on all subjects,
his stiffness, when roused, in maintaining them, also his high,
though at ordinary moments inobtrusive notions of his calling,
of the dignity of it, and its superiority to all mere worldly
distinctions, help to elucidate gossiping John Thomas. One
readily understands that on more intimate acquaintance, when
it was discovered by well-regulated minds that the erratic
Bard perversely came to teach, not to be taught, nor to be
gently schooled into imitative proprieties and condescendingly
patted on the back, he became less acceptable to the polite
world at No. 27, than when first started as a prodigy in that
elegant arena.




CHAPTER VII.

STRUGGLE AND SORROW. 17S2— 87. [/ET. 25—30.]




Returning to 1782-3, among the engravings executed by
Blake in those years, I have noticed after Stothard, four
illustrations — two vignettes and two oval plates — to Scott of
Am well's Poems, published by Buckland (1782) ; two frontis-
pieces to Dodsley's Ladys Pocket Book — ' The morning amuse-
ments of H.R.H. the Princess Royal and her four sisters'
(1782), and 'A Lady in full-dress' with another 'in the most
fashionable undress now worn' (1783); — and The Fall of
Rosamond, a circular plate in a book published by Macklin
(1783). To the latter year also, the first after Blake's
marriage, belong about eight or nine of the vignettes after
the purest and most lovely of the early and best designs of
the same artist — full of sweetness, refinement, and graceful
fancy — which illustrate Ritson's Collection of English Songs
(3 vols. 8vo.) ; others being engraved by Grignon, Heath, &c.
In the first volume occur the best designs, and — what is
remarkable — designs very Blake-like in feeling and concep-
tion ; having the air of graceful translation of his inventions.
Most in this volume are engraved by Blake, and very finely,

E 2



52 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1783—84.

with delicacy, as well as force. I may instance in particular
one at the head of the Love Sofigs, a Lady singing, Cupids
fluttering before her, a singularly refined composition ;
another, a vignette to Jemmy Dawson, which is, in fact. Hero
awaiting Leander ; another to When Lovely Woman, a sitting
figure of much dignity and beauty.

In after-years of estrangement from Stothard, Blake used
to complain of this mechanical employment as engraver to a
fellow designer, who (he asserted) first borrowed from one
that, in his servile capacity, had then to copy that comrade's
version of his own inventions — as to motive and composition
his own, that is. The strict justice of this complaint I can
hardly measure, because I know not how much of the Design
he afterwards engraved was actually being produced at this
period — doubtless much. We shall hereafter have to point
out that a good deal in Flaxman and Stothard may be traced
to Blake, is indeed only Blake in the Vernacular, classicized
and (perhaps half-unconsciously) adapted. His own com-
positions bear the authentic first-hand impress ; those un-
mistakable traces, which no hand can feign, of genuineness,
freshness, and spontaneity ; the look as of coming straight
from another world — that in which Blake's spirit lived. He,
in his cherished visionary faculty, his native power and life-
long habit of vivid Invention, was placed above all need or
inclination to borrow from others. If, as happens to all,
there occur occasional passages of unconscious reminiscence
from the Old Masters, there is no cooking or disguise. His
friend Fuseli, with characteristic candour, used to declare,
' Blake is d d good to steal from ! '

Gertainly, Stothard, though even he could by utmost
diligence only earn a moderate income — for if in request
with the publishers he was neglected by picture-buyers — was
throughout life, compared with Blake, a prosperous, affluent
man. He had, throughout, the advantage of Blake with the
public. Hence, early, some feeling of soreness in his un-
compliant companion's bosom. Stothard had the advantage



^T. 26—27.] STRUGGLE AND SORROW. 53

in the marketable quality of his genius, in his versatile
talents, his superior technic attainments — or, rather, superior
consistency of attainment ; above all, in his inborn grace
and elegance. He could make the refined Domestic groups
he so readily conceived, whether all his own or in part
borrowed, far more palatable to the many, the cultivated
many — cultivated Rogers for example, his life-long patron
— than Blake could ever make his Dantesque subUmity,
wild Titanic play of fancy, and spiritually imaginative dreams.
I think the latter, as we shall see when we come to the Songs
of Innocence and Experience, was at this period of his life
influenced to his advantage as a designer by contact with
Stothard's graceful mind ; but that any capability of grander
qualities occasionally shown by Stothard was derived, and
perhaps as unconsciously, from Blake. And Stothard's
earlier style is far purer and more ' matterful,' to use an
expression of Charles Lamb's, than the sugar-plum manner
of his latter years. In Stothard as in Blake, however
nominally various the subject, there is the tyrannous pre-
dominance of certain ruHng ideas of the designer's. Stothard's
tether was always shorter than Blake's ; but within the pre-
scribed limits, his performance was the more (superficially)
perfect, as well as soft, and rounded.

In 1784 I find Blake engraving after Stothard and others
in the Wifs Magazine. The Wifs Magazine was a ' Monthly

• Repository for the Parlour Window ' — not designed (as the
title in those free-speaking days might warrant a suspicion)
to raise a blush on Lady's cheek : — a miscellany of innocently
entertaining rather than strictly witty gleanings, and original
contributions, mostly amateur. A periodical curious to look
back upon in days of a weekly Punch ! It would be difficult
now to find a literary parallel to Mr. Harrison's plan of ' creat-
ing a spirit of emulation, and rewarding genius : ' by awarding

* one silver medal ' per month to the ' best witty tale, essay,
or poem,' another to * the best answer ' to the munificent pro-
prietor's ' prize enigmas.' A full list of the names and addresses



54 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1784.

of successful candidates for Fame is appended to each of the
two octavo volumes to which the Magazine ran. A graceful
grotesque, the Temple of Mirth, of Stothard's design, is the
frontispiece to the first number : a folding sheet forcibly
engraved by Blake in his characteristic manner of distributing
strongly contrasted light and shade and tone. To it suc-
ceeded, month by month, four similar engravings by him
after a noted caricaturist of the day now forgotten, S.
Collings : on broad-grin themes, such as TJie Tithe in Kind,
or the Sozvs Revenge, The Discomfited Duellists, The Blind
Beggar s Hats, and May Day in London. After which, an
engraver of lower grade, one Smith, {(jucere, our friend
Nollekens Smith T) executes the engravings ; and after him
a nameless one. The engraving caricatures of the earth
earthy for this ' Library of Momus ' was truly a singular task
for a spiritual poet !

Some slight clue to the original Design of this period in a
somewhat different key is given by the Exhibition-Catalogues,
which report Blake as making a second appearance at the
Academy in 1784. In that year, — the year of Reynolds's
Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, and Fortune-Teller, — there
hung in the 'Diawingand Sculpture Room,' two designs of
Blake's : one, — War unchained by an A ngel — Fire, Pestilence and
Famine following ', the other, a Breach in a City — The Morn-
ing after a Battle. Companion-subjects, their tacit moral —
the supreme despicableness of War — was one of which the
artist, in all his tenets thorough-going, was a fervent pro-
pagandist in days when War was tyrannously in the ascendant.
This, by the way, was the year of Peace with the tardily
recognised North American States. I have not seen the
former of those two drawings. The same theme gave birth
about twenty years later to four very fine water-colour
drawings, — for Dantesque intensity, imaginative directness,
and power of the terrible : illustrations of the doings of the
Destroying Angels that War lets loose — Fire,Plagne, Pestilence,
and Famine. Of the second-named we give here a reduced




1' I. AG HE.



^T. 27.] STRUGGLE AND SORROW. 55

version. A vivid expositor of Blake {London Quarterly
Review, January 1869^ says of this design : — 'An inexorable

• severe grandeur pervades the general lines ; an inexplicable

* woe — as of Samaria in the deadly siege, when Joram, wander-
' ing on the walls, was obliged to listen to the appeal of the
' cannibal mother — hangs over it. A sense of tragic culmina-
'tion, the stroke of doom irreversible comes through the
' windows of the eyes, as they take in the straight black lines
' of the pall and bier ; the mother falling from her husband's
' embrace with her dying child ; one fair corpse scarcely
' earthed over in the foreground, and the black funereal reek of
' a distant fire which consumes we know not what difficult
' horror. It is enough to fire the imagination of the greatest
' historical painter.' Another very grand and awe-inspiring
illustration of still later date, of the same suggestive theme, is
Let loose the Dogs of War — a demon or savage cheering on
blood-hounds who seize a man by the throat ; of which Mr.
Ruskin possesses the original pencil sketch, Mr. Linnell the
water-colour drawing.

During the summer of 1784, died Blake's father, an honest
shopkeeper of the old school, and a devout man — a dissenter.
He was buried in Bunhill Fields, on the fourth of July (a
Sunday) says the Register. The second son, James, — a year
and a half William's senior, — continued to live with the widow
Catherine, and succeeded to the hosier's business in Broad
Street, still a highly respectable street, and a good one for
trade, as it and the whole neighbourhood continued until the
era of Nash and the ' first gentleman in Europe.' Golden
Square was still the ' town residence ' of some half-dozen
M.P.'s — for county or rotten borough ; Poland Street and
Great Marlborough Street of others. Between this brother
and the artist no strong sympathy existed, little community
of sentiment or common ground (mentally) of any kind ;
although indeed, James — for the most part an humble matter-
of-fact man — had his spiritual and visionary side too ; would
at times talk Stvedenborg, talk of seeing Abraham and Moses,



56 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1785—86.

and to outsiders seem, like his gifted brother, * a bit mad ' — a
mild madman instead of a wild and stormy.

On his father's death, Blake, who found Design yield no
income, Engraving but a scanty one, returned from Green
Street, Leicester Fields, to familiar Broad Street. At No.
27, next door to his brother's, he set up shop as printseller
and engraver, in partnership with a former fellow-apprentice
at Basire's : James Parker, a man some six or seven years his
senior. An engraving by Blake after Stothard, Zephyrits atid
Flora (a long oval), was published by the firm " Parker and
Blake" this same year (1784). Mrs. Mathew, still friendly
and patronizing, though one day to be less eager for the poet's
services as Lion in Rathbone Place, countenanced, nay perhaps
first set the scheme going — in an ill-advised philanthropic
hour; favouring it, if Smith's hints may be trusted, with solid
pecuniary help. It will prove an ill-starred speculation ;
Pegasus proverbially turning out an indifferent draught-horse.
Mrs. Blake helped in the shop ; the poet busied himself with
his graver and pencil still. William Blake behind the counter
would have been a curious sight to see! His younger and
favourite brother, Robert, made one in the family ; William
taking him as a gratis pupil in engraving. It must have been
a singularly conducted commercial enterprise. No. 27 bears
at present small trace — with its two quiet parlour-windows,
apparently the same casements that have been there from the
beginning — of having once been even temporarily a shop.
The house is of the same character as No. 28 : a good-sized
three-storied one, with panelled rooms ; its original aspect
(like that of No. 28) wholly disguised, externally, by all-
levelling stucco. It is still a private mansion ; but let out