In the summer of 1784 Boswell was in London as usual, and saw Johnson, then an old man of seventy-five, for the last time. On the 30th June, he and Johnson dined with Sir Joshua Reynolds in Leicester Square, and when Johnson went home Boswell accompanied him in Sir Joshua’s coach to the entry of Bolt Court, in Fleet Street, and was so affected at parting that he would not accompany him to the house, and they bade each other an affectionate adieu in the carriage. Johnson stepped out on to the pavement, and, walking briskly, vanished into the yawn of Bolt Court, and, for Boswell, into the jaws of death, for he never saw him again. He went home to the north two days after, and in December Johnson died.
On his annual visits to London Boswell lived in various lodgings; but in or about 1786 he rented the house, still standing, at 56 Great Queen Street, and brought his wife to town with him. They occupied this place for some two years; and it is evident from his letters to Bishop Percy and the Rev. T. W. Temple that, whilst residing there, he wrote most of the last seven years of his Life of Johnson. Boswell died in London, in 1795, at No. 122 (formerly 47) Great Portland Street.
CHAPTER VII
BLAKE AND FLAXMAN
Ten years before Boswell went to live at 56 Great Queen Street, William Blake was serving an apprenticeship to James Basire, the well-known engraver, whose house was close by at No. 31 in the same street. Basire’s residence has gone the way of all bricks and mortar; but happily Soho still preserves the corner house at No. 28 Broad Street, in which Blake was born. He was born there on the 28th November 1857, over his father’s hosiery shop, and it was there that the first of his strange visions came to him; for he used to say that when he was only four years old he one day saw the face of God at the window looking in upon him, and the sight set him a-screaming. When he was four or five years older, you hear of him taking long rambles into the country; and it was on Peckham Rye that other visions came to him. Once he saw a tree there “filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars”; and once, on a summer morning, he saw “the haymakers at work, and amid them angelic figures walking.” In his matter-of-fact fashion he recounted the first of these two visions on his return home, and his mother had to intervene to prevent the honest hosier and conscientious Nonconformist, his father, from thrashing him for telling a lie.
At the age of ten Blake was journeying to and from the house in Broad Street to Mr. Paris’s academy in the Strand, taking drawing lessons. He was already writing poetry, too, and before he was fourteen had written one of the most beautiful and glitteringly imaginative of his lyrics:—
“How sweet I roamed from field to field,
And tasted all the summer’s pride,
Till I the Prince of Love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide.
He showed me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair
Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May-dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.”
In a preface to his first published volume, the Poetical Sketches, which contains this lyric, his Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter verses, “My Silks and fine Array,” and other lovely songs, he says that all the contents were “commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year.” From fourteen till he was twenty-one Blake was living away from home with his master, Basire, the engraver; then he went back to his father’s, and commenced to study at the recently formed Royal Academy, and in 1780 exhibited his first picture there, “The Death of Earl Godwin.” Marrying in 1782, he set up housekeeping for himself at 23 Green Street, Leicester Square, and began to move abroad in literary society. Flaxman, already his friend, introduced him to Mrs. Mathew, a lady of blue-stocking tendencies, who held a sort of salon at 27 Rathbone Place; and here, in 1784, “Rainy Day” Smith made his acquaintance. “At Mrs. Mathew’s most agreeable conversaziones,” he says, “I first met the late William Blake, to whom she and Mr. Flaxman had been truly kind. There I have often heard him read and sing several of his poems. He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed by most of his listeners to possess original and extraordinary merit.” He knew nothing of musical technique, but sang some of his verses to airs that Smith describes as “singularly beautiful.” His republican opinions and general unorthodoxy and daring outspokenness, however, did not make for social amenity, and it was not long before he dropped out of these elegant circles, and withdrew to his mystic dreamings and the production of paintings and poetry that the majority could not understand. A strangely beautiful and wonderful Bird of Paradise to break from the nest over that hosier’s shop at the corner of Broad Street, Soho!