I imagine that Thomas Monger Butcher was probably Catherine's brother; there are other Mongers not far off in the register, as if the name were a family name. His handwriting is mean and untidy, James Blake's vague but fluent; Catherine makes her mark somewhat faintly. As the register lies open there are entries of seven marriages; out of these, no fewer than three of the brides have signed by making their mark. The name William Blake stands out from these 'blotted and blurred' signatures; the ink is very black, as if he had pressed hard on the pen; and the name has a 'firm and determinate outline.'

Gilchrist describes Catherine Boucher as 'a bright-eyed, dark-haired brunette, with expressive features and a slim, graceful form.' This seems to be merely a re-writing of Allan Cunningham's vague statement that she 'was noticed by Blake for the whiteness of her hand, the brightness of her eyes, and a slim and handsome shape, corresponding with his own notions of sylphs and naiads.' But if a quaint and lovely pencil sketch in the Rossetti MS., representing a man in bed and a woman sitting on the side of the bed, beginning to dress, is really, as it probably is, done from life, and meant for Mrs. Blake, we see at once the model for his invariable type of woman, tall, slender, and with unusually long legs. There is a drawing of her head by Blake in the Rossetti MS. which, though apparently somewhat conventionalized, shows a clear aquiline profile and very large eyes; still to be divined in the rather painful head drawn by Tatham when she was an old woman, a head in which there is still power and fixity. Crabb Robinson, who met her in 1825, says that she had 'a good expression in her countenance, and, with a dark eye, remains of beauty in her youth.'

No man of genius ever had a better wife. To the last she called him 'Mr. Blake,' while he, we are told, frequently spoke of her as 'his beloved.' The most beautiful reference to her which I find in his letters is one in a letter of September 16, 1800, to Hayley, where he calls her 'my dear and too careful and over-joyous woman,' and says 'Eartham will be my first temple and altar; my wife is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels whenever she hears it named.' He taught her to write, and the copy-book titles to some of his water-colors are probably hers; to draw, so that after his death she finished some of his designs; and to help him in the printing and coloring of his engravings. A story is told, on the authority of Samuel Palmer, that they would both look into the flames of burning coals, and draw grotesque figures which they saw there, hers quite unlike his. 'It is quite certain,' says Crabb Robinson, 'that she believed in all his visions'; and he shows her to us reminding her husband, 'You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old, and he put his head to the window, and set you a-screaming,' She would walk with him into the country, whole summer days, says Tatham, and far into the night. And when he rose in the night, to write down what was 'dictated' to him, she would rise and sit by him, and hold his hand. 'She would get up in the night,' says the unnamed friend quoted by Gilchrist, 'when he was under his very fierce inspirations, which were as if they would tear him asunder, while he was yielding himself to the Muse, or whatever else it could be called, sketching and writing. And so terrible a task did this seem to be, that she had to sit motionless and silent; only to stay him mentally, without moving hand or foot; this for hours, and night after night.' 'His wife being to him a very patient woman,' says Tatham, who speaks of Mrs. Blake as 'an irradiated saint,' 'he fancied that while she looked on him as he worked, her sitting quite still by his side, doing nothing, soothed his impetuous mind; and he has many a time, when a strong desire presented itself to overcome any difficulty in his plates or drawings, in the middle of the night, risen, and requested her to get up with him, and sit by his side, in which she as cheerfully acquiesced.' 'Rigid, punctual, firm, precise,' she has been described; a good housewife and a good cook; refusing to have a servant not only because of the cost, but because no servant could be scrupulous enough to satisfy her. 'Finding,' says Tatham '(as Mrs. Blake declared, and as every one else knows), the more service the more inconvenience, she... did all the work herself, kept the house clean and herself tidy, besides printing all Blake's numerous engravings, which was a task sufficient for any industrious woman.' He tells us in another place: 'it is a fact known to the writer, that Mrs. Blake's frugality always kept a guinea or sovereign for any emergency, of which Blake never knew, even to the day of his death.'

Tatham says of Blake at the time of his marriage: 'Although not handsome, he must have had a most noble countenance, full of expression and animation; his hair was of a yellow brown, and curled with the utmost crispness and luxuriance; his locks, instead of falling down, stood up like a curling flame, and looked at a distance like radiations, which with his fiery eye and expressive forehead, his dignified and cheerful physiognomy, must have made his appearance truly prepossessing.' In another place he says: 'William Blake in stature was short [he was not quite five and a half feet in height], but well made, and very well proportioned; so much so that West, the great history painter, admired much the form of his limbs; he had a large head and wide shoulders. Elasticity and promptitude of action were the characteristics of his contour. His motions were rapid and energetic, betokening a mind filled with elevated enthusiasm; his forehead was very high and prominent over the frontals; his eye most unusually large and glassy, with which he appeared to look into some other world.' His eyes were prominent, 'large, dark, and expressive,' says Allan Cunningham; the flashing of his eyes remained in the memory of an old man who had seen him in court at Chichester in 1804. His nose, though 'snubby,' as he himself describes it, had 'a little clenched nostril, a nostril that opened as far as it could, but was tied down at the end.' The mouth was large and sensitive; the forehead, larger below than above, as he himself noted, was broad and high; and the whole face, as one sees it in what is probably the best likeness we have, Linnell's miniature of 1827, was full of irregular splendor, eager, eloquent, ecstatic; eyes and mouth and nostrils all as if tense with a continual suction, drinking up 'large draughts of intellectual day' with impatient haste. 'Infinite impatience,' says Swinburne, 'as of a great preacher or apostle—intense tremulous vitality, as of a great orator—seem to me to give his face the look of one who can do all things but hesitate.'

After his marriage in August 1782 (which has been said to have displeased his father, though Tatham says it was 'with the approbation and consent of his parents'), Blake took lodgings at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields (now pulled down), which was only the square's length away from Sir Joshua Reynolds. Flaxman had married in 1781, and had taken a house at 27 Wardour Street and it was probably he who, about this time, introduced Blake to 'the accomplished Mrs. Matthew,' whose drawing-room in Rathbone Place was frequented by literary and artistic people. Mr. Matthew, a clergyman of taste, who is said to have 'read the church service more beautifully than any other clergyman in London,' had discovered Flaxman, when a little boy, learning Latin behind the counter in his father's shop. 'From this incident,' says J. T. Smith in his notice of Flaxman, 'Mr. Matthew continued to notice him, and, as he grew up, became his first and best friend. Later on, he was introduced to Mrs. Matthew, who was so kind as to read Homer to him, whilst he made designs on the same table with her at the time she was reading.' It was apparently at the Matthews' house that Smith heard Blake sing his own songs to his own music, and it was through Mrs. Matthew's good opinion of these songs that she 'requested the Rev. Henry Matthew, her husband, to join Mr. Flaxman in his truly kind offer of defraying the expense of printing them': to which we owe the 'Poetical Sketches, by W. B.'; printed in 1783, and given to Blake to dispose of as he thought fit. There is no publisher's name on the book, and there is no reason to suppose that it was ever offered for sale.

'With his usual urbanity,' Mr. Matthew had written a foolish 'Advertisement' to the book, saying that the author had 'been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets, as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye,' 'his talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession.' The book is by no means incorrectly printed, and it is not probable that Blake would under any circumstances have given his poems more 'revisal' than he did. He did at this time a good deal of engraving, often after the designs of Stothard, whom he was afterwards to accuse of stealing his ideas; and in 1784 he had two, and in 1785 four, watercolor drawings at the Royal Academy. Fuseli, Stothard, and Flaxman[1] seem to have been his chief friends, and it is probable that he also knew Cosway, who practiced magic, and Cosway may have told him about Paracelsus, or lent him Law's translation of Behmen, while Flaxman, who was a Swedenborgian, may have brought him still more closely under the influence of Swedenborg.

In any case, he soon tired of the coterie of the Matthews, and we are told that it soon ceased to relish his 'manly firmness of opinion.' What he really thought of it we may know with some certainty from the extravaganza, An Island in the Moon, which seems to belong to 1784, and which is a light-hearted and incoherent satire, derived, no doubt, from Sterne, and pointing, as Mr. Sampson justly says, to Peacock. It is unfinished, and was not worth finishing, but it contains the first version of several of the Songs of Innocence, as well as the lovely song of Phoebe and Jellicoe. It has the further interest of showing us Blake's first, wholly irresponsible attempt to create imaginary worlds, and to invent grotesque and impossible names. It shows us the first explosions of that inflammable part of his nature, which was to burst through the quiet surface of his life at many intervals, in righteous angers and irrational suspicions. It betrays his deeply rooted dislike of science, and, here and there, a literary preference, for Ossian or for Chatterton. The original MS. is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and in this year, 1907, Mr. Edwin J. Ellis has done Blake the unkindness of printing it for the first time in full, in the pages of his Real Blake. Blake's satire is only occasionally good, though occasionally it is supremely good; his burlesque is almost always bad; and there is little probability that he ever intended to publish any part of the prose and verse which he threw off for the relief of personal irritations and spiritual indignations.

In An Island in the Moon we see Blake casting off the dust of the drawing-rooms, finally, so far as any mental obstruction was concerned; but he does not seem to have broken wholly with the Matthews, who, no doubt, were people of genuinely good intentions; and it is through their help that we find him, in 1784, on the death of his father, setting up as a print-seller, with his former fellow-apprentice, James Parker, at No. 27 Broad Street, next door to the house and shop which had been his fathers, and which were now taken on by his brother James. Smith says that he took a shop and a first-floor; and here his brother Robert came to live with him as his pupil, and remained with him till his death in February 1787.

III

After Robert's death Blake gave up the print-shop and moved out of Broad Street to Poland Street, a street running between it and Oxford Street. He took No. 28, a house only a few doors down from Oxford Street, and lived there for five years. Here, in 1789, he issued the Songs of Innocence, the first of his books to be produced by the method of his invention which he described as 'illuminated printing.' According to Smith, it was Robert who 'stood before him in one of his visionary imaginations, and directed him in the way in which he ought to proceed.' The process is thus described by Mr. Sampson: 'The text and surrounding design were written in reverse, in a medium impervious to acid, upon small copper-plates, which were then etched in a bath of aqua-fortis until the work stood in relief as in a stereotype. From these plates, which to economize copper were in many cases engraved upon both sides, impressions were printed, in the ordinary manner, in tints made to harmonise with the color scheme afterwards applied in water-colors by the artist.' Gilchrist tells an improbable story about Mrs. Blake going out with the last half-crown in the house, and spending 1s 10d of it in the purchase of 'the simple materials necessary.' But we know from a MS. note of John Linnell, referring to a somewhat later date: 'The copper-plates which Blake engraved to illustrate Hayley's life of Cowper were, as he told me, printed entirely by himself and his wife in his own press—a very good one which cost him forty pounds.' These plates were engraved in 1803, but it is not likely that Blake was ever able to buy more than one press.