"I'll bet you a bowl of punch it shall be completed, etched and bitten in, and a proof before that time."
"Done!"
The plate was finished; it contained many figures; the parties were mutually delighted, and the affair ended with a tipsy bout, at the Gray's Inn Coffee-house, at the employer's expense.
It was not likely that such an original would be content to sit, year after year, over a sheet of copper, perpetuating the renown of others, whilst possessed of a restless and ardent mind, intent on exploring unknown regions of taste, he could open a way through the intricacies of art, and by a short but eccentric cut reach the Temple of Fame. He set to work, and succeeded to the astonishment of the goddess, who, one day, beheld this new votary unceremoniously resting upon the steps of her altar.[36]
[William Blake, Painter and Poet.]
The life of this extraordinary man of genius has been written by Mr. Alexander Gilchrist, with much feeling, judgment, and good taste. Wordsworth was more interested with what he terms Blake's "madness" than with the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott. Fuseli and Flaxman predicted a day when the drawings of Blake should be as much sought after and treasured by artists as those of Michael Angelo. Hayley admired and befriended Blake. He was a true poet, though, as Gilchrist says, "he neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for workyday men at all; rather for children and angels—himself a divine child, whose play-things were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens, and the earth."
Blake was born in 1757, at No. 28, Broad Street, Carnaby Market, where his father carried on the business of a hosier. When a boy he began to dream. When eight or ten years of age, he brought home from Peckham Rye a tale of a tree filled with angels, for doing which his father threatened to thrash him.
In 1767 he was sent to the drawing-school of Mr. Pars, in the Strand, and taught to copy plaster casts after the antique, while his father made a collection of prints for him to study. He had already, too, begun to write poetry. At the age of fourteen he was placed with James Basire, the engraver. His father intended to apprentice him to Ryland, a more famous engraver than Basire. The boy Blake, however, raised an unexpected scruple. "The sequel," says Mr. Gilchrist, "shows it to have been a singular instance, if not of absolute prophetic gift or second sight, at all events of natural intuition into character and power of forecasting the future, from such as is often the endowment of temperament like his. In after-life this involuntary faculty of reading hidden writing continued to be a characteristic. 'Father,' said the strange boy, after the two had left Ryland's studio, 'I do not like the man's face; it looks as if he lived to be hanged!' Appearances were at this time utterly against the probability of such an event." But, twelve years after this interview, the unfortunate Ryland got into embarrassment, committed a forgery on the East India Company, and the prophecy was fulfilled.
By 1773 Blake had begun to draw his own dreams, such as one of Joseph of Arimathea, described by him as "one of the Gothic artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins." In 1783 Blake published, by the help of friends, a small volume of Poetical Sketches, of which here is a specimen:—
"Memory, hither come,
And tune your merry notes;
And, while upon the wind
Your music floats,
I'll pore upon the stream
Where sighing lovers dream,
And fish for fancies as they pass
Within the watery glass.