i have come of an Irish family named O'Neil. One of the poet's grandfathers married a certain Ellen Blake, and took her name, having disgraced his own by running into debt; and the family renamed this name. James Blake and his wife Catherine kept a small homer's shop at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, a part of London which is poor enough now, but was then much more prosperous. Little or nothing is known of their life. The father was one of the Nonconformists, who were then much fewer than now, and was probably a man of good sense and sound judgment, as can be seen from the way in which he provided for his son's education, and his recognition of the boy's aptitudes. He had five children: James, a careful prudent man, who became a prosperous merchant, fond of giving dull but excellent advice on practical matters; William, the poet; John, the family favourite, who, like so many favourites, turned out ill, and was called by William "the Evil one," enlisted in the army and died young; Robert, whom William loved best of all his family, and who also died young; and, finally, a daughter, who lived to a ripe age and never married.

William was born on the 28th of November, 1757, the year in which, according to Swedenborg, the Last Judgment took place in Heaven and in the human soul, when a new age began, and the kingdom of God appeared among men. He lived at home up to the age of ten, and received a meagre education in reading, writing and perhaps arithmetic, listening to many conversations about Swedenborg and the New Church, with which his father and his brother James were a good deal in sympathy, and probably drawing untrained childish pictures for his own amusement. His father, perceiving his taste in this direction, sent him to a teacher in the Strand, under whom he learned to draw from the Antique. Then, as the family could not afford him an art training, he was apprenticed to Basire, who was then a celebrated engraver, as his father had been before him, and as his son and grandson were destined to be until the middle of the nineteenth century. With him Blake remained for six years, that is to say, up to the age of twenty. He seems soon to have distinguished himself from his fellow-apprentices, and, within a year, was given special work, his master sending him to make drawings of the monuments in Westminster Abbey. There, for years, he spent the greater part of the day. He was the first to discover traces of colour upon the old carvings. He delighted in copying them, and in trying to reproduce their faded tints. There, no doubt, he found and

cultivated his preference for Gothic art, a preference which he was to retain all through his life, in defiance of contemporary taste, which was all for the Classic in art. There also, in the solitude of the vast cathedral, he could enjoy unhindered his dreams of the past and his visions of the eternal. The first of his own recorded works (dated 1773) is an engraving with the strange title: Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion. No doubt he produced others about the same time; but they have been lost. He also wrote, in his spare moments, some scraps of poetry, though without any idea of publication.

In 1778, he left Basire, to join the Antique class of the Royal Academy. Here he made himself noticeable by his hatred for Lebrun and Rubens, and perhaps also for Reynolds, with whom he is said to have had an interview which left each of them with a very poor opinion of the other. But his student life soon came to an end, and he established himself as an engraver on his own account, though he continued to live at home. Among works known to have been done by him at this early stage of his career were some engravings for the Ladies' Magazine, a watercolour entitled The Penance of Jane Shore, and a symbolical picture, War unchained by an Angel, which he did not complete until some years later. At this time he made the acquaintance of several other artists: Flaxman, the celebrated illustrator of the Homeric poems, who revived the fine and simple outlines of ancient Greek art; Stothard, then a very fashionable painter, and Fuseli the engraver. These three were all to play a prominent part in Blake's life.

His marriage clearly marks the end of his student days and the beginning of his maturity. The story of it is a simple and characteristic one, and has been many times recounted. The refusal of his love by a certain Polly or Clara Woods, to whom he had for some time paid court, brought on a fit of melancholy; and, to cure himself of this, he left London, and took lodgings in the house of a market-gardener at Richmond named Boucher, who was probably of French origin. Here he met his host's daughter, Catherine. At first sight of him, she experienced a peculiar nervous sensation which she could neither explain nor describe, but which obliged her to leave the room for a time. The same evening he told her of his ill-requited love, and of how he had been deceived. "I pity you from my heart," she said. "Do you pity me? Then I love you for that," was his reply. This was the beginning of their love-story, and also the end of their life

in the Richmond house. Blake would not live near her, but determined to prove, by absence, the sincerity of his feelings, and to work so that he might assure their common future. He returned at once to London, and the lovers did not meet again until a year later, when, finding themselves still of the same mind, they were married (18th August, 1782). He was then twenty-five years old, in the full prime of his manhood, and could look forward with confidence to the future.

Was it only this young girl's pity that had caused their sudden falling in love, or had it been so ordained from all eternity? Was the nervous shock which Catherine had felt only her recognition of the divine decree? Blake would assuredly have said so. Be that as it may, he had at any rate found instinctively the very woman he needed. To him she was not merely the bright-eyed young girl who had comforted him in his first great sorrow, not merely the graceful woman who was to serve as his only model, and whose form appears so often in his work. She was also the comrade whose health and strength enabled her to share without fatigue his thirty- and forty-mile walks, and the housekeeper who managed the slender resources of their home so economically that he never felt the actual hardships of poverty. She was all this and more. His love for her was of a rather domineering nature: he always felt his superiority to and his power over her. In Blake's eyes, woman was always an inferior being. But if he ever had made an exception, it would have been in his wife's favour. "You have been an angel to me," were his last words, and never was praise better deserved. Her feeling for him was more than love. It was veneration. To her he was always "Mr. Blake," a spirit of a higher order, moving in another world and breathing an air different from her own. She never disputed his opinions, but accepted them as those of a god, even when she failed to understand them. In her unhappiest moments, she had only tears to face him with; and those she very rarely shed. Her devotion was untiring. Wherever he pleased to go, she followed him. Even at night, when inspiration woke him, and he felt himself impelled to write or to draw, and needed some moral support, she would rise, take one of his hands, and sit speechless by his side for hours, aiding him by her presence and silent contact, till his work was finished.

She had had no education. For his sake and with his help, she learned to read and write, and even to draw and paint, as much at any rate as was necessary to enable her to colour his books. She

supported him in all his internal struggles. When no one believed in him, her faith remained unshakeable. Thanks to her, he was able to live an artist's life and to follow his dreams. By her he was watched and cared for on his death-bed, as he had been at every moment of his life. And by her, too, his memory has been preserved for us, as that of a saint. Personally, she appears but little in his work; but her softening influence is to be seen in many of his poems. And, through all his life, she was so inseparable from him that no praise can be too high for her constant faith, her tireless devotion, and the complete self-abnegation which she showed in giving her whole life to his service.

But life is not limited to a love-story, however happy. The young couple were poor, and must face the struggle that lay before them, in the world and against it. So now there begins the second, or active period in Blake's life. He continued his studies, as every great artist must do unceasingly. He had read much of the work of Shakespeare, Milton and Dante. His knowledge of the Bible was far more exact than that of the ordinary educated Englishman. He probably at this time made a serious study of Swedenborg's works, pencilling his comments in the margin, as well as some of Boehme's writings and possibly also those of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus. He followed with much interest the whole trend of thought in the second half of the eighteenth century, with its leaning towards occultism. And he must now have begun to lay the foundation of his own system. We do not know whether he actually joined the Swedenborgian "New Church," or any of the mystical societies of his time. If he did, no record remains of the fact. He was a frequent visitor for several years at the house of a certain Mr. Mathew, a clergyman of the Church of England, in Rathbone Place, and here he met various admirers of his youthful talent, whose kindness enabled him to print his first volume of poetry—the Poetical Sketches, issued in 1783. From this time onward, his biography becomes only an account of his successive changes of residence, and an enumeration of his works.

His first home was in Green Street, Leicester Fields, now Leicester Square. In 1784, his father died, and William established himself as a printseller next door to his brother James, who had succeeded to the hosiery business. His younger brother, Robert, came to learn drawing and engraving from him, but after three years fell ill and died, nursed devotedly by Blake; and, immediately after, the print

shop, which had not proved a success, was closed, and Blake went to live in Poland Street, where he began business as a working engraver. Then, in 1793, after the death of his mother, and after refusing, for reasons of policy, to accept the post of drawing-master to the Royal Family, he moved to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, where most of his works were produced, and where he remained up to the time of a very important event in his life: namely, his installation at Felpham, in 1800.

During these eighteen years (1782-1800), his friends were still few in number. He soon found that his doctrines were too unconventional and his ways of asserting them too dogmatic and too paradoxical to be welcomed in the Rev. Mr. Mathew's drawingroom; and he was wise enough to make his visits less and less frequent, until they ceased altogether. He kept up his relations with Flaxman, became a friend of Fuseli, and made the acquaintance of Johnson, the bookseller. At the latter's house, he joined, for a time, a small circle of revolutionaries, who dined there, and the majority of whom had gained a certain notoriety on account of their very advanced political and philosophical views. Among those whom he met here were William Godwin, celebrated for his anarchistic teaching, who had just published his Caleb Williams, to expose the despotism which made man the destroyer of his fellow men; Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, who became the wife of Godwin and the mother of Mary Shelley; Tom Paine, who had just begun his polemical work upon the rights of man, and who was to be later a member of the "Convention "; and Priestley, famous as a politician and as a great chemist, and destined also to become a member of the French Constituent Assembly. Brought thus into contact with all these revolutionary spirits, Blake, who was already a lover of liberty, became an ardent admirer of the French Revolution, and even went so far as to wear a red cap in the streets, though he discontinued this after the first massacres in September, 1792. He saved Thomas Paine from arrest by warning him, after one of his violent speeches, not to return home that evening. The police actually went to his house the same night to arrest him but he had taken Blake's advice, and was able to escape the next day to France. In such surroundings Blake had many opportunities of fostering and increasing his passion for liberty, and their influence is often visible in his work.

These meetings, however, came to an end with the dispersal of