kept in his own hands, and sold engraved copies of, for sums varying from five to twenty guineas.
While Schiavonetti was at work on his etchings from the Designs to Blair, hungry Cromek would call every now and then on Blake, to see what he was doing. One day, he caught sight of a pencil drawing from a hitherto virgin subject—the Procession of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims; Chaucer being a poet read by fewer then than now. Cromek 'appeared highly delighted' with Blake's sketch, says Smith, as being an original treatment of an original subject. In point of fact, he wanted to secure a finished drawing from it, for the purpose of having it engraved, and without employing Blake, just as he had served him over the Designs to the The Grave; as I learn from other sources, on sifting the matter. However, Blake was not to be taken in a second time. Negotiations on that basis failed; but, as Blake understood the matter, he received a commission, tacit or express, from Cromek, to execute the design. The Yorkshireman, nevertheless, went to Stothard, suggested the subject as a novelty, and, in fine, commissioned of that artist an oil-picture for sixty guineas, to be engraved by Bromley; for whom Schiavonetti was eventually substituted. Whether Stothard knew of Blake's design I can hardly pronounce; possibly not; certainly he did not, I should say, of Cromek's previous overtures to Blake, nor of the fact that a subscription paper for an engraving of the Canterbury Pilgrims had been circulated by Blake's friends.
This was in 1806, two years before publication of The Grave. One day, while Stothard was painting his picture, Blake called on his friend and saw it, ignorant, evidently, that it was to supersede his own, and that slippery Cromek was at the bottom of its having existed at all; nay, was making it his next speculation with the public. For the two artists to design from the same poets and subjects was no new thing, as a comparison of their works will show. Take, for instance, the Night Thoughts of Young, illustrated by Blake in 1797, by
