Crabb Robinson, a gentleman of singularly wide intercourse with the distinguished men of two generations, was another. On entering the room, as he related to me, he found himself alone. With a wise prescience of the inevitable future scarcity of that remarkable brochure, the Descriptive Catalogue, he purchased four copies for himself and friends—Charles Lamb among them. When, after that wholesale purchase, he inquired of James Blake, the custodian of the unique gallery, whether he could not come again free?—'Oh! yes; free as long as you live!' was the reply of the humble hosier, overjoyed at having so munificent a visitor, or a visitor at all.
This James Blake is characterized, by those who remember him, as an honest, unpretending shopkeeper in an old-world style, ill-calculated for great prosperity in the hosiery, or any other line. In his dress he is described to me as adhering to knee-breeches, worsted stockings, and buckles. As primitive as his brother he was, though very unlike: his head not in the clouds amid radiant visions, but bent downwards and studying the pence of this world—how to get them which he found no easy task, and how to keep. He looked upon his erratic brother with pity and blame, as a wilful, misguided man, wholly in a wrong track; while the latter despised him for his grovelling, worldly mind,—as he reckoned it. Time widened the breach. In after years, when James had retired on a scanty independence and lived in Cirencester Street, becoming a near neighbour of Mr. Linnell, at whose house Blake was then a frequent visitor, they did not even speak. At James's shop, ladies yet living, friends of Blake's, remember to have made their little purchases of gloves and haberdashery.
Lamb preferred Blake's Canterbury Pilgrimage to Stothard's. 'A work of wonderful power and spirit, hard and dry, yet with grace,' he says of it, on one occasion. That rare critic was delighted also with the Descriptive Catalogue. The analysis of the characters in the Prologue—the Knight, the
