involved both print and proprietor. On Cromek, too, consumption laid its hand, arresting all his ingenious and innocent schemes, or, as Smith calls it, the long 'endeavour to live byspeculating on the talents of others.' Lengthened visits to native Yorkshire failed to stay the inevitable course of his malady, and he returned to Newman Street, there to linger another year of forced inaction, during which poor Cromek and family,—comprising a wife, two young children, and a dependent sister,—were reduced to great straits. Doubtless, many a valuable autograph and Design had then to be changed into cash. So that we have to pity the predacious Yorkshireman after all. On the 12th March, 1812, at the age of forty-two, he went where he could jockey no more men nor artists.
The widow had her fresh difficulties in realising the property her husband's scheming brain had created; had first to raise money for the engraver to proceed with the Pilgrimage. The engraver then in view was Lewis Schiavonetti's brother, Niccolo, who had worked in Lewis's studio, and caught his manner. To finish the plate, he wanted three hundred and thirty guines, in three instalments, and fifteen months' time. To raise the first instalment, Mrs. Cromek parted with a good property,—sold the remainder and copyright of Blake's Blair for £120, to the Ackermanns, who re-issued the book in 1813, with biographic notices of Blair, Cromek, and Schiavonetti. Then Niccolò followed in his brother's steps to an early grave. This last in the chain of sorrowful casualties caused further delays. The plate,—Mrs. Cromek borrowing the necessary money with difficulty from her father,—was at last, after having passed under the hands of three distinct engravers, finished by James Heath, or in his manufactory rather. Thence it eventually issued, a very much worse one for all these changes than when poor Lewis Schiavonetti's failing hand had left it a brilliant, masterly etching. It had an extraordinary sale, as everybody knows, and proved exceedingly profitable to the widow. The long-cherished venture
