in the background, for example. Towards the end of the volume, a pretty and characteristic, but very generalised little etching by Blake occurs, of a Gothic cathedral, among trees, meant probably for that of Canterbury.
Few new patrons arose to fill the gaps I have recapitulated in the chosen circle of the old. All, it may be observed, were in the middle rank of life. There was nothing in William Blake's high and spiritual genius to command sympathy from a fastidious, poco curante aristocracy, still less from Majesty, in those days. 'Take them away! take them away!' was the testy mandate of disquieted Royalty, on some drawings of Blake's being once shown to George the Third.
Among present friends may be mentioned Mr. George Cumberland of Bristol. This gentleman did an important service to Blake, when he introduced him, about 18 13, to a young artist named John Linnell, who was to become the kindest friend and stay of the neglected man's declining years, and afterwards to be famous as one of our great landscape-painters. He was then, and till many a year later, industriously toiling at Portrait, as a bread profession; at miniatures, engraving—whatever, in short, he could get to do; while he painted Landscape as an unremunerative luxury. The present brisk, not to say eager, demand for good modern pictures was not, in those years, even beginning. The intimacy between the two arose from the younger artist applying to the elder to help him over engravings then in hand, from portraits of his own. Such as were jointly undertaken in this way, Blake commenced, Linnell finished.
Of the half-dozen years of Blake's life succeeding the exhibition in Broad Street, and the engravings of his Pilgrimage, I find little or no remaining trace, except that he was still living in South Moulton Street, in his accustomed poverty, and, if possible, more than accustomed neglect.
He was no longer at the pains or trivial cost, to him not trivial, of being even his own publisher; of throwing off from
