as a basis for illustration; and actually commenced one, the last year of his life, for Mr. Linnell, getting as far as Genesis, chap. iv. verse 15. He cared not for recreation. Writing and design were his recreation from the task-work of engraving. 'I don't understand what you mean by the want of a holiday,' he would tell his friends. Art was recreation enough for him. Work itself was pleasure, and any work, engraving, whilst he was at it, almost as much as design, — nay, even what, to another, would have been the irksome task of engraving bad pictures. He was an early riser, and worked steadily on, through health and sickness. Once, a young artist called and complained of being very ill: 'What was he to do?' 'Oh!' said Blake, 'I never stop for anything; I work on, whether ill or not.' Throughout life, he was always, as Mrs. Blake truly described him, either reading, writing, or designing. For it was a tenet of his, that the inner world is the all-important; that each man has a world within, greater than the external. Even while he engraved, he read,—as the plate-marks on his books testify. He never took walks for mere walking's sake, or for pleasure; and could not sympathise with those who did. During one period, he, for two years together, never went out at all, except to the corner of the Court to fetch his porter. That in-doors 'recreation' of his held him spell-bound. So wholly did the topics on which he thought, or dreamed, absorb his mind that 'often,' Smith tells us, 'in the middle of the night he would, after thinking deeply upon a particular subject, leap from his bed and write for two hours or more.'
Through his friend Linnell, Blake became acquainted with a new and sympathising circle of artists, which hereafter will include some very enthusiastic younger men. They, in part, filled the place of the old circle, now thinned by death and (in Stothard's case) by dissension. Of which, however, Flaxman and Fuseli remained; men friendly to him personally, and just to his genius, though, as respects the former, Blake did not always choose to think so. Once in these, or later years,
