whom he assisted by buying two or three of his expensive illustrated books. One among the best of the Songs of Innocence and Experience I have seen, formerly belonged to Wainwright. Blake entertained, as did Lamb, Procter, and others of The London coterie, a kindness for him and his works.
For this spiritual voluptuary, with the greedy senses, soft coat, and tiger heart, painted and exhibited as well as wrote. I trace him at the Academy in 1821,—Subject from Undine, ch. 6; in 1822 (year of Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners), Paris in the Chamber of Helen; and in 1825, First Idea of a Scene from Der Freyschütz, and a Sketch from Gerusalemme Liberata — both sketches, it is worth notice, as indicating uncertain application to the practice of art. He was then living at 44, Great Marlborough Street. Mr. Palmer, one of Blake's young disciples in those days, well remembers a visit to the Academy in Blake's company, during which the latter pointed to a picture near the ceiling, by Wainwright, and spoke of it as 'very fine.' It was a scene from Walton's Angler, exhibited in 1823 or 4. 'While so many moments better worthy to remain are fled,' writes Mr. Palmer to me, 'the caprice of memory presents me with the image of Blake looking up at Wainwright's picture; Blake in his plain black suit and rather broad-brimmed, but not quakerish hat, standing so quietly among all the dressed-up, rustling, swelling people, and myself thinking " How little you know who is "among you!"'
During the first years of The London Magazine, 1820—23, Wainwright was a contributor, under various pseudonyms, of articles, not, as Talfourd mistakenly describes them, 'of mere flashy assumption,' full of 'disdainful notices of living artists;' but articles of real literary merit and originality; in a vein of partly feigned coxcombry and flippant impertinence, of wholly genuine sympathy with art (within orthodox limits), and recognition of the real excellencies of the moderns,—of Retsch, of Stothard, for example, and of Etty, then a young
