ESSAY ON BLAKE,
BY JAMES SMETHAM.
Reprinted from the London Quarterly Review, January 1869.
For a reference to the author of this essay see the Supplementary Chapter to the Life of Blake, Vol. I. pp. 428-9.
The omitted portions are extracts or summaries from the foregoing "Life of Blake," as a review of which the essay originally appeared.
The great landscape-painter, Linnell—whose portraits were, some of them, as choice as Holbein's—in the year 1827 painted a portrait of William Blake, the great idealist, and an engraving of it is here before us as we write. A friend looking at it observed that it was "like a landscape." It was a happy observation. The forehead resembles a corrugated mountain-side worn with tumbling streams "blanching and billowing in the hollows of it;" the face is twisted into "as many lines as the new map with the augmentation of the Indies:" it is a grand face, ably anatomised, full of energy and vitality; and out of these labyrinthine lines there gazes an eye which seems to behold things more than mortal. At the exhibition of National Portraits at South Kensington, there was a portrait of the same man by Thomas Phillips; but very different in treatment [see Frontispieces to Vols. I. and II]. The skin covers the bones and sinews more calmly; the attitude is eager, wistful, and prompt. Comparing the
