his Works to make its way and hold its place among the precious records and possessions of Englishmen.
What has been once well done need not be tried at again and done worse. No second writer need now recapitulate the less significant details of Blake's life: space and skill wanting, we can but refer readers to the complete biography. That the great poet and artist was a hosier's son,[1] born near Golden Square, put to school in the Strand to learn drawing at ten of one Pars, apprenticed at fourteen to learn engraving of one Basire; that he lived "smoothly enough" for two years, and was then set to work on abbey monuments, "to be out of harm's way," other apprentices being "disorderly," "mutinous," and given to "wrangling;" these facts and more, all of value and weight in their way, Mr. Gilchrist has given at full in his second and third chapters, adding just enough critical comment to set the facts off and give them their proper relief and significance. His labours among Gothic monuments, and the especial style of his training as an engraver, left their marks on the man afterwards. Two things here put on record are worthy of recollection: that he began seeing visions at "eight or ten;" and that he took objections to Ryland (a better known engraver than Basire), when taken to be apprenticed to him, on a singular
- ↑ It may be as well set down here as at any further stage of our business, that the date of Blake's birth appears, from good MS. authority, to have been the 20th of November (1757), not the 28th; that he was the second of five children, not four; James, the hosier in Broad Street, being his junior, not, as the biography states, his senior by a year and a half. The eldest son was John, a favourite child who came to small good, enlisted, and died it seems in comparative youth; of him Mr. Gilchrist evidently had not heard. In some verses of the Felpham period (written in 1801, printed in vol. ii. p. 189 of the "Life and Selections") Blake makes mention of "my brother John the evil one," which may now be comprehensible enough.
