into celebrity by William Shipley, painter, brother to a bishop, and virtual founder also, in 1754, of the still-extant Society of Arts,-in that same house, where the Society lodged until migrating to its stately home over the way, in the Adelphi.

Who was Pars? Pars, the Leigh or Cary of his day, was originally a chaser and son of a chaser, the art to which Hogarth was apprenticed, one then going out of demand, unhappily, for the fact implied the loss of a decorative art. Which decadence it was led this Pars to go into the juvenile Art-Academy line, vice Shipley retired. He had a younger brother, William, a portrait-painter, and one of the earliest Associates or inchoate R. A.'s, who was extensively patronized by the Dilettanti Society, and by the dilettante Lord Palmerston of that time. The former sent him to Greece, there for three years to study ruined temple and mutilated statue, and to return with portfolios, a mine of wealth to cribbing 'classic architects, contemporary Chambers' and future Soanes.

At Pars' school as much drawing was taught as is to be learned by copying plaster-casts after the Antique, but no drawing from the living figure. Blake's father bought a few casts, from which the boy could continue his drawing-lessons at home: the Gladiator, the Hercules, the Venus de Medici, various heads, and the usual models of hand, arm, and foot. After a time, small sums of money were indulgently supplied wherewith to make a collection of Prints for study. To secure these, the youth became a frequenter of the printdealer's shops and the sales of the auctioneers, who then took threepenny biddings, and would often knock down a print for as many shillings as pounds are now given, thanks to evermultiplying Lancashire fortunes.

In a scarce, probably almost unread book, affecting-despite the unattractive literary peculiarities of its pedagogue authors -from its subject and very minuteness of detail, occurs an account, from which I have begun to borrow, of Blake's early education in art, derived from the artist's own lips. It is a more reliable story than Allan Cunningham's pleasant

mannered generalities, easy to read, hard to verify. The singular biography to which I allude, is Dr. Malkin's Father's Memoirs of his Child (1806), illustrated by a frontispiece of Blake's design. The Child in question was one of those hapless 'prodigies of learning' who, to quote a goodnatured friend and philosopher's consoling words to the poor Doctor, commence their career at three, become expert 'linguists at four, profound philosophers at five, read the 'Fathers at six, and die of old age at seven.'

'Langford,' writes Malkin, called Blake his little connoisseur, and often knocked down a cheap lot with friendly precipitation.' Amiable Langford! The great Italians,Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, Giulio Romano,-the great Germans,-Albert Dürer, Martin Hemskerk,-with others similar, were the exclusive objects of his choice; a sufficiently remarkable one in days when Guido and the Caracci were the gods of the servile crowd. Such a choice was 'contemned by his youthful companions, who were accustomed to laugh at what they called his mechanical taste!' 'I am happy,' wrote Blake himself in later life (MS. notes to Reynolds), 'I cannot 'say that Raffaelle ever was from my earliest childhood hidden from me. I saw and I knew immediately the 'difference between Raffaelle and Rubens.'

Between the ages of eleven and twelve, if not before, Blake had begun to write original irregular verse; a rarer precocity than that of sketching, and rarer still in alliance with the latter tendency. Poems composed in his twelfth year, came to be included in a selection privately printed in his twentysixth. Could we but know which they were! One, by Malkin's help, we can identify as written before he was fourteen the following ethereal piece of sportive Fancy, 'Song' he calls it :—

How sweet I roam'd from field to field,

And tasted all the summer's pride,

Till I the prince of Love beheld,

Who in the sunny beams did glide!

He shew'd me lilies for my hair,

And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow.

With sweet May-dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,

And shut me in his golden cage.

He loves to sit and hear me sing,

Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,

And mocks my loss of liberty.

This may surely be reckoned equal precocity to that so much lauded of Pope and Cowley. It is not promise, but fulfilment. The grown man in vain might hope to better such sweet playfulness,-playfulness as of a 'child-angel's' penning-any more than noon can reproduce the tender streaks of dawn. But criticism is idle. How analyse a violet's perfume, or dissect the bloom on a butterfly's wing?

CHAPTER III.

ENGRAVER'S APPRENTICE. 1771-78. [ÆT. 14—21.]

THE preliminary charges of launching Blake in the career of a Painter, were too onerous for the paternal pocket; involving for one thing, a heavy premium to some leading artist for instruction under his own roof, then the only attainable, always the only adequate training. The investment, moreover, would not after all be certain of assuring daily bread for the future. English engravers were then taking that high place they are now doing little to maintain. Apprenticeship to one would secure, with some degree of artistic education, the cunning right hand which can always keep want at arm's length: a thing artist and littérateur have often had cause to envy in the skilled artizan. The consideration was not without weight in the eyes of an honest shopkeeper, to whose understanding the prosaic craft would more practically address itself than the vague abstractions of Art, or those shadowy promises of Fame, on which alone a mere artist had too often to feed. Thus it was decided for the future designer, that he should enter the, to him, enchanted domain of Art by a back door, as it were He is not to be dandled into a Painter, but painfully to win his way to an outside place. Daily through life, he will have to marry his shining dreams to the humblest, most irksome realities of a virtually artizan life. Already it had been decreed that an inspired Poet should be endowed with barely grammar enough to compose with schoolboy accuracy.

At the age of fourteen, the drawing-school of Mr. Pars in the Strand, was exchanged for the shop of engraver Basire, in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. There had been an intention of apprenticing Blake to Ryland, a more famous man than Basire; an artist of genuine talent and even genius, who had been well educated in his craft; had been a pupil of Ravenet, and after that (among others) of Boucher, whose stipple manner he was the first to introduce into England. With the view of securing the teaching and example of so skilled a hand, Blake was taken by his father to Ryland; but the negotiation failed. The boy himself raised an unexpected scruple. The sequel shows it to have been a singular instance-if not of absolute prophetic gift or second sight -at all events of natural intuition into character and power of forecasting the future from it, such as is often the endowment of temperaments like his. In after life this involuntary faculty of reading hidden writing continued to be a characteristic. Father,' said the strange boy, after the two had left Ryland's studio, 'I do not like the man's face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged!' Appearances were at that time utterly against the probability of such an event. Ryland was then at the zenith of his reputation. He was engraver to the king, whose portrait (after Ramsay) he had engraved, receiving for his work an annual pension of 2001. An accomplished and agreeable man, he was the friend of poet Churchill and others of distinguished rank in letters and society. His manners and personal appearance were peculiarly prepossessing, winning the spontaneous confidence of those who knew or even casually saw him. But twelve years after this interview, the unfortunate artist will have got into embarrassments, will commit a forgery on the East India Company:-and the prophecy will be fulfilled.

The Basire with whom ultimately Blake was placed, was James Basire, the second chronologically and in merit first of four Basires; all engravers, and the three last in date.