of successful candidates for Fame is appended to each of the two octavo volumes to which the Magazine ran. A graceful grotesque, the Temple of Mirth, of Stothard's design, is the frontispiece to the first number: a folding sheet forcibly engraved by Blake in his characteristic manner of distributing strongly contrasted light and shade and tone. To it succeeded, month by month, four similar engravings by him after a noted caricaturist of the day now forgotten, S. Collings on broad-grin themes, such as The Tithe in Kind, or the Sow's Revenge, The Discomfited Duellists, The Blind Beggar's Hats, and May Day in London. After which, an engraver of lower grade, one Smith, (quære, our friend Nollekens Smith ?) executes the engravings; and after him a nameless one. The engraving caricatures of the earth earthy for this 'Library of Momus' was truly a singular task for a spiritual poet!

Some slight clue to the original Design of this period in a somewhat different key is given by the Exhibition-Catalogues, which report Blake as making a second appearance at the Academy in 1784. In that year, the year of Reynolds's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, and Fortune-Teller,-there hung in the 'Drawing and Sculpture Room,' two designs of Blake's: one,- War unchained by an Angel-Fire, Pestilence and Famine following; the other, a Breach in a City-The Morning after a Battle. Companion-subjects, their tacit moral— the supreme despicableness of War-was one of which the artist, in all his tenets thorough-going, was a fervent propagandist in days when War was tyrannously in the ascendant. This, by the way, was the year of Peace with the tardily recognised North American States. I have not seen the former of those two drawings. The same theme gave birth about twenty years later to four very fine water-colour drawings,—for Dantesque intensity, imaginative directness, and power of the terrible: illustrations of the doings of the Destroying Angels that War lets loose-Fire, Plague, Pestilence, and Famine. Of the second-named we give here a reduced

version. A vivid expositor of Blake (London Quarterly Review, January 1869) says of this design: An inexorable 'severe grandeur pervades the general lines; an inexplicable 'woe-as of Samaria in the deadly siege, when Joram, wander'ing on the walls, was obliged to listen to the appeal of the 'cannibal mother-hangs over it. A sense of tragic culmina'tion, the stroke of doom irreversible comes through the 'windows of the eyes, as they take in the straight black lines 'of the pall and bier; the mother falling from her husband's 'embrace with her dying child; one fair corpse scarcely 'earthed over in the foreground, and the black funereal reek of 'a distant fire which consumes we know not what difficult 'horror. It is enough to fire the imagination of the greatest 'historical painter.' Another very grand and awe-inspiring illustration of still later date, of the same suggestive theme, is Let loose the Dogs of War-a demon or savage cheering on blood-hounds who seize a man by the throat; of which Mr. Ruskin possesses the original pencil sketch, Mr. Linnell the water-colour drawing.

During the summer of 1784, died Blake's father, an honest shopkeeper of the old school, and a devout man—a dissenter. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, on the fourth of July (a Sunday) says the Register. The second son, James,—a year and a half William's senior,-continued to live with the widow Catherine, and succeeded to the hosier's business in Broad Street, still a highly respectable street, and a good one for trade, as it and the whole neighbourhood continued until the era of Nash and the 'first gentleman in Europe.' Golden Square was still the 'town residence' of some half-dozen M.P.'s-for county or rotten borough; Poland Street and Great Marlborough Street of others. Between this brother and the artist no strong sympathy existed, little community of sentiment or common ground (mentally) of any kind; although indeed, James-for the most part an humble matterof-fact man-had his spiritual and visionary side too; would at times talk Swedenborg, talk of seeing Abraham and Moses,

and to outsiders scem, like his gifted brother, 'a bit mad'—a mild madman instead of a wild and stormy.

On his father's death, Blake, who found Design yield no income, Engraving but a scanty one, returned from Green Street, Leicester Fields, to familiar Broad Street. At No. 27, next door to his brother's, he set up shop as printseller and engraver, in partnership with a former fellow-apprentice at Basire's James Parker, a man some six or seven years his senior. An engraving by Blake after Stothard, Zephyrus and Flora (a long oval), was published by the firm "Parker and Blake" this same year (1784). Mrs. Mathew, still friendly and patronizing, though one day to be less eager for the poet's services as Lion in Rathbone Place, countenanced, nay perhaps first set the scheme going-in an ill-advised philanthropic hour; favouring it, if Smith's hints may be trusted, with solid pecuniary help. It will prove an ill-starred speculation; Pegasus proverbially turning out an indifferent draught-horse. Mrs. Blake helped in the shop; the poet busied himself with his graver and pencil still. William Blake behind the counter would have been a curious sight to see! His younger and favourite brother, Robert, made one in the family; William taking him as a gratis pupil in engraving. It must have been a singularly conducted commercial enterprise. No. 27 bears at present small trace-with its two quiet parlour-windows, apparently the same casements that have been there from the beginning of having once been even temporarily a shop. The house is of the same character as No. 28: a good-sized three-storied one, with panelled rooms; its original aspect (like that of No. 28) wholly disguised, externally, by alllevelling stucco. It is still a private mansion; but let out (now) in floors and rooms to many families, instead of one. From 27, Broad Street, Blake in 1785 sent four water-colour drawings or frescos, in his peculiar acceptation of the term, to the Academy-Exhibition, one by the way, at which our old friend Parson Gardnor is still exhibiting-some seven Views of Lake Scenery. One of Blake's drawings is from Gray, The