' and resentment. While Sir Joshua was rolling in riches, Barry was poor and unemployed, except by his own energy; 'Mortimer was called a madman, and only portrait-painting was applauded and rewarded by the rich and great. Reynolds ' and Gainsborough blotted and blurred one against the other, 'and divided all the English world between them. Fuseli, 'indignant, almost hid himself. I AM HID.'

Always excepting the favoured portrait-painters, these were, indeed, cold days for the unhappy British artist-the historical or poetic artist above all. Times have strangely altered within living memory. The case is now reversed. One can but sympathise with the above touching outburst; and Blake rarely complained aloud of the world's ill usage, extreme as it was: one can but sympathise, I say, even while cherishing the warmest love and admiration for Sir Joshua's and Gainsborough's delightful art. The glow of sunset need not blind us to the pure light of Hesperus. Admiration of a fashionable beauty, with her Watteau-like grace, should not dazzle the eye to exclusion of the nobler grace of Raphael or the Antique.

Of these notes more hereafter.

VOL. I.

CHAPTER XII.

THE GATES OF PARADISE, AMERICA, ETC.

1793. [ÆT. 36.]

IN 1793, Blake quitted Poland Street, after five years' residence there. The now dingy demirep street, one in which Shelley lodged in 1811, after his expulsion from Oxford, had witnessed the production of the Songs of Innocence and other Poetry and Design of a genus unknown, before or since, to that permanently foggy district. From the neighbourhood of his birth he removed across Westminster Bridge to Lambeth. There he will remain other seven years, and produce no less an amount of strange and original work. Hercules Buildings is the new abode; a row of houses which had sprung up since his boyish rambles.

Within easy reach of the centre of London on one side, the favourite Dulwich strolls of early years were at hand on the other. Hercules Buildings, stretching diagonally between the Kennington Road and Lambeth Palace, was then a street of modest irregular sized houses, from one to three stories high, with fore-courts or little gardens in front, in the suburban style; a street indeed only for half its length, the remainder being a single row, or terrace. No. 13, Blake's, was among the humbler, one-storied houses, on the right hand side as you go from the Bridge to the Palace. It had a wainscoted parlour, pleasant low windows, and a narrow strip of real garden behind, wherein grew a fine vine. A lady who, as a girl, used with her elders to call on the artist here, tells me Blake would on no account prune this vine, having a

theory it was wrong and unnatural to prune vines: and the affranchised tree consequently bore a luxuriant crop of leaves, and plenty of infinitesimal grapes which never ripened. Open garden ground and field, interspersed with a few lines of clean, newly-built houses, lay all about and near; for brick and mortar was spreading even then. At back, Blake looked out over gardens towards Lambeth Palace and the Thames, seen between gaps of Stangate Walk,-Etty's home a few years later. The city and towers of Westminster closed the prospect beyond the river, on whose surface sailing hoys were then plying once or twice a day. Vauxhall Gardens lay half a mile to the left; Dulwich and Peckham hills within view to the south-west. The street has since been partly rebuilt, partly re-named; the whole become now sordid and dirty. At the back of what was Blake's side has arisen a row of illdrained, one-storied tenements bestriden by the arches of the South Western Railway; while the adjacent main roads, grimy and hopeless looking, stretch out their long arms towards further mile on mile of suburb, Newington, Kennington, Brixton.

In Hercules Buildings Blake engraved and 'published '—May, 1793, adding at the foot of the title-page Johnson's name to his own-The Gates of Paradise; a singularly beautiful and characteristic volume, pre-eminently marked by significance and simplicity. It is a little foolscap octavo, printed according to his usual method, but not coloured; containing seventeen plates of emblems, accompanied by verse, with a title or motto to each plate. For Children, the title runs, or, as some copies have it, For the Sexes. The Gates of Paradise a sort of devout dream, equally wild and lovely,' Allan Cunningham happily terms it. There is little in art which speaks to the mind directly and pregnantly as do these few, simple Designs, emblematic of so much which could never be imprisoned in words, yet of a kind more allied to literature than to art. It is plain, on looking at this little volume alone, from whom Flaxman and Stothard borrowed.