how much he should like to have such a head when he grew to be a man."

Mr. Allingham supposes that also about the same time he may unwittingly often have met in the street, or have walked beside, "a placid, thin man of eighty-four, of erect figure and abstracted air," the greatest of modern visionseers, "Emanuel Swedenborg, then upon a visit to England." I venture to say that had those two wonderful beings so met, though they might not have known each other by name, they would, none the less-notwithstanding the fact that in after days, from some mysterious cause, the younger underrated the elder-have mutually hailed in each other a kindred genius, and somehow the piercing glance of the Swedish seer would have gone down into the upturned eyes of the filled-with-wonderment boy poetartist, and a sensation would have passed through their souls that would have been remembered till the day of their death. Men of genius have

an unerring instinct for the detection of genius in others, and Blake had also the ever-attendant qualities of the highest genius, and eyes less penetrating than those of the great seer would naturally be kindly drawn to young Blake, for the open-heartedness and utter guilelessness of the boy, I imagine, was such as to be felt by all who came into contact with him; and it is gratifying to find upon record that his master, Mr. Basire himself, was among those who felt and appreciated these noble qualities in his apprentice, as it is to find that the apprentice, all through his fairly long life, retained and cherished an affection and admiration for his kind-hearted master.

About two years after he had been bound, Mr. Basire, who must have had the utmost confidence in his drawing ability as well as in his truthfulness and honesty, sent him (to be out of harm's way-the danger of suffering

from the company of other of his apprentices, of whom the good master had not so high an opinion) into Westminster Abbey and the various old churches in and near London, to make drawings from the monuments and buildings for a work he was engaged to engrave. This would undoubtedly exert a powerful influence upon his tastes and habits, as Mr. Gilchrist intimates, and "have been singularly adapted to foster the romantic turn of his imagination, and to strengthen his affinities for the spiritual in art," and more especially, I would add, for the spiritual in poetry, of which he had already produced the delightful specimen before cited.

On the expiration of his apprenticeship he went to study at the Royal Academy, then yet in its infancy, where he extended his acquaintanceship among artists, and soon ranked among his friends and appreciators, Stothard, Flaxman, and afterwards Fuseli-the two last named of

whom set the highest value on his art genius; while Flaxman, at the same time, declared his genius for poetry to be as great as that he possessed for art. Fuseli, who, at the time of Blake's introduction to him, was in the height of his popularity, continued his friend and champion to the end; and Flaxman, with the exception of a brief period during which an unhappy misunderstanding existed between them, was also a life-long friend and defender -and friends and defenders from the earliest stages of his poetic and artistic career our poetartist unhappily needed.

In his twenty-fifth year, on a Sunday, the 18th day of August in 1782, Blake was married at Battersea to Catherine Boucher, who was ordained to be throughout the years of his manhood and old age, into which the sun of fortune seldom or never threw a heart-cheering beam, a most precious helpmate. Catherine, like himself, was poor, and of poor parents, and without

a school education-a cross was affixed to her name in the marriage contract; but she had a capacity for learning, and a desire to learn— the two grand things—and under the tutorage of her husband she soon learned to read and write. She also learned to print his engravings and how to colour; and Blake having opened an engraver's shop, we are told that she became his saleswoman. Nay, into whatever scheme for the furtherance of his art or the betterment of his condition, or for the gratification, as it might to the non-initiated appear, of some mere fantastic whim, he entered into, she too entered, and clearly with her whole heart and soul. Never was a man of genius blessed with such a woman for a wife as this same little dark-eyed Catherine Boucher proved to William Blake. Nay, I ought to say that never was a commonminded man, dullard, or dunce, so blessed-for it would seem to be written in the fate of men of genius that they should have the most

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