insignificant piece of yellow flame of a farthing candle. All of our very highest inspired work is noted for this character, and Blake's best is pre-eminently so; while some of his most imperfect has a touch of it. And as his work was, so was the man. Lofty-minded, noble and sweet in disposition and general temper, he yet when crossed was subject to fits and outbursts of anger and spleen, which, however, were only for the moment, and the effects of which were felt by none so keenly as by himself-which were always followed by a spirit of child-like forgetfulness or forgiveness, or by a spirit which caused his irritability to be forgotten or forgiven, and which left the man the same object of affection to his friends at the last that he was to them at the first. Hence the secret of the fact that though, from several causes anything but discreditable to himself, the circle of his friends was small, these friends were, with perhaps a single exception, life-friends; and

C

when he had outlived nearly all these for he did--he had the consolation to find himself begirt by a small knot of other-youngerfriends more enthusiastic on the whole, and equally true-nearly all talented young artists, and who were not only destined to cheer him in his latter days, and soften with their sympathy the pillow of his death-bed, but to prove instrumental after his death in extending his fame and in defending his conduct and character, and who clearly held their friend and mentor to be wholly sane, whatever might from his words, deeds, or works be adduced by others as proofs to the contrary.

He died upon a Sunday, being the 12th of August 1827, in his seventieth year of age, and without issue, leaving his beloved wife Catherine, who outlived him four years, a sufficient capital in his works to supply her small wants. Setting aside the testimony of brother artists and other famous personages,

it is proof sufficient that Blake had the purest and sweetest of dispositions to know that he was not only beloved by this excellent woman, but worshipped; and as a small yet precious appendage to this grand testimony, I would add that a humble female who had sat with her by his death-bed, declared afterwards, “I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel." That I conceive to be worth all the epitaphs to be found in all the churchyards and churches in Great Britain, with those in Westminster Abbey at their head.

JOSEPH SKIPSEY.

June 1884.

ADVERTISEMENT.

HE following Sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced

in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year; since which time, his talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession, he has been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye.

Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetical originality which merited some respite from oblivion. These their opinions remain, however, to be now reproved or confirmed by a less partial public.