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 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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unsuitable women for wives, as from the days of "Athena's wisest son," the immortal and ever beloved Socrates and his Xantippe, the private lives of the most gifted sons of fame in all nations would appear to testify. In our nation to mention a few-Dickens and his wife, Bulwer Lytton and his wife, Sterne and his wife, Byron and his wife, as is well known, lived all discordant lives-and even the divine Milton had his matrimonial troubles. Of course the women in most of these cases were not to blame more than their liege lords-nay, in some cases not so much, and were evidently the greatest sufferers-as in all likelihood was the wife of Byron. Then, what sort of a time must Jean Armour have had of it with poor Burns or in their early marriage years what must have been that of the beautiful Anne Hathaway with the young Shakespeare, since, as Mr. John Oldcastle observes, "the dark Jady with the sallow face and black eyes, which

were so beautiful to Shakespeare in spite of the taste of the time, she to whom half of his sonnets were written, whoever she may have been, was not Anne Hathaway." Catherine Boucher was assuredly not altogether without her matrimonial troubles, but these were of a kind totally unakin to those from which Burns's Bonnie Jean must have suffered, and wholly such as would momentarily arise out of the irritability of her husband's temper, and would pass off without leaving any deep stings in her heart, seeing, as she did, that such irritability was in a great measure the result of his neglect by the world-a world to which he must have felt himself to be a herald of a new era in art and song—for such a herald he truly was. Collins and Gray and Chatterton had each, in various degrees it is true, already pointed the way to the realisation of that same era, so far as song went; but in the lyrics, as well as the designs of Blake, was more pronounced that return,

in the highest and noblest sense, to nature-to nature as seen through the magic glass of the imagination and to which the world to some extent, through the later born Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley, afterwards should be aroused; though he, like those who had gone before, was destined to warble his immortal songs for the time like a nightingale in the night, unheard or unheeded. The first songproofs to his claim for this praise were put into print in the Poetical Sketches a short time after his marriage that is in 1783, when Burns was only in his twenty-fourth year, and altogether unknown to fame, when Coleridge was in his eleventh year, and Wordsworth was in his thirteenth, and Byron and Shelley and Keats were as yet unborn, and several of which proofs -for nearly all the best of the said Sketches, it is surmised, were written between Blake's twelfth and twentieth years-were produced fully a decade before that period.

I have said that he sang unheard and unheeded, and from the first, save by a small knot of devoted friends, he always did, and in consequence the Poetical Sketches fell still-born from the press; and this would mean, beside the excruciating pangs of disappointment only known to himself, and in a lesser degree to his own dear wife, a money loss to the poor poet which he was little able to sustain. Nor could Blake be said to ever have earned a penny, save through his ability and labours as a designer and engraver; and though on the whole, in the opinion of competent judges, he was ever badly paid even for these, yet he managed to livewas never in a state of misery—was never reduced to pawn his manhood, or his honour, and to leave them, till out of credit, in pawn, as many who have made a mighty deal of more noise in the world than he have done; nor amid all his difficulties, except from the dearest of friends, would he submit to accept a favour,