Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/123

 accessories of these domestic scenes are as simply generalised as a child's: result of an inobservant eye for such things. They were not calculated to obtain Blake employment in a capacity in which more versatile hands and prettier designers, such as Burney and Corbould (failing Stothard), were far better fitted to succeed. The book itself never went to a second edition. More designs appear to have been made for the little work than were found available, and some of the best were among the rejected. It may interest the reader to have a sample of him in this comparatively humble department. Possessing most of the original drawings, we therefore give a print from one. There is, however, a terrible extremity of voiceless despair in the upturned face of the principal figure which, perhaps, no hand but that of him who conceived it could accurately reproduce. He also re-engraved for Johnson some designs by Chodowiecki to a book of pinafore precepts, called Elements of Morality, translated from the German of Salzmann by Mary Wollstonecraft; and among casual work engraved a plate for Darwin's Botanic Garden—The Fertilization of Egypt—after Fuseli.

Bookseller Johnson was a favourable specimen of a class of booksellers and men now a tradition: an open-hearted tradesman of the eighteenth century, of strict probity, simple habits, liberal in his dealings, living by his shop and in it, not at a suburban mansion. He was, for nearly forty years, Fuseli's fast and intimate friend, his first and best; the kind patron of Mary Wollstonecraft, and of many another. He encouraged Cowper over The Task, after the first volume of Poems had been received with indifference; and when The Task met its sudden unexpected success, he righteously pressed 1,000l. on the author, although both this and the previous volume had been assigned to him for nothing—as an equivalent, that is, for the bare cost of publication. To Blake, also, Johnson was friendly, and tried to help him as far as he could help so unmarketable a talent.