Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/196

 to Felpham to look at his future home, and secure a house; which he did at an annual rent of twenty pounds: not being provided with one rent-free by Hayley, as some supposed,—a kind of patronage which would have ill-suited the artist's independent spirit. The poet was not even his landlord, owning, in fact, no property in the village beyond what he had bought to build his house on. Blake's cottage belonged to the landlord of the Fox Inn.

Hayley, whose forte was not economy nor prudent conduct of any kind, had, by ill-judged generosities and lavish expenditure, seriously incumbered the handsome estate inherited from his father. Felpham, his present retreat, lay some six miles off the patrimonial 'paradise,' as he, for once, not hyperbolically styled it,—romantic Eartham, a peaceful, sequestered spot among the wooded hills stretching southward from the Sussex Downs; a hamlet made up of some dozen widely-scattered cottages, a farm-house or two, a primitive little antique church, and the comfortable modern 'great house,' lying high, in the centre of lovely sheltered gardens and grounds, commanding wide, varied views of purple vale and gleaming sea. At Felpham, during the latter years of his son's life, he had built a marine cottage, planned to his own fancy, whither to retire and retrench, while he let his place at Eartham. It was a cottage with an embattled turret; with a library fitted up with busts and pictures; a 'covered way for equestrian exercise,' and a well-laid-out garden; all as a first step in the new plans of economy. His son passed the painful close of his ill-starred existence in it; and here Hayley himself had now definitely taken up his abode. He continued there till his death in 1820; long before which he had sold Eartham to Huskisson, the statesman; whose widow continued to inhabit it for many years.

On the eve of removing from Lambeth, in the middle of September, was written the following characteristic letter from Mrs. Blake to Mrs. Flaxman,—the 'dear Nancy' of the sculptor. I am indebted for a copy of it to the courtesy