Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/227

 Blake, who had a natural aptitude for acquiring knowledge, little cultivated in youth, was always willing to apply himself to the vocabulary of a language, for the purpose of reading a great original author. He would declare that he learnt French, sufficient to read it, in a few weeks. By-and-by, at sixty years of age, he will set to learning Italian, in order to read Dante.

The references, in our next extract, to Cowper's monumental tablet at East Dereham, then under discussion, and Blake a party to it, are sufficiently amusing, surely, to warrant our staying to smile over the same. Consider what 'the Design' actually erected is. An oblong piece of marble, bearing an inscription, with a sculptured 'Holy Bible' on end at top; another marble volume, lettered 'The Task,' leaning against it; and a palm leaf inclined over the whole, as the redeeming line of beauty. Chaste and simple!

February 25th, 1802. ' I thank you heartily for your pleasant letter, and I am going to affiard you, I hope, very high gratification in the prospect of our overcoming all the prejudices of our good Lady Hesketh against simple and graceful ornaments for the tomb of our beloved bard. I entreated her to suspend her decision till I had time to send for the simply elegant sketches that I expected from Flaxman. When these sketches reached me, I was not myself perfectly pleased with the shape of the lyre introduced by the sculptor, and presumptuously have tried myself to out-design my dear Flaxman himself, on this most animating occasion. I formed, therefore, a device of the Bible upright supporting The Task, with a laurel leaf and Palms, such as I send you, neatly copied by our kind Blake, I have sent other copies of the same to her ladyship and to Flaxman; requesting the latter to tell me frankly how he likes my design, and for what sum he can execute the said design, with the background,—a firm slab of dove-coloured marble, and the rest white. If her ladyship and Flaxman are as much pleased with my idea as the good Blake and Paulina