Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/347

 did she undervalue it, to her discredit and our loss. This artist's fresh and daring conceptions it would have been well to have embodied in happier, maturer, more lucid shape, than 'society' ever vouchsafed him the slenderest help towards realizing. As it is, one of his archaic-looking drawings is often more matterful and suggestive, imprisons more thought and imagination, than are commonly beaten out thin over the walls of an entire exhibition.

In September or October 1809, the engraving of his Canterbury Pilgrimage was commenced. And, fulfilling the voluntary engagement recorded in the prospectus, the print,—somewhat smaller in size than the picture,—was issued on the 8th of the following October; a year or two before the plate after Stothard's picture emerged from the difficulties which befel it. Blake thus forestalled his forestaller, to the indignation of Stothard in his turn; the print being of the same size as Cromek's intended one, and having inevitable resemblances to it, in general composition.

It was launched without the slightest help from the elaborate machinery usually put in motion to secure a welcome for an important engraving, and, by energetic Cromek, worked on so unprecedented a scale. As may readily be believed, the subscribers might almost have been counted on the hand. Blake's work, indeed, lacks all the alluring grace of Stothard's felicitous composition, in which a wide range of previous art is indirectly laid under contribution, or, to speak plainly, cribbed from, after the fashion of most well-educated historical painters; whereas Blake boldly and obstinately draws on his own resources. Bare where Stothard's composition is opulent, yet challenging comparison as to the very qualities in which Blake was most deficient, his design creates an unfavourable impression before the superficial spectator has time to recognise its essential merits. A good notion of the work may be obtained from our reduced outline with the series of heads, on the same scale as the original, engraved below it. 'Hard and dry,' as Lamb