Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/351

 CHAPTER XXVI.

ENGRAVER CROMEK. 1807—1812. [ 50—55.]

Blake had been nursing his wrath against Cromek and Stothard, and making ineffectual reprisals by exhibition and engraving, the course of Cromek's speculation had not run smoothly. As intimately, if indirectly, bearing on Blake's life of struggles, this matter ought, perhaps, to be glanced at here. We must first go back a little, and track Cromek in his versatile career. The retrospect will, here and there, throw a vivid ray of light on the real character of the man, and so enable us to construe Blake aright in the critical relation in which the two, for a time, stood to one another. It may help the reader to a conclusion as to the rights of that difficult case—for so Smith and Cunningham seemed to find it—Blake v. Stothard and Another.

During the progress, under the engraver, of his first publishing scheme, the active Yorkshireman had been turning his literary tastes to account. He had made a tour in Dumfriesshire, in quest of unpublished fugitive pieces by Robert Burns; a tour undertaken, according to his own statement, from pure interest in the poet. He discovered many previously unknown; others rejected 'on principle' by the great man's posthumous patron, prim Currie, of now seldom blessed memory. The visit was well timed. Burns had been dead ten years; but everything by him, everything about him, was already carefully treasured by those privileged enough to