Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/355

 And further cultivation of the profession (or trade sometimes) of literature, while he was still clerk of the works to Chantrey, was rendered easy to him on the strength of that volume alone.

On this, as on other occasions of the kind, Cromek fulfilled to admiration his legitimate part as publisher. While he picked the brains of his protégés—Blake, Stothard, Cunningham—and stopped the pay, he could not help doing them incidental good service, in dragging them forward a stage with the public; a service which genial Allan Cunningham seems always to have remembered with a kind of tenderness.

One more illustrative anecdote. 'Cromek,' as Mr. Peter Cunningham mildly puts it, 'had rather lax ideas about meum et tuum when valuable autographs were laid before him. I remember an instance of this, which I have heard my father relate. Sir Walter Scott was talking to him of some of the chief curiosities he possessed at Abbotsford. "I had once (I am sorry to say once) an original letter from Ben Jonson to Drummond of Hawthornden, all in Ben's own beautiful handwriting: I never heard of another." My father mentioned one he had seen in London in Cromek's hands. Scott used some strong expression, and added, "The last person I showed that letter to was Cromek, and I have never seen it since.'" Cromek had favoured Scott with a visit during his Dumfries tour of 1809.

After this unexpectedly vivid ray of evidence as to character Mr. Cromek's bare word cannot be taken, when he contradicts the positive assertion of simple, upright, if visionary Blake, that Cromek 'had actually commissioned him to paint the Pilgrimage before Stothard thought of his.' We doubt the jocose turn given the denial—'that the order had been given in a vision for he never gave it,' will not serve. The order was a vivâ voce one. And that, like a previous vivâ voce agreement, is even easier to forget than the ownership of an autograph worth, perhaps, ten pounds in the market. Mr. Blake was not aware of the desirableness of getting