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 single rooms to the labouring poor. That which was Blake's front room was lately in the market at four and sixpence a week, as an assiduous inquirer found. Of the back room, which Blake chiefly inhabited, a plan is given below and a picture in Chapter XXXIV. The whole place now wears that inexpressibly forlorn, squalid look houses, used for a lower purpose than the one for which they were built, always assume. There is an ancient timber and brick gateway under a lofty old house hard by; and a few traces yet linger here and there, in bits of wall, &c., of the old Savoy Palace, destroyed to make way for the approaches to Waterloo Bridge, which had been opened just four years when Blake first came to the court.



Those capable of feeling the beauty of Blake's design were, if anything, fewer at this period than they had ever been. Among these few numbered a man who was hereafter to acquire a sombre and terrible notoriety,—Thomas Griffiths Wainwright; the lively magazine writer, fine-art critic, artist, man of pleasure, companion of poets and philosophers, and future murderer, secret poisoner of confidential friend and trustful sister-in-law. This was the Janus Weathercock of The London Magazine; the 'light-hearted Janus' of Charles Lamb. To the other anomalies of this unhappy man's career may be added the fact of his intimacy with William Blake,