Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/473

 of old: John Flaxman, whose always feeble frame had, for some time, been visibly affected for the worse. After a few days' illness from an inflammatory cold which gave his friends little warning of danger, he passed peacefully away, on the 7th December, 1826, in his seventy-second year: somewhat more than six years after the death of his devoted helpmate 'Nancy,' who had been his companion on equal terms; a woman of real gifts and acquirements, of classic accomplishments and sympathies like himself Not till this biography was almost completed, in January, 1860, did the last member of Flaxman's refined, happy household,—Mrs. Flaxman's sister, Maria Denman,—follow her beloved friends to the tomb. She, also, was a cultivated lady, of much energy and devotion of character, worshipping Flaxman's memory with a sisterly enthusiasm to the last. She had lived to fulfil one cherished object,—the housing a fine selection of Flaxman's original models in the safe keeping of London University College; to which institution she had presented them. My own obligations to her appear in more than one page of this volume. As a girl she had seen and reverenced Blake so long ago as when he was living in Hercules Buildings.

Under the date of December occurs mention, by Mr. Crabb Robinson, of another call on Blake:—

'It was, I behave, on the 7th of December (1826) that I saw him. I had just heard of the death of Flaxman, a man whom he admired, and was curious how he would receive the intelligence. He had been ill during the summer, and he said with a smile, "I thought I should have gone first." He then added, "I cannot think of death as more than the going out of one room into another." He relapsed into his ordinary train of thinking. . . . This day he said, "Men are born with an angel and a devil." This he himself interpreted as soul and body. ... He spoke of the Old Testament as if it were the evil element—"Christ took much after His mother." ... He digressed into a condemnation of those who sit in judgment on others: "I have never known a very bad man who had not something very good about him." ...