Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/483

 CHAPTER XXXVIII.

POSTHUMOUS. 1827—31.

noon on the following Friday, August 17th, the chosen knot of friends,—Richmond, Calvert, Tatham, and others, — attended the body of the beloved man to the grave,—saw it laid in Bunhill Fields burying-ground, Finsbury: Tatham, though ill, travelling ninety miles to do so. Bunhill Fields is known to us all as the burial-place of Bunyan and De Foe, among other illustrious Nonconformists. Thither, seven years later, was brought Blake's old rival, Stothard, to be laid with his kin: a stone memorial marks his grave.

Among the 'five thousand head-stones' in Bunhill Fields, exists none to William Blake; nothing to indicate the spot where he was buried. Smith, with the best intentions (and Mr. Fairholt in the Art Journal for August, 1858, follows him), would identify the grave as one 'numbered 80, at the 'distance of about twenty-five feet from the north wall.' Unfortunately, that particular portion of the burying-ground was not added until 1836; in 1827 it was occupied by houses, then part of Bunhill Row. On reference to the register, now kept at Somerset House, I find the grave to be numbered '77, east and west; 32 north and south.' This, helped by the exsexton, we discover vaguely to be a spot somewhere about the middle of that division of the ground lying to the right as you enter. There is no identifying it further. As it was