Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/84

 of successful candidates for Fame is appended to each of the two octavo volumes to which the Magazine ran. A graceful grotesque, the Temple of Mirth, of Stothard's design, is the frontispiece to the first number: a folding sheet forcibly engraved by Blake in his characteristic manner of distributing strongly contrasted light and shade and tone. To it succeeded, month by month, four similar engravings by him after a noted caricaturist of the day now forgotten, S. Collings: on broad-grin themes, such as The Tithe in Kind, or the Sow's Revenge, The Discomfited Duellists, The Blind Beggar's Hats, and May Day in London. After which, an engraver of lower grade, one Smith, (quære, our friend Nollekens Smith?) executes the engravings; and after him a nameless one. The engraving caricatures of the earth earthy for this 'Library of Momus' was truly a singular task for a spiritual poet!

Some slight clue to the original Design of this period in a somewhat different key is given by the Exhibition-Catalogues, which report Blake as making a second appearance at the Academy in 1784. In that year,—the year of Reynolds's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, and Fortune-Teller,—there hung in the 'Drawing and Sculpture Room,' two designs of Blake's: one,—War unchained by an Angel—Fire, Pestilence and Famine following; the other, a Breach in a City—The Morning after a Battle. Companion-subjects, their tacit moral—the supreme despicableness of War—was one of which the artist, in all his tenets thorough-going, was a fervent propagandist in days when War was tyrannously in the ascendant. This, by the way, was the year of Peace with the tardily recognised North American States. I have not seen the former of those two drawings. The same theme gave birth about twenty years later to four very fine water-colour drawings,—for Dantesque intensity, imaginative directness, and power of the terrible: illustrations of the doings of the Destroying Angels that War lets loose—Fire, Plague, Pestilence, and Famine. Of the second-named we give here a reduced