Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/92

 engraved a good deal after Stothard, in a style which evinces a common Master with Blake as well as companionship with him: in particular, the very fine designs, among Stothard's most masterly, to the Vicar of Wakefield (1792), which are very admirably engraved; also most of those of Falconer's Shipwreck (1795). After Flaxman, he executed several of the plates to Homer's Iliad; after Smirke, The Commemoration of 1797; after Northcote, The Revolution of 1688, and others; and for Boydell's Shakspeare, eleven plates. He died 'about 1805,' according to the Dictionaries.

Blake quitted Broad Street for neighbouring Poland Street: the long street which connects Broad Street with Oxford Street, and into which Great Marlborough Street runs at right angles. He lodged at No. 28 (now a cheesemonger's shop, boasting three brass bells), not many doors from Oxford Street on the right-hand side, going towards that thoroughfare; the houses at which end of the street are smaller and of later date than those between Great Marlborough and Broad Street. Henceforward Mrs. Blake, whom he carefully instructed, remained his sole pupil—sole assistant and companion too; for the gap left by his brother was never filled up by children. In the same year—that of Etty's birth (March, 1787) amid the narrow streets of distant antique York—his friend Flaxman exchanged Wardour Street for Rome, and a seven years' sojourn in Italy. Already educating eye and mind in his own way, Turner, a boy of twelve, was hovering about Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, in which the barber's son was born: some half mile—of (then) staid and busy streets—distant from Blake's Broad Street; Long Acre, in which Stothard first saw the light, lying between the two.