Page:Life of William Blake, Pictor ignotus (Volume 1).djvu/321

 CHAPTER XXXI.

FOUNTAIN COURT. 1821—25. [. 64—68.] seventeen years in South Molton Street, Blake, in 1821, migrated to No. 3, Fountain Court, Strand,—a house kept by a brother-in-law named Baines. It was his final change of residence. Here, as in South Molton Street, his lodgings were not a 'garret,' as Allan Cunningham, with metaphorical flourish, describes them, but now, as before, in the best part—the first floor—of a respectable house. Fountain Court, unknown by name, perhaps, to many who yet often pass it on their way through a great London artery, is a court lying a little out of the Strand, between it and the river, and approached by a dark narrow opening, or inclined plane, at the corner of Simpson's Tavern, and nearly opposite Exeter Hall. At one corner of the court, nearest the Strand, stands the Coal Hole Tavern, once the haunt of Edmund Kean and his 'Wolf Club,' of claqueurs; still in Blake's time a resort of the Thespian race; not then promoted to the less admirable notoriety it has, in our days, enjoyed. Now the shrill tinkle of a dilapidated piano, accompaniment to a series of tawdry poses plastiques, wakes the nocturnal echoes, making night hideous in the quiet court where the poet and visionary once lived and designed the Inventions to Job.

An old-fashioned respectable court in 1821, as other similar streets in that neighbourhood still are—its red-brick houses with overhanging cornices, dating from the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century—it is silent and sordid now; having, like