Page:Life of William Blake, Pictor ignotus (Volume 1).djvu/322

 all Blake's abodes, suffered a decline of fortune. No. 3, then a clean red-brick house, is now a dirty stuccoed one, let out, as are all in the court, in single rooms to the labouring poor. That which was Blake's front room was lately in the market at four and sixpence a week, as an assiduous inquirer found. The whole place wears that inexpressibly forlorn, squalid look houses used for a lower purpose than the one for which they were built always assume. There is an ancient timber and brick gateway under a lofty old house hard by; and a few traces yet linger here and there, in bits of wall, &c., of the old Savoy Palace, destroyed to make way for the approaches to Waterloo Bridge, which had been opened just four years when Blake first came to the court.

Those capable of feeling the beauty of Blake's design were, if anything, fewer at this period than they had ever been. Among these few numbered a man who was hereafter to acquire a sombre and terrible notoriety,—Thomas Griffiths Wainwright; the lively magazine writer, fine-art critic, artist, man of pleasure, companion of poets and philosophers, and future murderer, secret poisoner of confidential friend and trustful sister-in-law. This was the Janus Weathercock of The London Magazine; the 'light-hearted Janus' of Charles Lamb. To the other anomalies of this unhappy man's career may be added the fact of his intimacy with William Blake, whom he assisted by buying two or three of his expensive illustrated books. One among the best of the Songs of Innocence and Experience I have seen, formerly belonged to Wainwright. Blake entertained, as did Lamb, Procter, and others of The London coterie, a kindness for him and his works.

For this spiritual voluptuary, with the greedy senses, soft coat, and tiger heart, painted and exhibited as well as wrote. I trace him at the Academy in 1821,—Subject from Undine, ch. 6; in 1822 (year of Wilkie's Chelsea Pensioners), Paris in the Chamber of Helen; and in 1825, First Idea of a Scene front Der Freyschütz, and a Sketch from Gerusalemme Liberata — both sketches, it is worth notice, as