Page:Nollekens and His Times, Volume 2.djvu/473

 I it has been invariably the custom of every age, whenever a man has been found to depart from the usual mode of thinking, to consider him of deranged intellect, and not unfrequently stark staring mad; which judgment his calumniators would pronounce with as little hesitation, as some of the uncharitable part of mankind would pass sentence of death upon a poor half-drowned cur who had lost his master, or one who had escaped hanging with a rope about his neck. Cowper, in a letter to Lady Hesketh, dated June 3d, 1788, speaking of a dancing-master's advertisement, says, 'The author of it had the good hap to be crazed, or he had never produced any thing half so clever; for you will ever observe, that they who are said to have lost their wits, have more than other people."

Bearing this stigma of eccentricity, William Blake, with most extraordinary zeal, cmmenced his efforts in in Art under the roof of No, 28, Broad-street, Carnaby-market; in which house he was born, and where his father carried on the business of a hosier. William, the subject of the following pages, who was his second son, showing an early stretch of mind, and a