Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/28

xxii 5. Frederick Tatham, sculptor and miniature painter, was the son of Charles Heathcote Tatham, architect, who made Blake's acquaintance through Linnell. About 1825, when a youth of twenty or twenty-one, the younger Tatham met Blake and, unfortunately for the world, became one of the small group of neophytes. On the death of the poet's wife in October, 1831, Tatham acquired, or appropriated, the whole of Blake's literary remains, which he afterwards destroyed, as we are told, on 'religious grounds,' This person wrote a memoir of Blake which he appears to have parted with for purely secular reasons. Lost sight of for some time, and fruitlessly sought by Gilchrist, it reappeared in the Blamire sale in 1863, bound in with an illuminated copy of Jerusalem (see Rossetti Papers, 1862-1870 passim). This MS. life, which no one seems to have thought worth printing in full, has been used and quoted by Swinburne, Ellis and Yeats, and others, though they do not appear to have gleaned from this source any new facts of real importance. Those given, however, presumably possess the interest of having been derived from Catherine Blake, who, for a short time before her death, had been an inmate of the miniature painter's household. Tatham's misstatement of the date of Blake's birth (which misled Swinburne) does not suggest habits of accuracy; and Richard Garnett, who met him later in life, refers to him as a man on whose word no reliance could be placed.

My knowledge of Tatham's Memoir, which I have not been able to see, is limited to the extracts quoted therefrom by Swinburne and others. The copy of Jerusalem with which it is bound up was re-sold at Sotheby's in June, 1887, to a London dealer, and is now the property of an owner who prefers that no description of its contents be given.

6. Henry Crabb Robinson, then in his fiftieth year, first met Blake at the home of Mr. Aders on December 10, 1825. His diary and letters contain accounts of Blake in his last years, interesting and valuable both as to his mystical opinions (not very clearly or sympathetically apprehended