Page:William Blake, his life, character and genius.djvu/15



is now well on to seventy years since that strange and almost inexplicable genius, William Blake, died and found obscure burial in Bunhill Fields; and though his fame has been gradually growing since that time to the present, the world is still undecided as to his rightful place in the realm of art and letters, and likewise as to the message he had to deliver to the generations, even if what he had to deliver can be dignified by the name of message at all, which some deny.

Blake died in August, 1827, at the age of sixty-nine, having been born in 1757, amid the gloom of a London November. His father, James Blake, a descendant of the Blakes of Somersetshire—the same family which produced Admiral Blake—was a hosier, and carried on business at No. 28 Broad Street, near Golden Square, a district which was at that time much more "respectable," not to say fashionable, than it is now. According to all accounts, the hosier was in a