Page:William Blake, painter and poet.djvu/88

72 The end was now near. During 1827 Blake's health greatly failed from catarrh and dysentery, and he could no longer go up to Hampstead to see Linnell. Linnell wished him to quit the damp neighbourhood of the river, and live in his own house in Cirencester Place, part only of which he used as a studio. But Blake said, "I cannot get my mind out of a state of terrible fear at such a step." He also said, "I am too much attached to Dante to think much of anything else." One of his last works was the colouring of The Ancient of Days for the elder Tatham, who paid him at a higher rate than he was accustomed to receive. Blake accordingly worked his hardest, and when it was finished "threw it from him, and with an air of exulting triumph exclaimed, 'There, that will do, I cannot mend it.'" Later still he exclaimed to his wife, "You have ever been an angel to me, I will draw you," and produced a sketch, "interesting, but not like." On August 12 he died, "composing and uttering songs to his Maker." He was buried in Bunhill Fields, in a grave which cannot now be identified. It is little to the honour of his countrymen that no public memorial of him should exist. A better one could not be than his own Death's Door in the illustration to Blair's Grave, treated as a bas-relief with the necessary modifications.

The artist whose life had been spent in a condition so little remote from penury did not leave a single debt, and the accumulated stock of his works sufficed to support his widow in comfort for the four years for which she survived him. Friends, indeed, aided, Linnell and Tatham successively giving her house-room, and others assiduously recommending her stores of drawings to wealthy patrons. She died in Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, and was buried beside her husband in Bunhill Fields.

The artistic processes used by Blake are a subject of considerable discussion. Notwithstanding his constant description of his pictures as