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 WILLIAM BLAKE realised that the aim of art was to please. Ruskin said of him very truly (I forget the exact words) that there were no thorns to his roses. At the same time, his smoothness was a smoothness of innocence rather than a smoothness of self-indulgence; his work has a girlish timidity rather than any real conventional cowardice; he was a true artist in a somewhat effeminate style of art. Nor is there any reason to doubt that his personal character was as clean and good-natured as his pictures. It may be that he began his Canterbury Pilgrims without any commission from Cromek, or it may be that he took the commission from Cromek without the least idea that the conception had been borrowed from Blake. That Cromek treated Blake badly is beyond dispute; that Stothard treated him badly is unproved; but Blake was not much in the habit of waiting for proof in such cases. Stothard, I say, may not have been morally in the wrong at all. But he was intellectually and critically very much in the wrong; and Blake pointed this out in a pamphlet which, though defaced here and there with his fantastic malice, is a solid and 50