Page:William Blake (Chesterton).djvu/77

 WILLIAM BLAKE Testament he was paying Blake a compliment. But the truth is, I fancy, that the painter and poet had been one too many for the publisher. I think that on any occasion Cromek would have willingly forgiven Blake for showing the harmlessness of the dove. I fancy that on one occasion Blake must have shown the wisdom of the serpent.

From the mere slavery of this sweater Blake was probably delivered by the help of the last and most human of his patrons, a young man named John Linnell, a landscape painter and a friend of the great Mulready. It is extraordinary to think that he was young enough to die in 1882; and that a man who had read in the Prophetic Books the last crusades of Blake may have lived to read in the newspapers some of the last crusades of Gladstone. This man Linnell covers the last years of Blake as with an ambulance tent in the wilderness. Blake never had any ugly relations with Linnell, just as he had never had any with Butts. His quarrels had wearied many friends; but by this time I think he was too weary even to quarrel. On Linnell's commission he began 65