Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/219

 Rh stored; and Drawings, for Public Inspection, and for Sale by Private Contract.' Crabb Robinson, from whom we have the only detailed account of the exhibition, says that the pictures filled 'several rooms of an ordinary dwelling-house' (see p. 283 below). He mentions Lamb's delight in the Catalogue, and his declaring 'that Blake's description was the finest criticism he had ever read of Chaucer's poem.' In that letter to Bernard Barton (May 15, 1824), which is full of vivid admiration for Blake ('I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age'), Lamb speaks of the criticism as 'most spirited, but mystical and full of vision,' and says: 'His pictures—one in particular, the "Canterbury Pilgrims" (far above Stothard's)—have great merit, but hard, dry, yet with grace.' Southey, we know from a sneer in The Doctor at 'that painter of great but insane genius, William Blake,' also went to the exhibition, and found, he