Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/435

 His next work was the Illustrations of Blair's Grave, which came to the world with the following commendation by Fuseli: 'The author of the moral series before us has endeavoured to awaken sensibility by touching our sympathies with nearer, less ambiguous and less ludicrous imagery, than what mythology, Gothic superstition, or symbols as far fetched as inadequate could supply. His avocation has been chiefly employed to spread a familiar and domestic atmosphere round the most important of all subjects, to connect the visible and the invisible world without provoking probability, and to lead the eye from the milder light of time to the radiations of eternity.' For these twelve 'Inventions,' as he called them, Blake received twenty guineas from Cromeck, the engraver—a man of skill in art and taste in literature. The price was little, but nevertheless it was more than what he usually received for such productions; he also undertook to engrave them. But Blake's mode of engraving was as peculiar as his style of designing; it had little of that grace of execution about it, which attracts customers, and the Inventions, after an experiment or two, were placed under the fashionable graver of Louis Schiavonetti. Blake was deeply incensed—he complained that he was deprived of the profit of engraving his own designs, and, with even less justice, that Schiavonetti was unfit for the task.

Some of these twelve 'Inventions 'are natural and