That space inclosed, but little he regards,

Spread o'er with relics of masts, sails, and yards:
Fish by the wall, on spit of elder, rest,

Of all his food, the cheapest and the best,

By his own labour caught, for his own hunger dress'd.

Sir

Pamful

as it is to me to leave my) Herife at this Tince, yet the Tear Sof having my Absence miputed to motwis very different from these which would have been the real ones, induced me to attempt the Journey to wickham & I a Ionly write in Hope that if I be not at the Whitithich by the hue apponited (which is impracticable) you

expect me

be so good

ал

would nevertheles tite & after 18, ID is I

should not then be with you,

wit

to conclude that I am

detained by Impediment which cannot be

removed

me

i

with

I shall take money wi but Jotite expect that you

Sufficient of 2

41

Expences of every

have

I shall look for d payment hind; be weekend. the quite not make myself in Judge what they should be Jam for gigbed sav ceerd 12 Gris Bole that I any oblijed bed rather Mr Cable in to ill affair with one seems.

of

Facsimile Letter from Crabbe

THE WIDOW.

FROM "TALES OF THE HALL."

Now came the time, when in her husband's face
Care, and concern, and caution she could trace;
His troubled features gloom and sadness bore,
Less he resisted, but he suffer'd more ;
Grief and confusion seized him in the day,
And the night passed in agony away.
"My ruin comes !" was his awakening thought,
And vainly through the day was comfort sought;
"There, take my all!" he said, and in his dream,
Heard the door bolted, and his children scream.

Fretful herself, he of his wife in vain

For comfort sought-" He would be well again;
Time would disorders of such nature heal-

O! if he felt what she was doom'd to feel!

The Family of Friends.

In a large Town, a wealthy Shriving Place Where hopes of Gain excite an Auxinis Race Which dark Tenue Wheaths of clendy Volumes Cloak Und mark for Leagues around the Place of Smoke. Where Fire to Water lend its powerfil Aid And Sham produces, Strong Ally to Trade Arrived a Stranger whom no Merchant knew Nor could conjecture what he camisto do "He was too Old or Fortune new to win Nor did he show & Purport to begin

A

And

The man was jo

Stay there was something in his air that told Of Fortune gained before hormat for dd He brought us Sewants with liom Those be faught were soon this Habity and his trannier's laught civil kind' & pee

His Manner

inner easy

. His Habit such as ayed Men's will be To self indulgent, wealthy Mew like beim Plead for these Failings __ this their Way, their When

Beginning of the MS. of Crabbe's "Family of Friends"

Such sleepless nights! such broken rest! her frame
Rack'd with diseases that she could not name!
With pangs like her's no other was oppress'd!"
Weeping, she said, and sigh'd herself to rest.

The suffering husband look'd the world around,
And saw no friend; on him misfortune frown'd;

Then here is WILLIAM BLAKE, for whom the classic forms and traditions William have nothing to say at all; whose ethereal imagination and mystic mind have Blake. taken their deepest impressions from the Elizabethan dramatists and from Ossian; whose aim, fitfully and feverishly accomplished, is to fling the roseate and cerulean fancies of his brain on a gossamer texture woven out of the songs of Shakespeare and the echoes of Fingal's airy hall; a poet this for whom time, and habit, and the conventions of an age do not exist; who is no more nor less at home in 1785 than he would be in 1585 or 1985; on whom his own epoch, with its tastes and limitations, has left no mark whatever; a being all sensitiveness and lyric passion and delicate, aerial mystery.

William Blake (1757-1827) was the second son of James Blake, a hosier of Broad Street, Golden Square, where he was born on the 28th of November 1787. He was scarcely educated at all, beyond learning to read and write, but at ten years of age he began to copy prints, and at eleven years to write verses. He became at fourteen apprenticed to Basire, the engraver, and later worked in the schools of the Royal Academy. It is not here to the purpose to follow stage by stage the artistic career of Blake. In 1783 Flaxman the sculptor, in combination with another friend, caused Blake's juvenile poems, Poetical Sketches, to pass through the press. This volume, all written before 1777, with much very crude and feeble work, contained some of the poet's most perfect songs. His father died in 1784, and Blake set up next door to the paternal shop as a printseller, in partnership with a fellow-student. This arrangement lasted three years. Blake then started alone in Poland Street, and his first act was to bring out the Songs of Innocence, engraved, in a manner invented by the painterpoet, on copper, with a symbolic design in many colours, and finished by hand. The interest awakened by these astonishing productions was small, but Blake was not dejected. In 1789 he engraved The Book of Thel, and in 1790, in prose, The Marriage of leaven and Ilell. In 1791 he published in the usual way the least important of his poetical books, The French Revolution. In 1794 the exquisite Songs

VOL. IV.

B

of Experience followed. By this time he had moved again from Poland Street to Lambeth, where he continued to produce his rainbow-coloured rhapsodies. Among these, The Gates of Paradise, The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and America, a Prophecy, were finished within a few months. Europe and Urizen also belong to 1794. At this period Blake's apocalyptic splendour of invention was at its height. There was a distinct decline in clearness of intellectual presentment in The Song of Los and Ahania (both 1795). Blake now turned mainly to p..inting and picture-engraving. In 1800 he left London for Felpham, near Bognor, to be near Hayley, who wanted Blake's constant services as an engraver. He was greatly delighted with Fel ham: "Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates."

Here he lived in peace until 1803, when occurred the very strange incident of his being arrested on a charge of sedition brought against him in revenge by a spiteful sergeant of dragoons. Blake was acquitted at Chichester in 1804, but he was excessively disturbed. "The visions were angry with him," he b.lieved, and he returned to London. From lodgings in South Molton Street he began once more to issue prophetic "poems" of vast size and mysterious import-Jerusalem and Milton, both engraved in 1804. These he declared to be dictated to him supernaturally, "without premeditation, and even against my will." After this, although he continued to write. masses of wild rhythm, The Ghost of Abel (1822) was the only literary work which he could be said, by any straining of the term. to "publish." By this time he hd moved (1821) to the late t of his tenements, Fountain Court, in the Temple. In 1825 his heath began to fail, and he was subject to painful and weakening recurrences of dysentery. He retained the habit of draughtsmanship, however, until a few days before his death on the 12th of August 1827, when he passed away smilin, after an ecstatic vision of Par:dise. He had been a seer of luminous wonders from his very infancy, when he had beheld the face of God at a window and had watched shining angels walking amongst the hay-makers. In his early manhood he was habitual y visited by the souls of the great dead, "all majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common height of man." The question how far Blake believed in the objective actuality of his visions has never been answered; but it is evident that in his trances he did not distinguish or attempt to distinguish between substance and phantom. Blake was, in early life, a robust and courageous little man, active, temperate, and gentle, with extraordinary eyes. Of his unworldliness many tales are told, humorous and pathetic. His faith was like that of a little child, boundless and unreasoning. His wife, Catherine