“I shall think of you only—­I mean of your great kindness, and your promise to keep my ring for me.  Of course you will tell nobody.  Carroway will have me like a tiger if you do.  Farewell, young lady—­for one week, fare well.”  With a wave of his hat he was gone, before Mary had time to retract her promise; and she thought of her mother.

WILLIAM BLAKE

(1757-1827)

Poet-painter, visionary, and super-mystic in almost all capacities, William Blake was born in London in 1757.  He was the second son of humble people—­his father but a stocking merchant.  An “odd little boy,” he was destined to be recognized as “one of the most curious and abnormal personages of the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries.”  Allan Cunningham describes him by saying that Blake at ten years of age was an artist and at twelve a poet.  He seems really to have shown in childhood his double gift.  But the boy’s education was rudimentary, his advantages not even usual, it would seem.  To the end of his life, the mature man’s works betray a defective common-schooling, a lamentable lack of higher intellectual training—­unless we suspect that the process would have disciplined his mind, to the loss of bizarre originality.  Most of what Blake learned he taught himself, and that at haphazard.  The mistiness and inexplicability of his productions is part of such a process, as well as of invincible temperament.

[Illustration:  William Blake]

In 1767 Blake was studying drawing with Mr. Pars, at the sometime famous Strand Academy, where he was reckoned a diligent but egotistical pupil.  At fourteen he became apprenticed, for a livelihood,—­afterward exchanged for the painter’s and illustrator’s freer career,—­to James Basire, an academic but excellent engraver, whose manner is curiously traceable through much of Blake’s after work.  Even in the formal atmosphere of the Royal Academy’s antique school, Blake remained an opinionated and curiously “detached” scholar, with singular critical notions, with half-expressed or very boldly expressed theories as to art, religion, and most other things.  In 1782 he married a young woman of equally humble derivation, who could not even sign the marriage register.  He developed her character, educated her mind, and made her a devoted and companionable wife, full of faith in him.  Their curious and retired menage was as happy in a practical and mundane aspect as could be hoped from even a normal one.

In 1780 he began to exhibit, his first picture being ’The Death of Earl Godwin.’  After exhibiting five others, however, ending with ’Jacob’s Dream,’ he withdrew altogether from public advertisement.  Several devoted patrons—­especially Mr. Linnell, and a certain Mr. Thomas Butts, who bought incessantly, anything and everything,—­seized upon all he drew and painted.  In his literary undertakings he was for the most part his own editor