The boy had much reason to thank his mother, for to her intervention it was doubtless largely due that he was left to follow his bent, and haunt such picture-galleries as might be found in noblemen’s houses and public sale-rooms.  There he feasted his bodily eyes on earthly beauty, as his mental gaze had been charmed with heavenly visions.  From admiration to imitation was but a step, and the little hands soon began to shape such rude, but loving copies as Raffaelle, with tears in his eyes, must have smiled to see.  His father, moved by motherly persuasions, as we can easily infer, bought him casts for models, that he might continue his drawing-lessons at home; his own small allowance of pocket-money went for prints; his wistful child-face presently became known to dealers, and many a cheap lot was knocked down to him with amiable haste by friendly auctioneers.  Then and there began that life-long love and loyalty to the grand old masters of Germany and Italy, to Albrecht Duerer, to Michel Angelo, to Raffaelle, which knew no diminution, and which, in its very commencement, revealed the eclecticism of true genius, because the giants were not the gods in those days.

But there came a time when Pegasus must be broken in to drudgery, and travel along trodden ways.  By slow, it cannot be said by toilsome ascent, the young student had reached the vestibule of the temple; but

    “Every door was barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys,”

which, alas! to him were wanting.  Nothing daunted, his sincere soul preferred to be a doorkeeper in the house of his worship rather than a dweller in the tents of Mammon.  Unable to be an artist, he was content for the time to become an artisan, and chose to learn engraving,—­a craft which would keep him within sight and sound of the heaven from which he was shut out.  Application was first made to Ryland, then in the zenith of his fame, engraver to the King, friend of authors and artists, himself a graceful, accomplished, and agreeable gentleman.  But the marvellous eyes that pierced through mortal gloom to immortal glory saw also the darkness that brooded behind uncanny light.  “I do not like the man’s face,” said young Blake, as he was leaving the shop with his father; “it looks as if he will live to be hanged.”  The negotiation failed; Blake was apprenticed to Basire; and twelve years after, the darkness that had lain so long in ambush came out and hid the day:  Ryland was hanged.

His new master, Basire, was one of those workmen who magnify their office and make it honorable.  The most distinguished of four generations of Basires, engravers, he is represented as a superior, liberal-minded, upright man, and a kind master.  With him Blake served out his seven years of apprenticeship, as faithful, painstaking, and industrious as any blockhead.  So great was the confidence which he secured, that, month after month, and year after year, he was sent out alone to Westminster Abbey and the various old