Afterwards, with the delicate and loving design of helping the artist, who would receive help in no other way, five and even ten guineas were paid, for which sum he could hardly do enough, finishing off each picture like a miniature.  One solitary patron he had, Mr. Thomas Butts, who, buying his pictures for thirty years, and turning his own house into “a perfect Blake Gallery, often supplied the painter with his sole means of subsistence.”  May he have his reward!  Most pathetic is an anecdote related by Mr. H.C.  Robinson, who found himself one morning sole visitor at an Exhibition which Blake had opened, on his own account, at his brother James’s house.  In view of the fact that he had bought four copies of the Descriptive Catalogue, Mr. Robinson inquired of James, the custodian, if he might not come again free.  “Oh, yes! free as long an you live!” was the reply of the humble hosier, overjoyed at having so munificent a visitor, or a visitor at all.

We have a sense of incongruity in seeing this defiant, but sincere pencil employed by publishers to illustrate the turgid sorrow of Young’s “Night Thoughts.”  The work was to have been issued in parts, but got no farther than the first. (It would have been no great calamity, if the poem itself had come to the same premature end!) The sonorous mourner could hardly have recognized himself in the impersonations in which he was presented, nor his progeny in the concrete objects to which they were reduced.  The well-known couplet,

  “’Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours
  And ask them what report they’ve borne to heaven,”

is represented by hours “drawn as aerial and shadowy beings,” some of whom are bringing their scrolls to the inquirer, and others are carrying their records to heaven.

  “Oft burst my song beyond the bounds of life”

has a lovely figure, holding a lyre, and springing into the air, but confined by a chain to the earth.  Death puts off his skeleton, and appears as a solemn, draped figure; but in many cases the clerical poet is “taken at his word,” with a literalness more startling than dignified.

Introduced by Flaxman to Hayley, friend and biographer of Cowper, favorably known to his contemporaries, though now wellnigh forgotten, Blake was invited to Felpham, and began there a new life.  It is pleasant to look back upon this period.  Hayley, the kindly, generous, vain, imprudent, impulsive country squire, not at all excepting himself in his love for mankind, pouring forth sonnets on the slightest provocation,—­indeed, so given over to the vice of verse, that

            “he scarce could ope
  His mouth but out there flew a trope,”—­