other booksellers. It was drudging work, and Blake was not without his full share of drudgery. To engrave after Stothard was to set a lion to speak in a monstrous little voice. But Stothard had his uses for Blake. Through a fellow-engraver Blake was introduced to Stothard, who, still young, was making a guinea a piece for his contributions to the Novelist’s Magazine. Broad Street was in the thick of the Artists and Royal Academicians. Once Blake had pierced the magic circle and could meet them on equal terms, instead of merely watching their exits and their entrances through the doors of Broad Street, Poland Street, and Golden Square, they might prove of value to him, not by teaching him to paint as they painted, but by helping him to get customers for his own productions. Stothard had lately made the acquaintance of Flaxman, who had sought him out, and he introduced Blake to Flaxman, who in 1781 took a house at 27 Wardour Street and became Blake’s close friend and neighbour.

At this time, in 1780, Blake threw off one of his very own magnificent designs known as Morning, or Glad Day. It is the real Blake with only one foot on earth, his head in a flood of light, and the symbols of his grub state—caterpillar and moth—at his feet. The rays of the light are darting north and south and east and west. Blake had weary years before him to work out his salvation to Glad Day. This design makes it certain that he already had had his glimpse of the end, and we shall find that he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.

London was not without its excitements. Lord George Gordon headed the No-Popery Riots in 1780, and through the unruly violence of the mob, London was in a panic for a week. Lord George was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower, where he was visited by the ubiquitous John Wesley, who found him well instructed in the Bible and not disposed to complain.

It is impossible to trace accurately what books Blake read at this time. It is evident that he observed Wesley and Whitefield and admired much that he saw in them. But his own religious genius was far removed from theirs, and sought nourishment elsewhere. It is probable that he read Boehme, Paracelsus, Fludd, Madame Guyon, and St Theresa in his spare hours.

But there were other imperious needs surging up in him. The creative passion of love was driving him hither and thither. With his tendency to view all things in the light of eternity, he was passionately in love with the eternal feminine, into which any pair of bright eyes would serve as windows. The particular pair of eyes that captivated him belonged to “a lively little girl” called Polly Wood, with whom he kept company for a while. Polly’s conversation was probably no more suitable as a permanent entertainment to Blake than that of a modern flapper. Fortunately, she understood little affairs of the heart much better than he did, not taking them more seriously than they deserved; and when she saw symptoms of tremendously earnest love-making threatening to engulf her, she quickly shook him off with a sharp stroke, “Are you a fool?” and left him feeling very lacerated and sorry for himself.

Blake had not long to wait for another manifestation of the eternal feminine. Recovering from an illness at Kew, where he was staying at the house of a market-gardener named Boucher, he told his grief to the gardener’s daughter Catherine, who declared that she pitied him from the heart. There was the authentic voice of the eternal feminine. “Do you pity me?” he gasped. “Yes! I do most sincerely” the voice continued. “Then I love you!” and his fate was sealed. William Blake and Catherine Boucher were married quietly at St Mary’s Church, Battersea, on August 18th, 1782, and the happy pair, leaving their parental nests, made their first little home together in lodgings at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields.

Blake’s worldly goods with all of which he endowed his bride were not plentiful. A portfolio of prints which had been growing in bulk during fifteen years was his darling treasure. Money he had none. But he had immense capacity for sustained application and work. His engravings made small but sure returns, and for the last four years he had turned his attention to water-colour, and in 1780 had even exhibited in the Royal Academy. And he was making friends. Friend Flaxman lived near in Wardour Street, friend Fuseli in Broad Street. Stothard was kind. A young man with sanguine temperament like Blake might expect anything to turn up.

His wife brought no gold with her; but she brought a faithful maternal heart, unlimited faith in her husband, a teachable spirit, and a willingness to turn her hand to all that was necessary to make and keep a little home for the man-child of her heart. She had made her mark in the marriage register of St Mary’s Church. A woman with such endowments, unspoilt by education, was virgin soil that would yield whatever her husband willed. It was no long time before she learnt of him to write, draw, and engrave, all of which acquirements she placed in perfect loyalty at his disposal.

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GLAD DAY.

We have seen that Blake’s circle of acquaintances widened much from the day he became a student at the Royal Academy. But artists are not necessarily in Society, and if one can believe what everyone says they are apt to be bohemian. Now that Blake was a married man, he could not be indifferent to the grades of the social ladder; and when Flaxman introduced him to the elegant and cultured Mrs Mathew at 27 Rathbone Place, he not only had hopes of a useful patron for himself, but also that the accomplished lady might be a kind friend to his wife. She had been truly kind to Flaxman for many years, and it is reasonable to suppose that while benefiting him she had herself benefited by his pure classicism and romanticism combined. Thus equipped, she needed only to extend her sympathies towards mysticism, and then she might include even Blake himself among her good works. But she and her sister Blue-stockings deserve a chapter to themselves.

CHAPTER III

THE BLUE-STOCKINGS

Posterity is spiteful towards those who do not make good their claim to immortality; and for a long time the Blue-stockings have been the butt of the superior modern. Yet they were remarkable women, and by their dash to capture for themselves some of the treasures of man’s learning they helped to open up a new way for the modern woman.

We can dispense no doubt with Mrs Montagu’s Essay, in which she defends Shakespeare against the rash onslaught of Voltaire. We may even forget her three Dialogues of the Dead, although Mrs Modish speaks with the genuine accent of the polite world: “Indeed, Mr Mercury, I cannot have the pleasure of waiting upon you now, I am engaged, absolutely engaged.” (There was a fourth Dialogue returned to her by Lord Lyttelton in which Cleopatra tells Berenice only what every woman knows.) But we cannot forgo without loss to ourselves her letters to the Duchess of Portland and many other friends, which are lively, witty, and entertaining, and second in her time only to those of that prince of letter-writers, Horace Walpole.

Mrs Montagu’s friends did their best to turn her head. Mrs Carter writes to her of “the elegant brilliancy of my dearest Mrs Montagu,” and not content with prose as a medium of