In a future chapter I hope to deal with the Blake drawings and easel pictures done for Mr. Butts, which were available to the public in the Exhibition at Messrs. Carfax's Rooms in Ryder Street, held in 1904.
Blake seems to have enjoyed a little wave of recognition at Lambeth--popularity it can hardly be called--but it was not long-lived. At one time he was even suggested as drawing-master to the Royal Family, but declined the position, not from modesty, but from devotion to his true _métier_--the preservation and expression of spiritual ideas--with which such a post would probably have interfered.
Two acts of secret and most munificent generosity are recorded by Tatham, and quoted by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, concerning Blake while at Lambeth.
He gave £40 (he seldom after had half as much money beside him) to a friend in distress, and his deep sympathetic heart being moved by the sight of a sick young man, an artist, who daily passed their door, he and his Kate made the young man's acquaintance, and for the love of Christ and in memory of brother Robert, finally took him into their house and tended him till his death some months later.
While at Lambeth he made three large and important drawings--"Nebuchadnezzar," an enlarged edition of the bearded figure on hands and knees which occurs in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"; "The Lazar House" and "The Elohim creating Adam." He also made designs for Young's "Night Thoughts." There were 537 designs made, and Blake only took a year to do them. A selected few were engraved. While at Lambeth he printed also his "Visions of the Daughters of Albion," "America," "Europe," "Urizen," "The Gates of Paradise," "The Book of Los," "The Song of Los," and "Ahania." The list implies steady application, and untiring intellectual and spiritual energy.
[Illustration: THE LAZAR HOUSE, FROM MILTON
The introduction of our painter, in 1800, by his old friend Flaxman, to Hayley, poetaster and dilettante, marks the beginning of a new epoch in his life.
Hayley, the friend of Gibbon and, later, of Cowper (whose biography he wrote), was a characteristic product of the last quarter of the eighteenth century,--that age of complaisant preoccupation with trifles.