. The table book of art; a history of art in all countries and ages . owing old, with his spirit unabated, and his gladness in life andwork undimmed ; constantly devising and executing fresh prophetical fancies, alwaysmore fantastic and incomprehensible. His last home was in Fountain Court, Strand,where the kindness of friends in buying his poems placed him at least above thereach of want. He began to illustrate Dante, and he still tinted his Jerusalem sittingbolstered up in bed at last, in order to put the final touches before he said It isdone, I cannot mend it. As he had rejoiced in life, h
. The table book of art; a history of art in all countries and ages . owing old, with his spirit unabated, and his gladness in life andwork undimmed ; constantly devising and executing fresh prophetical fancies, alwaysmore fantastic and incomprehensible. His last home was in Fountain Court, Strand,where the kindness of friends in buying his poems placed him at least above thereach of want. He began to illustrate Dante, and he still tinted his Jerusalem sittingbolstered up in bed at last, in order to put the final touches before he said It isdone, I cannot mend it. As he had rejoiced in life, he rejoiced in death, telling hiswife—I glory in dying, I have no grief but in leaving you, Kate; and he askedagain for pencils and brushes in order to try and paint a last likeness of his best andlife-long friend. He lay singing extemporaneous songs, and died without hiswife, who watched him, knowing the moment of his death. He died in his seventy-second year, in 1828. In personal appearance William Blake was a little man, with a high foreheadand large dark THE TEMPTATION ON THE MOUNT.[From the original fainting by Ary Scheffer.) STOTHARD. 139 An attempt was made to induce his widow to disclose the process by which heattained his brilliant, sometimes gorgeous, tints, but regarding her fidelity to her hus-bands memory as involved in the preservation of his secret, she constantly refused totell it, and so it perished with her. Besides his strange designs, Blake left not lessthan a hundred MS. volumes of verse, which had grown for the most part as extrava-gant and incoherent as his drawings. A large part of Blakes MSS. are in the pos-session of Mr. Rossetti the painter. John Flaxman was a sculptor rather than a painter. He was born in 1755 atYork, but was brought up in London, where his father kept a plaster-cast shop in theStrand, in which Flaxman had his first lessons in art His delicate constitution onlyrendered him a more diligent scholar, and, when a lad, he was not
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