. Westminster Abbey : its memories and its message . t is possible to do, from drawings andengravings, is to acknowledge that none of the high praises thathave been lavished on them is exaggerated. I said it waspossible to study them in this way ; but it is far from an easything to do for the majority of folk. In the great tomes ofCoughs Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain are certainfine engravings of Westminster tombs which have an ex-traordinary interest. They are signed Basire Del. et Sculp.,and one would suppose them therefore to have been drawn andengraved by that Basire who was engrav
. Westminster Abbey : its memories and its message . t is possible to do, from drawings andengravings, is to acknowledge that none of the high praises thathave been lavished on them is exaggerated. I said it waspossible to study them in this way ; but it is far from an easything to do for the majority of folk. In the great tomes ofCoughs Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain are certainfine engravings of Westminster tombs which have an ex-traordinary interest. They are signed Basire Del. et Sculp.,and one would suppose them therefore to have been drawn andengraved by that Basire who was engraver, in the third quarterof the eighteenth century, to the Society of Antiquaries. Butno, their origin is much more illustrious. You have to think ofa young man named William Blake, apprentice to this Basire,and sent into the Abbey to draw tombs, partly to release himfrom the wrangling of fellow-apprentices. Dreamer of dreamsand seer of visions, the artist-poet was to those young cubsquite an alien; but shut up in the Abbey, climbing up on to the176. LIFE, AND THE TOMBS tombs the better to see them, and perceiving (he was the first todo it) the lovely spirit of Gothic beauty, he was happily in hisown place. From Gilchrists life of Blake we learn that he wasoccupied by his master for several years, from 1773, in thusdrawing and helping to engrave the monuments of the Philippa is identified as his work; but there are otherswhich one judges to be from the same hand, and of those areHenry III and Eleanor, both poetical in their majesty. Theoriginal copper-plates thus engraved by Blake are in theBodleian Library, where they form a part of the collectionbequeathed by Richard Goughs will in 1799. As one turnsover the pages of Gough in the Bodleian or the BritishMuseum, one cannot help regretting that these lovely drawingsare not more accessible. With their value as art, the im-portance of their subject, and the interest of their authorship,they are entirely delightful. If t
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjectwestmin, bookyear1921
