There is one feature in stipple which in Bartolozzi claims a welcome recognition, and that is the sprightly manner in which he has engraved a great many fine plates of Children at Play after Hamilton, and others. They are not Cupids nor classical children in impossible groves, mounted on clouds, or in other fantastic attitudes, but are simple eighteenth-century children, natural and human, clothed in everyday dress, the forerunners of the groups of romantic children with which Kate Greenaway delighted the middle nineteenth century.
Among stipple engravers of the eighteenth century the names of P. W. Tomkins, Thomas Cheesman, John Jones, and Charles Wilkin stand in the first rank.
William Blake, poet, visionary, engraver, is at once remarkable for the position he occupies in the world of literature and of art. He was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to Basire, the engraver, of Lincoln's Inn Fields. He loved art for its own sake. "Were I to love money," he says, "I should lose all power of thought; desire of gain deadens the genius of man. I might roll in wealth and ride in a golden chariot, were I to listen to the voice of parsimony. My business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes, expressing god-like sentiments." His wife, "the dark-eyed Kate" of his lyrical poems, took off in the press the impressions of his plates, coloured them with a delicate hand, and even made drawings of her own to rival the mysterious fancies that came from her husband's pencil. But she did not see the visions Blake did, who, as a child, saw an angel following the reapers in the corn.
