or, at all events, seen through the press, by the amiable clergyman in 1823.
'Our good Blake,' scribbles the artist's patron, one hot day in August, 1801, 'is actually in labour with a young lion. 'The new born cub will probably kiss your hands in a week or two. The Lion is his third Ballad,' (none are yet printed) 'and we hope his plate to it will surpass its predecessors. Apropos of this good, warm-hearted artist. He has a great wish that you should prevail on Cowper's dear Rose' (Mrs. Anne Bodham, a cousin of the poet on the mother's side, and the correspondent who sent him that picture of his mother which elicited the poem we all know so well) 'to send her portrait of the beloved bard, by Abbott, to Felpham, that Blake may engrave it for the Milton we meditate; which we devote (you know) to the sublime purpose of raising a monument suited to the dignity of the dear bard, in the metropolis; if the public show proper spirit (as I am persuaded it will) on that occasion—a point that we shall put to the test, in publishing the Life.'
The portrait of Cowper, by Abbot, the Academician,—a very prosaic one,—was not, I presume, sent to Felpham; for it was never engraved by Blake. A print of it, by one W. C. Edwards, forms the frontispiece to Vol. I. of The Private Correspondence of Cowper, edited by Johnson in 1824. The scheme here referred to was that of an edition of Cowper's unfinished Commentary on Paradise Lost, and MS. translations of Milton's Latin and Italian poetry, together with Hayley's previously published, lengthy Life of Milton. The whole was to be in three quarto volumes, 'decorated with engravings,' by Blake, after designs by Flaxman: the proceeds to go towards a London monument to Cowper, from Flaxman's chisel. The project, like so many from the same brain, had to be abandoned for one of later birth:—a single quarto, illustrated by Flaxman, of Cowper's Translations and Notes on Milton, for the proposed 'benefit,' as usual, of somebody,—this time of 'an orphan godson of the
