of whom voluntarily testified their regard around his grave in the burial-ground of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, when the time came to be carried thither in January, 1783.
The specific value of the guidance to be had by an ingenuous art-student from the venerable Moser, now a man of seventy-three, is suggestively indicated by a reminiscence afterwards noted down in Blake's MS. commentary on Reynolds' Discourses. 'I was once,' he there relates, 'looking over the prints from Raffaelle and Michael Angelo in the Library of the Royal Academy. Moser came to me, and said,—"You should not study these old, hard, stiff, and dry, unfinished works of art: stay a little and I will show you what you should study." He then went and took down Le Brun and Rubens' Galleries. How did I secretly rage! I also spake my mind! I said to Moser,—"These things that you call finished are not even begun: how then can they be finished?" The man who does not know the beginning cannot know the end of art.' Which observations 'tis to be feared Keeper Moser accounted hardly dutiful. For a well-conducted Student ought, in strict duty, to spend (and in such a case lose) his evening in looking through what his teacher sets before him. It has happened to other Academy students under subsequent Keepers and Librarians, I am told, to find themselves in a similarly awkward dilemma to this of Blake's.
With the Antique, Blake got on well enough, drawing with 'great care all or certainly nearly all the noble antique figures in various views.' From the living figure he also drew a good deal; but early conceived a distaste for the study as pursued in Academies of Art. Already 'life,' in so factitious, monotonous an aspect of it as that presented by a Model artificially posed to enact an artificial part—to maintain in painful rigidity some fleeting gesture of spontaneous Nature's—became, as it continued, 'hateful' looking to him, laden with thick-coming fancies, 'more like death' than life; nay (singular to say), 'smelling of mortality'—to an imagin-
