version. A vivid expositor of Blake (London Quarterly Review, January 1869) says of this design:—'An inexorable severe grandeur pervades the general lines; an inexplicable woe—as of Samaria in the deadly siege, when Joram, wandering on the walls, was obliged to listen to the appeal of the cannibal mother—hangs over it. A sense of tragic culmination, the stroke of doom irreversible comes through the windows of the eyes, as they take in the straight black lines of the pall and bier; the mother falling from her husband's embrace with her dying child; one fair corpse scarcely earthed over in the foreground, and the black funereal reek of a distant fire which consumes we know not what difficult horror. It is enough to fire the imagination of the greatest historical painter.' Another very grand and awe-inspiring illustration of still later date, of the same suggestive theme, is Let loose the Dogs of War—a demon or savage cheering on blood-hounds who seize a man by the throat; of which Mr. Ruskin possesses the original pencil sketch, Mr. Linnell the water-colour drawing.
During the summer of 1784, died Blake's father, an honest shopkeeper of the old school, and a devout man—a dissenter. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, on the fourth of July (a Sunday) says the Register. The second son, James,—a year and a half William's senior,—continued to live with the widow Catherine, and succeeded to the hosier's business in Broad Street, still a highly respectable street, and a good one for trade, as it and the whole neighbourhood continued until the era of Nash and the 'first gentleman in Europe.' Golden Square was still the 'town residence' of some half-dozen M.P.'s—for county or rotten borough; Poland Street and Great Marlborough Street of others. Between this brother and the artist no strong sympathy existed, little community of sentiment or common ground (mentally) of any kind; although indeed, James—for the most part an humble matter-of-fact man—had his spiritual and visionary side too; would at times talk Swedenborg, talk of seeing Abraham and Moses,
