into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as I have not been for twenty dark, but very profitable years.' Some of this new radiance may be seen in the watercolour of 'The River of Life,' which has been assigned by Mr. Russell to this year; and in those 'Inventions' in illustration of Blair's Grave, by which Blake was to make his one appeal to the public of his time.
That appeal he made through the treacherous services of a sharper named Cromek, an engraver and publisher of prints, who bought the twelve drawings for the price of twenty pounds, on the understanding that they were to be engraved by their designer; and thereupon handed them over to the fashionable Schiavonetti, telling Blake 'your drawings have had the good fortune to be engraved by one of the first artists in Europe.' He further caused a difference between Blake and Stothard which destroyed a friendship of nearly thirty years, never made up in the lifetime of either, though Blake made two efforts to be reconciled. The story of the double commission given by Cromek for a picture of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, and of the twofold accusation
