met in society. Had not the Royal Academy been founded (J. T. Smith tells us in his Book for a Rainy Day, under date 1768) by 'members who had agreed to withdraw themselves from various clubs, not only in order to be more select as to talent, but perfectly correct as to gentlemanly conduct'?
It was about this time that Blake was discovered, admired, and helped by one who has been described as 'not merely a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.' This was Lamb's 'kind, lighthearted Wainewright,' who in the intervals of his strange crimes found time to buy a fine copy of the Songs of Innocence and to give a jaunty word of encouragement or advertisement to Jerusalem. Palmer remembers Blake stopping before one of Wainewright's pictures in the Academy and saying, 'Very fine.'
In 1820 Blake had carried out his last commission from Butts in a series of twenty-
