70
WILLIAM BLAKE
Reynolds, when each, to his own surprise, seems to have found the other very pleasant.
Blake's mother died in 1792, at the age of seventy, and was buried in Bunhill Fields on September 9. In the following year he moved to 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,[1] where, during the next seven years, he did engraving, both of his own designs and of those of others, and published the engraved book of designs called The Gates of Paradise (1793), the poems and illustrations of the Songs of Experience (1794), and the greater part of the Prophetic Books, besides writing, apparently in 1797, the vast and never really finished MS. of The Four Zoas. This period was that of which
- ↑ Gilchrist (i. 98) gives a long account of the house which he took to be Blake's, and which he supposed to be on the west side of Hercules Road. But it has been ascertained beyond a doubt, on the authority of the Lambeth rate-books, confirmed by Norwood's map of London at the end of the eighteenth century, that Blake's house, then numbered 13 Hercules Buildings, was on the east side of the road, and is the house now numbered 23 Hercules Road. Before 1842 the whole road was renumbered, starting at the south end of the western side and returning by the eastern side, so that the house which Gilchrist saw in 1863 as 13 Hercules Buildings was what afterwards became 70 Hercules Road, and is now pulled down. The road was finally renumbered in 1890, and the house became 23 Hercules Road.
