WILLIAM BLAKE
sioned Blake to complete it. A few days afterwards Cromek found himself in the studio of the popular painter Stothard, and suggested the subject to him. Stothard finished his picture first and it appeared before Blake's. Blake went into one of his worst rages and wrote one of his best pieces of prose.
A brother artist said of Blake, with beautiful simplicity, "He is a good man to steal from." The remark is as philosophical as it is practical. Blake had the great mark of real intellectual wealth; anything that fell from him might be worth picking up. What he dropped in the street might as easily be half-a-sovereign as a halfpenny. Moreover, he invited theft in this further sense, that his mental wealth existed, so to speak, in the most concentrated form. It is easier to steal half-a-sovereign in gold than in halfpence. He was literally packed with ideas—with ideas which required unpacking. In him and his works they were too compressed to be intelligible; they were too brief to be even witty. And as a thief might steal a diamond and turn it into twenty farms, so the
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