WILLIAM BLAKE
a serious, chivalrous, and many-sided gentleman who enjoyed books, understood music, and was hardy and prompt in battle. Moreover, he is definitely described as humble, reverent, and full of filial respect. That such a man should be called a fop because of a frill or a feather Blake rightly regarded as a sign of the mean superficiality of his rival's ideas. Stothard spoke of "the fair young wife of Bath"; Blake placidly points out that she had had four husbands, and was, as in Blake's picture, a loud, lewd, brazen woman of quite advanced age, but of enormous vitality and humour. Stothard makes the monk the mere comic monk of commonplace pictures, shaped like a wine barrel and as full of wine. Blake points out that Chaucer's monk was a man, and an influential man; not without sensual faults, but also not without dignity and authority. Everywhere, in fact, he reminds his opponent that in entering the world of Chaucer he is not entering a fancy-dress ball, but a temple carved with colossal and eternal images of the gods of good and evil. Stothard was only interested in Chaucer's types because they were dead; Blake was interested in them
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