66
LETTERS OF WILLIAM BLAKE.
intellectual visions are the stamina of everything you value. Go on, if not for your own sake, yet for ours, who love and admire your works; but, above all, for the sake of the arts. Do not throw aside for any long time the honour intended you by nature to revive the Greek workmanship. I study your outlines[1] as usual, just as if they were antiques.
As to myself, about whom you are so kindly interested, I live by miracle. I am painting small pictures from the Bible. For as to engraving, in which art I cannot reproach myself with any neglect, yet I am laid by in a corner as if I did not exist, and since my Young's Night Thoughts[2] have been published, even Johnson[3] and Fuseli[4]
- ↑ i.e. in the Thoughts on Outline.
- ↑ The Complaint and the Consolation; or, Night Thoughts, by Edward Young. London: Printed for R. Edwards, 1797: folio, with 43 illustrations designed and engraved by Blake.
- ↑ Joseph Johnson (1738-1809), bookseller and publisher in St. Paul's Churchyard. He commissioned engravings from Blake on several occasions, and in 1791 published for him, anonymously, The French Revolution: a Poem in seven Books, Book the First; and again, in 1793, in conjunction with Blake himself, The Gates of Paradise.
- ↑ Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), painter, was a native of Zurich. He came to England as a young man, and, with the exception of ten years spent in Italy, remained there for the rest of his life. In the year in which this letter was written he succeeded Barry as Professor of Painting to the Royal Academy, in which capacity he delivered a remarkable series of lectures on painting. Though a great deal of his work is mannered and unpleasant, he was nevertheless a powerful and imaginative draughtsman. The beautiful "Titania and
