REMINISCENCES OF BLAKE
about the time at which I am now arrived, "I saw in England many men of talents, but only 3 men of Genius, Coleridge, Flaxman & Blake, & of these Blake was the greatest." I do not mean to intimate my assent to this opinion, nor to do more than supply such materials as my intercourse with him furnishes to an uncritical narrative, to wh. I shall confine myself. I have written a few sentences in these reminiscences already, those of the year 1810. I had not then begun the regular journal which I afterwards kept. I will therefore go over the ground again & introduce these recollections of 1825 by a reference to the slight knowledge I had of him before, & what occasioned my taking an interest in him, not caring to repeat what Cunningham has recorded of him in the volume of his Lives of the British Painters, &c &c. except thus much. It appears that he was born [on 28th November 1757]. Dr. Malkin our Bury Grammar School Head Master published in the year 1806 a memoir of a very precocious child who died [blank in MS.] years old, & he prefixed to the Memoir an engraving of a portrait of him by Blake, & in the vol. he gave an acct. of Blake as a painter & poet & printed some specimens of his poems, viz. The Tiger & ballads & mystical lyrical poems, all of a wild character, & M[alkin] gave an account of visions wh. Blake related to his acquaintance. I knew that Flaxman thought highly of him, & tho' he did not venture to extol him as a genuine Seer, yet he did not join in the ordinary derision of him as a madman. Without having seen him, yet I had already conceived a high opinion of him, & thought he wd. furnish matter for a paper interesting to Germans. And therefore when Fred. Perthes the patriotic publisher at Hamburg wrote to me in 1810, requesting me to give him an article for his Patriotische Annalen, I thought I cd. do no better than send him a paper on Blake[1] . . .
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