Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/424

been largely appreciated during his own life. In so far as he becomes more and more recognised, it will be through a medium of interpretation, partly literary, partly artistic, which will enable thoughtful and refined minds to read his works as they read the classics in the dead languages. The lapse of a century has altered all the external conditions of art. There is no longer a need for patronage, in the ancient sense of the the word. No painter has to take his turn in Lord Chesterfield's ante-room—pictured for us by E. M. Ward—with the yawning parson, who comes to dedicate his volume of sermons; the widow who wants a place in the charity school for her son; the wooden-legged, overlooked, sea-captain, who indignantly lugs out his turnip of a chronometer; the insolent, red-coated man of the turf, who peers through an eye-glass, fixed on the end of his jockey whip, at the frowning and impatient Samuel Johnson, in snuff-colour, who is perhaps even now chewing the bitter cud of that notable sentence which begins, "Is not a patron my Lord," and ends with the words "encumbers him with help." It is comparatively rarely that an English noble buys the more precious work of the pencil. The men to whom the painter addresses himself with hope are the wealthy merchant, the successful tradesman, the tasteful lawyer, the physician in good practice. While he pushes himself up to the higher levels, most young men of any invention and skill can keep poverty at arm's length by designing on wood for Punch, or Judy, or the Illustrated News, or the Cornhill Magazine, or the Good Words, or one of that legion of periodicals, weekly and monthly, which bristle with clever woodcuts, and in which, as in an open tilting-yard, young squires of the pencil may win their spurs. Even when the power of invention is not present in a high degree, there is much work of a prosaic kind required, in doing which a fair living may be obtained by a diligent young man of average ability, not to speak of the exceedingly valuable practice afforded by this kind of labour. It seems not unlikely that this field will enlarge. Society is meeting its modern abridg-