the drawings as 'a high and original effort of genius' by eleven Royal Academicians, including Benjamin West, Flaxman, Lawrence, and Stothard. 'To the elegant and classical taste of Mr. Fuseli,' he tells us further, 'he is indebted for the excellent remarks on the moral worth and picturesque dignity of the Designs that accompany this Poem.' Fuseli praises pompously the 'genuine and unaffected attitudes,' the 'simple graces which nature and the heart alone can dictate, and only an eye inspired by both, discover,' though finding the artist 'playing on the very verge of legitimate invention.'
It is by the designs to Blair's Grave that Blake is still perhaps chiefly known, outside his own public; nor was he ever so clear, or, in a literal way, so convincing in his rendering of imaginative reality. Something formal tempers and makes the ecstasy explicit; the drawing is inflexibly elegant; all the Gothic secrets that had been learnt among the tombs in Westminster Abbey find their way into these stony and yet strangely living death-beds and monuments of death. No more vehement movement
