The life of William Blake - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... The engraver then in view was Lewis Schiavonetti's brother, Niccol6, who had worked in Lewis's studio, and caught his manner. To finish the plate, he wanted three hundred and thirty guineas, in three instalments, and fifteen months' time. To raise the first instalment, Mrs. Cromek parted with a good property,--sold the remainder and copyright of Blake's Blair for £120, to the Ackermanns, who re-issued the book in 1813, with biographic notices of Blair, Cromek, and Schiavonetti. Then Niccolo followed in his brother's steps to an early grave. This last in the chain of sorrowful casualties caused further delays. The plate,--Mrs. Cromek borrowing the necessary money with difficulty from her father,--was at last, after having passed under the hands of three distinct engravers, finished by James Heath, or in his manufactory rather. Thence it eventually issued, a very much worse one for all these changes than when poor Lewis Schiavonetti's failing hand had left it a brilliant, masterly etching. It had an extraordinary sale, as everybody knows, and proved exceedingly profitable to the widow. The long-cherished venture turned out no despicable dower for a needy man, living by his wits, to leave her. As for the producer of the picture, who, artist-like, had forborne to press the adventurer in his straits, or the widow in hcys, his share in this great success was a certain number of copies of the print (commercially useless to him), as an equivalent for the long deferred £40. Such I gather from Mrs. Bray's Life of Stothard, and other sources, to have been the fluctuating fortunes of the most popular of modern prints; of an enterprise which, thanks to Cromek's indirect courses, excited, first and last, so much bitterness in the mind of Blake....