day – by Loutherbourg’s assistant, young Oram, another protégé. The furniture, again, ‘bookcases, tables, and chairs, were also ornamented to accord with the appearance of those of antiquity.’
Mrs Mathew’s drawing-room was frequented by most of the literary and known people of the last quarter of the century, was a centre of all then esteemed enlightened and delightful in society. Reunions were held in it such as Mrs Montagu and Mrs Vesey had first set going, unconsciously contributing the word bluestocking to our language. There, in the list of her intimate friends and companions, would assemble those esteemed ornaments of their sex: unreadable Chapone, of well improved mind; sensible Barbauld; versatile, agreeable Mrs Brooke, novelist and dramatist; learned and awful Mrs Carter, a female Great Cham of literature, and protectress of ‘Religion and Morality.’ Thither, came sprightly, fashionable Mrs Montagu herself, Conyers Middleton’s pupil, champion of Shakspere in his urgent need against rude Voltaire, and a letter-writer almost as vivacious and piquante in the modish style as her namesake Lady Wortley; her printed correspondence remaining still readable and entertaining. This is the lady whose powers of mind and conversation Dr Johnson estimated so highly, and whose good opinion he so highly valued, though at last to his sorrow falling out of favour with her. It was she who gave the annual May-Day dinner to the chimney sweeps, in commemoration of a well-known family incident. As illustrative of their status with the public, let us add, on Smith’s authority, that the four last-named beaux-esprits figured as Muses in the Frontispiece to a Lady’s Pocket Book for 1778 – a flattering apotheosis of nine contemporary female wits, including Angelica Kauffman and Mrs Sheridan. Perhaps pious, busy Hannah More, as yet of the world, as yet young and kittenish, though not without claws, also in her youth a good letter-writer in the woman-of-the-world style; perhaps, being of the Montagu circle, she also would make one at Mrs Mathew’s, on her visits to town to see her publishers, the Cadells, about some ambling poetic 4to. Florio and the Bas-bleu, modest Sacred Drama, heavy 8vo. Strictures on Female Education, or other fascinating lucubration on
‘Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate:’
dissertations, which, after having brought their author in some thirty thousand pounds sterling, a capricious public consumes with less avidity than it did. Good heavens! what a frowsy, drowsy ‘party sitting in a parlour,’ now ‘all silent and all damned’ (in a literary sense), these venerable ladies and great literary luminaries of their day, ladies once lively and chatty enough, seem to an irreverent generation, at their present distance from us. The spiritual interval is an infinitely wider one than the temporal; so foreign have mere eighteenth-century habits of thought and prim conventions become. Let us charitably believe the conversation of the fair was not so dull as their books; that there was the due enlivenment of scandal and small talk; and that Mrs Mathew – by far the most pleasant to think of, because she did not commit herself to a book – that she, with perhaps Mrs Brooke and Mrs Montagu, took the leading parts.
The disadvantages of a neglected education, such as Blake’s, are considerable. But, one is here reminded, the disadvantages of a false one are greater: when the acquisition of a second nature of conventionality, misconception of high models and worship of low ones is the kind in vogue. An inestimable advantage for an original mind to have retained its freedom, the healthy play of native powers, of virgin faculties yet unsophisticate.
Mrs Mathew’s husband was a known man, too, man of taste and virtu, incumbent of the neighbouring Proprietary Chapel, Percy Chapel, Charlotte Street, built for him by admiring lay friends; an edifice known to a later generation as the theatre of Satan Montgomery’s displays. Mr Mathew filled also a post of more prestige as afternoon preacher at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields; and ‘read the church-service more beautifully than any other clergyman in London,’ a lady who had heard him informs me – and as others too used to think – Flaxman for one. With which meagre biographic trait, the inquisitive reader must be satisfied. The most diligent search yields nothing further. That he was an amiable, kindly man we gather from the circumstances of his first notice of the child Flaxman in the father’s castshop, coughing over his Latin behind the counter, and of his continued notice of the weakly child during the years which elapsed before he was strong enough to walk from the Strand to Rathbone Place, and be received into the sunshine of Mrs Mathew’s smiles.
To that lady’s agreeable and brilliant conversazioni Blake was made welcome. At one of them, a little later (in 1784), Nollekens Smith, most literal, most useful of gossips, then a youth of eighteen, first saw the poet-painter, and ‘heard him read and sing several of his poems’ – ‘often heard him.’ Yes! sing them; for Blake had composed airs to his verses. Wholly ignorant of the art of music, he was unable to note down these spontaneous melodies, and repeated them by ear: Smith reports that his tunes were sometimes ‘most singularly beautiful,’ and ‘were noted down by musical professors;’ Mrs Mathew’s being a musical house. I wish one of these musical professors or his executors would produce a sample. Airs simple and ethereal to match the designs and poems of William Blake would be a novelty in music. One would fain hear the melody invented for
How sweet I roam’d from field to field –
or for some of the Songs of Innocence. ‘He was listened to by the company,’ adds Smith, ‘with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.’ Phoenix amid an admiring circle of cocks and hens is alone a spectacle to compare mentally with this!
The accomplished hostess for a time took up Blake with much fervour. His poetic recitals kindled so much enthusiasm in her feminine bosom, that she urged her husband to join his young friend, Flaxman, in placing the poems – those of which we gave an account at the date of composition – in the clear light of print, and to assume half the cost. Which, accordingly, was done, in 1783, the year in which happened the execution for forgery of the gifted fellow-engraver – in whose face the boy Blake, twelve years before had so strangely deciphered omens of his fate – Ryland. This unfortunate man’s prepossessing appearance and manners inspired on the other hand so much confidence in the governor of the prison in which he awaited trial, that on one occasion the former took him out for a walk, implicitly trusting to his good faith that he would not avail himself of the opportunity to run away. Ryland’s was the last execution at Tyburn, then still on the outside of London. This was the year, too, in which Barry published his Account of the Pictures in the Adelphi. On one copy I have seen a characteristic pencil recollection, from Blake’s hand, of the strange Irishman’s ill-favoured face: that of an idealized bulldog, with villainously low forehead, turn-up nose, and squalid tout-ensemble. It is strong evidence of the modest Flaxman’s generous enthusiasm for his friend that, himself a struggling artist, little patronized, he should have made the first offer of printing these poems, and at his own charge; and that he now bore a moiety of the cost. The book only runs to 74 pages, 8vo., and its unpretending title-page stands thus: Poetical Sketches; by W. B. London: Printed in the Year 1783. The clergyman ‘with his usual urbanity’ penned a preface stating the youthful authorship of the volume, apologizing for ‘irregularities and defects’ in the poems, and hoping their ‘poetic originality merits some respite from oblivion.’
The author’s absence of leisure is pleaded, ‘requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye.’ Little revisal certainly they had, not even correction of the press, apparently. The pamphlet, which has no printer’s name to be discredited by it, is as carelessly printed as an old English play, evidently at an establishment which did not boast a ‘reader.’ Semicolons and fullstops where commas should be, misprints, such as ‘beds of dawn’ for ‘birds,’ by no means help out the meaning. The whole impression was presented to Blake to sell to friends or publish, as he should think best. Unfortunately, it never got published, and for all purposes except that of preservation, might as well have continued MS. As in those days there still survived, singular to
