BLAKE, William, English poet, painter and engraver: b. London, 28 Nov. 1757; d. 12 Aug. 1857. At the age of 10 he was sent to a drawing-school, and four years later he was apprenticed for seven years to the engraver James Basire, for whom he drew from the monuments in the older London churches and Westminster Abbey. In 1778 he studied in the Royal Academy, and about this time he began to engrave for the booksellers, among his chief productions being plates after Stothard for the Novelists' Magazine. To the first exhibition of the Royal Academy he sent a drawing entitled 'The Death of Earl Godwin.' He married in 1782 Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener, and for the three years 1784 87 carried on a printseller's shop in partnership with another engraver. From his earliest years Blake was a mystic. He believed that all things exist in the human imagination alone, and had a wonderful power of imaginative vision which enabled him to see angels in trees and in fields, great men of past times, etc. His 'Songs of Innocence,' verse and designs (1789), and the companion 'Songs of Experience' (1794), were reproduced by himself and his wife by a process which he believed to have been revealed to him in a dream by a dead brother. Between 1793 and 1800 he produced a large number of de signs, among them 537 illustrations for Young's 'Night Thoughts.' In 1800 he became ac quainted, through Flaxman, with the poet Wil ham Hayley, who gave him artistic commissions, and for three years he lived in his neighborhood at Felpham. He next produced the designs to Blair's 'Grave' (engraved by Schiavonetti), which in imaginative power stand in the fore front of his artistic work. In 1808 he sent to
the Royal Academy the pictures 'Christ in the Sepulchre Guarded by Angels' and