Reprinted from the London Quarterly Review, January 1869.

For a reference to the author of this essay see the Supplementary Chapter to the Life of Blake, Vol. I. pp. 428–9.

The omitted portions are extracts or summaries from the foregoing “Life of Blake” as a review of which the essay originally appeared.

The great landscape-painter, Linnell—whose portraits were, some of them, as choice as Holbein's—in the year 1827 painted a portrait of William Blake, the great idealist, and an engraving of it is here before us as we write. A friend looking at it observed that it was “like a landscape.” It was a happy observation. The forehead resembles a corrugated mountain-side worn with tumbling streams “blanching and billowing in the hollows of it;” the face is twisted into “as many lines as the new map with the augmentation of the Indies:” it is a grand face, ably anatomised, full of energy and vitality ; and out of these labyrinthine lines there gazes an eye which seems to behold things more than mortal. At the exhibition of National Portraits at South Kensington, there was a portrait of the same man by Thomas Phillips; but very different in treatment [see Frontispieces to Vols. I. and II]. The skin covers the bones and sinews more calmly; the attitude is eager, wistful, and prompt. Comparing the two so fine and so various portraits, you are able adequately to conceive the man, and in both you feel that this awful eye, far-gazing, subduing the unseen to itself, was the most wonderful feature of the countenance.