"A petty sneaking knave I knew-- O! Mr. Cromek, how do ye do?"
Stothard and Blake had been young together. It was he who had introduced him to Flaxman. The friendship, of course, was not of the closest, for they followed a very different track in art.
Flaxman and Blake had a common interest in Swedenborg as well as a supreme regard for outline, but Stothard's was always an outward eye, never inward. With a wife and many children, and everlastingly busy producing his thousands of designs, it was not to be expected that he should dive into inner causes. His contemporaries were content, and we too, that he should see the effects in a graceful and poetic glow, and reproduce them in soothing and graceful compositions. He peered into many times and many countries, but he was happier when illustrating his contemporaries, happiest when depicting the chequered career of Clarissa Harlowe.
Cromek was not wrong in thinking that Stothard would make a successful picture of the _Canterbury Pilgrims_. He was famous at grouping, had an eye for horses, and was willing to drudge at the British Museum to clothe his figures correctly. There was some difficulty about the engraving, which Cromek had first intended to entrust to Bromley. It passed successively through the hands of Lewis Schiavonetti, Engleheart, Niccolo Schiavonetti, and was finally done by James Heath. The result justified Cromek's calculations. The _Pilgrimage to Canterbury_ was exhibited in all the great towns of England, and also in Edinburgh and Dublin. It had the most extensive sale of anything of the kind published within a hundred years. Everyone bought it and exhibited it, according to Mrs Bray, in their front parlour. It was reckoned Stothard's masterpiece. And when Harlow painted Stothard's portrait, he placed in the background a curtain just sufficiently drawn back to show the finest group of a picture in which the whole grouping was excellent.
Meanwhile Blake, determined to dispense with a professional advertiser, engraved his own design, and put it up for sale at 28 Broad Street, the house of his birth where his brother James carried on the business. But it was not to stand alone. It was exhibited together with sixteen historical inventions, eleven frescoes, seven drawings. Blake wrote a prospectus to the _Canterbury Pilgrims_ and a _Descriptive Catalogue_ to the whole collection. One or two people, notably Crabb Robinson, found their way to the room; and while the praises of Stothard were being sung throughout the land for a design that had originated from Blake, Blake was tasting the bitter mortification of knowing that his attempt at self-advertisement and appeal to the public had failed.