The eighteenth century, however, saw a notable activity in the illustrating of books, dating from the publication in 1726 of Hogarth’s plates to Butler’s “Hudibras.” But perhaps the greatest stimulus to the still groping art was the influence of the charming and fertile French illustrator Gravelot, who lived and worked in London for some twenty years in the first half of the century. His influence, sadly needed at this time, was in the direction of grace and delicacy in visualizing the mental image, and of the many English artists of the period who addressed themselves to book-illustration none equalled the prolific Thomas Stothard in the display of these qualities. The designs that Stothard made in the course of his long career are practically countless, and, with much work that was feeble or merely pretty, at his best, as when illustrating the novels of Richardson, Sterne, and Goldsmith, and certain poems of Samuel Rogers, his graphic fancy would translate the author’s conceptions with sympathy into pictorial terms of grace and persuasion. And the daintiness of his design would lend itself as readily to stipple-engraving as to line. Stothard’s is one of the few outstanding names in eighteenth-century book-illustration; another is Flaxman’s, with his outline designs for Homer, Æschylus, and Dante; but in the whole history of the art no name shines more brilliantly than that of their great contemporary, William Blake. With that sublime and original genius, it may be said, English printed book-illustration came into being in its ideal condition as a work of art. Before Blake produced his entrancing “Songs of Innocence” in 1787 nobody had conceived the printed page as an harmonious combination of text, illustration, and decoration, an ideal of beautiful book-making that has proved the inspiration of some of our best modern artists. So we may call Blake the first great English book-illustrator. Never were expression and decoration more perfectly blended than in those pages of Blake’s, all smelling of April, as Swinburne happily phrased it, with their script and their illustrative designs, in decorative setting, printed in tinted inks from plates etched in relief after a method of his own devising, and their exquisite colour-harmonies built up by hand upon the impressions. That Blake’s example was not followed in those days of the popularity of the stippled colour-print is surprising, although it would have argued an artistic sense of book-decoration that was in Blake’s day, and for long afterwards, extremely rare, if not almost non-existent. But absolutely unique and original as was Blake’s genius, and slow as was his influence, we can trace in later book-illustration, especially in some of to-day’s, something of the influence not only of his colour-books but of his nobly beautiful illustrations to the Book of Job and Blair’s “Grave,” and of those wonderful little woodcut designs for Philips’s “Pastorals,” in which he