I have seen one water-colour (presumably not one of the original set done for Thomas Butts, though probably a repliqua) of Satan pouring a vial containing the plague of boils on the prostrate body of Job. It is interesting to compare it with the final form the design assumed in the engraving (Plate 6 in the Book of Job) done for John Linnell. Owing to the courtesy of Sir Charles Dilke, to whom the picture now belongs, we have been enabled to reproduce it. It will at once be seen that, in the engraving the management of the light is more satisfactory, because it is comprehensible, than in the water-colour; while the cloud-forms are less conventional and rounder. The bat-like wings with which Satan is furnished in the painting have been sacrificed in the engraving. Job's wife has been put into tone, whereas in the water-colour, the visible side of her, which ought to have been in dense shadow, was in full light. The whole design has been pulled together, gaining an impressiveness and unity altogether wanting in the earlier work. Blake's passion for "determinate outline" (irrespective of its appearance in Nature), and contempt for truth of tone in colour, gives the water-colour a mapped-out definitive appearance in its background of scenery,--despite the magnificent qualities of imagination and draughtsmanship displayed in the treatment of the figures,--which somehow recalls the work of such masters as Paolo Uccello. Mr. Linnell, deeply impressed with the lofty and imaginative character of the water-colours done for Mr. Butts, commissioned a complete set of engravings to be executed from them by Blake's hand, for which he paid L150 in instalments of L2 to L3 weekly--the largest sum Blake had ever received for any one series. On glancing through them it will at once be noticed that his style of engraving had undergone a change during the last period of his life. "The Canterbury Pilgrimage," which he had executed fifteen years previously, exhibited the old hard and dry manner of engraving which he had adopted from Basire in its most accentuated form. (For the convenience of classification I have included that picture among the loose drawings, engravings, and water-colours for consideration in a later chapter, but it would be well for the student to look at it now, the better to appreciate the freedom, grace and power of the engravings in the "Job" series.) On one of the many pleasant days Blake spent with Linnell at North End, Hampstead, the latter showed him some choice engravings of Marc Antonio and his pupil Bononsoni, and from this latter's work Blake suddenly apprehended the possibilities, the scope, that lay for him in the engraver's art. In the school of Basire much of the work was accomplished by a laborious and indiscriminate process of cross-hatching.