Cromek, who had learnt engraving in the studio of Bartolozzi, found it laborious and slow work, so exchanged its drudgery for the calling of a publisher, but, having good taste but no capital, he was hard pressed indeed to make both ends meet. One day a piece of luck came in his way. He paid a visit to Blake's working and living room in South Molton Street. Many beautiful things were to come into being in that room, but none more so than the drawings for Blair's "Grave" which Blake had designed, intending to print and publish them in the usual way. Cromek found them, and seized upon them, gloating. He persuaded Blake to relinquish the idea of publishing them himself, and to surrender the undertaking to Cromek as one more fitted to push them and bring them before the notice of the public. Blake was very poor at the time. In an insulting letter written by Cromek to Blake some two years later, he refers with contemptible want of feeling and taste to this fact. "Your best work, the illustrations to the 'Grave,'" he says, "was produced when you and Mrs. Blake were reduced so low as to be obliged to live on half a guinea a week!" Blake sold the twelve drawings to him for L1 10_s._ each, with the assured verbal agreement that he was himself to engrave them for the projected edition--a promise which of course entailed considerable further payment for the work of engraving later on. Cromek in possession of the copyright conveniently forgot his promise. Impregnated as he was with the fluent and graceful style of Bartolozzi's school, Blake's manner of engraving seemed to him grim, austere and archaic. He thought that the noble drawings translated by the hand of the popular and graceful engraver, Lewis Schiavonetti, would insure the success of the designs with the public as Blake could never have done were he to have engraved them himself. It may be that there was truth in it. Some critics hold that the illustrations to Blair's "Grave" have a suavity, a felicity superimposed by the engraver on the stern and original work of Blake which was just what was needed to render his work attractive to the public. To Blake's true lovers, however, his own graver is the rightful interpreter of his own drawings, and, whether Cromek were right or not in this critical matter of taste, he was dishonest and mean to break the engagement on the basis of which alone he had obtained the drawings.