In the year 1808 Blake exhibited, for the fifth and last time, at the Royal Academy, two pictures in "fresco," "Christ in the Sepulchre guarded by Angels," and "Jacob's Dream." The engraving of Blake's "Canterbury Pilgrimage" was issued in October, 1810. It was altogether unadvertised and unheralded, and the public held itself coldly aloof, neither admiring nor buying. The original picture was taken by the ever-faithful Mr. Butts. Stothard's picture was not finished engraving till a year or two later, for adverse fortunes overtook it. Lewis Schiavonetti died in the middle of the work, and another hand had to finish it. Notwithstanding all of which misadventures, it was one of the most popular engravings ever issued. We shall compare the two compositions in a succeeding chapter. [Illustration: SATAN POURING THE PLAGUE OF BOILS ON JOB Water-colour drawing. Reproduced by kind permission of Sir Charles Dilke] CHAPTER IV DECLINING YEARS Seventeen years of quiet productiveness and unceasing work, marked by the increasing neglect of the world, were passed by Blake at 17, South Molton Street. When finally abandoned by the public to the deep solitude which he created for himself in the midst of the roar of the city, the years are a record of much peaceful labour, of beautiful and strange work, produced as the result of his spiritual meditations and visions. "That he should do great things for small wages," writes Mr. Swinburne, "was a condition of his life," and the poverty which had knocked at his door for almost half a century, now raised the latch and came in, to live with the Blakes as accustomed house-mate to the end. Mrs. Blake had often to remind him of the bare larder and purse by setting an empty plate before him, when he turned to his task-work of engraving to earn the needful money whereby they might live. In the last years of his life Blake said significantly to Crabb Robinson, "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has, is so much taken from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy." And so indeed he was. But he wrote in the Note-book these lines also, indicative of the loneliness and misunderstanding of his whole life: The Angel who presided at my birth, Said, "Little creature formed for joy and mirth, Go, Love, without the help of anything on earth." The struggle between himself and the world being over, and his intractable genius relegated by the influential and great persons of his age to a limbo of neglect and contempt, then did he reach out his hands as to a friend, and pulled Poverty across the threshold; and stretching his limbs and shaking back his gray old head in relief and content, he settled in to the unhindered and undistracted contemplation of "those things which really are"--the eternal inner world of the imagination.