When he was fourteen, with a view to getting a trade by which he could earn his daily bread, Blake's father determined to apprentice him to an engraver. He took him first to Rylands, an eminent engraver with a Court appointment, but the boy said after the interview, "Father, I do not like that man's face. He looks as if he would live to be hanged." Strange forecast this proved to be, for in 1783 Rylands was indeed hanged for forgery. Blake was finally apprenticed to Basire, a sound craftsman, but of a somewhat hard and dry manner. Basire's style as an engraver set its stamp on Blake, there is no doubt. It would have hampered most men severely, rendering their work formal and immobile, but Blake turned it to a strange account, and it became expressive in his hands. When in his later years he found that he had outgrown it, he modified it to suit his new requirements, but it had been a laborious and useful servant, if not a gracious one. During his apprenticeship Basire set him to draw all the mediaeval tombs and monuments in Westminster Abbey and other churches for a certain publication to be brought out by the firm. In doing this Blake imbibed large draughts of the intense and fervent Gothic spirit. Its deep innerness, its passionate aspiration, its whimsicality, and its quaint decorative exuberance, expressed alike in angels and gargoyles, found and touched a vibrating chord in his heart. Gothic art entered into him and became part of him. Its influence was strong, though it took a characteristically Blakeian expression always, and those long mornings spent among the slanting sunbeams and the whispering silence of the chapels around the King Confessor's tomb, were among the truly eventful incidents of his life. In many of his designs a Gothic church with spires and buttresses like Westminster,--often a mere symbol sufficient to recall it, occasionally carefully and elaborately drawn in--stands as an embodiment of Blake's idea of worship. Strange thoughts must have come to him among those forests of slender pillars and arches! Some hint of them is conveyed by an engraving he did during the period of drawing in the Abbey. It is after a drawing (probably one bought by him cheap at a sale room) by Michael Angelo, and has the imaginative inscription written on it by Blake, "Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion. This is one of the Gothic artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the dark ages, wandering about in sheepskin and goatskin, of whom the world was not worthy." Joseph of Arimathea, it will be remembered, is supposed to have come to Glastonbury in 63 A.D. and built the first Christian Church. He did not always work in the Abbey in quiet. There is a story told by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, of how he was plagued by the Westminster boys till he laid his grievance before the Dean, who thereupon deprived the boys of the right to wander about the Abbey at their pleasure, a right denied to them to this day.