This impulse was quickly observed by his father and encouraged by him. William was sent to learn drawing from a Mr Pars, who kept a drawing-school in the Strand. Here he copied plaster casts and odd-and-end plaster bits of the human body, the body itself being left severely alone. A certain amount of technical facility was thus acquired, but his education in art advanced more surely from his desultory wanderings in sale-rooms and in the private galleries of munificent noblemen. At the sale-rooms he bought prints often for a few pence, and his little store of prints was added to by gifts from his father, who also presented him with models of the Gladiator, Hercules, Venus of Medici. In this way he gained his first enthusiastic knowledge of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Martin Hemskerck, Albert Dürer and Julio Romano, who were exactly the right teachers for him. Michael Angelo and the Florentine School believed that drawing was the foundation of all great art. Albert Dürer and his great German successors were of the same opinion. William Blake, the little citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem, had known the horror of indefiniteness, and worked through his apprenticeship to joy only when he discovered that the blessed City stood four-square, and was bounded by great walls on its four sides. Hence his selection of prints was instinctive. He knew without being told what helped him to find himself, and he escaped once for all, while still a child, the seductive elegance of his own age. These were happy years. His mind was already stored with unfashionable knowledge, gleaned chiefly from the robust Elizabethan age, and his spirit, like a mirror, reflected the things he saw with his spiritual eye. His happiness was creative, and he burst into song when he was only eleven in strains that savoured of Ben Jonson, but were wholly fresh and captivating because they were inspired by the first fresh vision of his childhood. There is surely nothing in any language written by a boy of eleven to touch the song: _How sweet I roam'd from field to field_. It is a sudden spring of sparkling water that can never lose its purity. Blake remained four years with Pars, and then his father, willing that his son should become an artist, apprenticed him in 1771 to Basire in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields.