At this time Blake was making designs for Blair's _Grave_, which he intended himself to engrave and publish. These were seen by Cromek, who admired them, and whose business instinct detected money in them. Immediately he proposed to publish a new edition of _The Grave_, and made a verbal agreement with Blake that he should contribute twelve engravings from his own designs. But, inspired by the same business instinct, it occurred to him that Blake's designs would sell much better if they were engraved by one who was known to be able to meet the popular taste. Accordingly he went off to Schiavonetti, who had been a fellow-pupil of Bartolozzi, and proposed to him to do the engravings. The result was satisfactory to everyone except Blake. His illustrations appeared in the summer of 1808, and he received twenty guineas for his designs, but he was naturally furious and resentful against Cromek for playing him such a trick. Cromek was quite right in his judgment that the Blake designs for _The Grave_ would be popular. Yet this did not arise from any affinity between Blake and the then famous author of _The Grave_. Blair had been dead for fifty years. His poem expressed the strict orthodoxy of his day. Its fine passages are scarcely able to give vitality to the whole. Blake can have had no sympathy with the long-drawn-out description of the damask-cheeked maiden lying in her grave, the food of worms. The real genius of Christianity does not permit of such nauseous details of the charnel-house. We know how sensitive Blake was to the damask cheek of a maiden; but we also know that he had come to regard it as the very transitory manifestation of the eternal beauty, and with his spiritual eye continually on the "Inviolable Rose" he did not need to remind himself of the mouldering relics in the grave. He selected for what proved to be one of his finest designs Blair's description of the reunion of soul and body on the Day of Judgment. The poem repeats the doctrine of the resuscitation of the body that has long since returned to dust. Blake, of course, repudiated this dogma. He believed that the spiritual body is already present in one who has been born again of the spirit; and, therefore, death is the bursting of the mortal shell that the spiritual body may pass on into its spiritual environment. Yet with his love of marriages he depicted the rending of the tomb and the passionate reunion of soul and body, not because he believed in such a future event, but because that reunion taken symbolically was marvellously expressive of the rapturous marriage of many pairs of contraries that man in his day persisted in keeping apart. For the rest, Blair's poem was sufficiently universal in its treatment of death to enable Blake to illustrate him, and yet read his own opinions into the words he selected.