While Blake was at work on his designs for Blair's _Grave_, he drew a pencil sketch of _Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims_, which had always attracted him. Cromek, hopping in and out to see how the Blair designs were progressing, saw the sketch, and his brain immediately swarmed with fertile ideas. He proposed that Blake should engrave his design, and he would push it. But on second thoughts it occurred to him that the subject was admirably suited to Stothard's genius. Leaving Blake with nothing but a verbal agreement, he went straight off to Stothard, and proposed that he should make a design on the subject, for which he would pay him sixty guineas. Cromek undertook to find an engraver. Blake, who had been a friend of Stothard for many years, went to visit him, and found him at work on the _Canterbury Pilgrims_. Unsuspecting, he praised the work. Afterwards he discovered the part that Cromek had played in the seeming coincidence. At once he concluded that Stothard was privy to the deceit, and he included him in his vehement indignation against Cromek, and the lamb roared. With note-book at hand he jotted: "A petty sneaking knave I knew-- O! Mr. Cromek, how do ye do?" Stothard and Blake had been young together. It was he who had introduced him to Flaxman. The friendship, of course, was not of the closest, for they followed a very different track in art. Flaxman and Blake had a common interest in Swedenborg as well as a supreme regard for outline, but Stothard's was always an outward eye, never inward. With a wife and many children, and everlastingly busy producing his thousands of designs, it was not to be expected that he should dive into inner causes. His contemporaries were content, and we too, that he should see the effects in a graceful and poetic glow, and reproduce them in soothing and graceful compositions. He peered into many times and many countries, but he was happier when illustrating his contemporaries, happiest when depicting the chequered career of Clarissa Harlowe.