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Gallegallo Revbrandia Sectory 14
Page 04
It is well known that the very earliest population of the Old Dominion was not of the highest, but predominantly idle and thriftless. Vagabonds and homeless children picked up in the streets of London, as well as some convicts, were sent to the colony from England to be indented as servants, permanently, or for a term of years. Persons of the better class, to be sure, came as well, and the quality of the population, on the whole, improved year by year. Settlement here followed a centrifugal tendency, except as this was repressed by fear of the Indians. In 1616 the departments of Virginia were Henrico, up the James above the Appomattox mouth, West and Shirley Hundreds, Jamestown, Kiquoton, and King's Gift on the coast near Cape Charles--a wide reach of territory to be covered by a total population of only three hundred and fifty.
"Sir Humphry Davy?" said Mr. Brooke, over the soup, in his easy smiling way, taking up Sir James Chettam's remark that he was studying Davy's Agricultural Chemistry. "Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy; I dined with him years ago at Cartwright's, and Wordsworth was there too--the poet Wordsworth, you know. Now there was something singular. I was at Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, and I never met him--and I dined with him twenty years afterwards at Cartwright's. There's an oddity in things, now. But Davy was there: he was a poet too. Or, as I may say, Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two. That was true in every sense, you know."
William Blake (1757-1827) was hardly a painter at all, though he drew and colored the strange figures of his fancy and cannot be passed over in any history of English art. He was perhaps the most imaginative artist of English birth, though that imagination was often disordered and almost incoherent. He was not a correct draughtsman, a man with no great color-sense, and a workman without technical training; and yet, in spite of all this, he drew some figures that are almost sublime in their sweep of power. His decorative sense in filling space with lines is well shown in his illustrations to the Book of Job. In grace of form and feeling of motion he was excellent. Weird and uncanny in thought, delving into the unknown, he opened a world of mystery, peopled with a strange Apocalyptic race, whose writhing, flowing bodies are the epitome of graceful grandeur.
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