Blake, William, poet, painter, and engraver, born in London, where, with rare intervals, he spent his life a mystic from his very boyhood; apprenticed to an engraver, whom he assisted with his drawings; started on original lines of his own as illustrator of books and a painter; devoted his leisure to poetry; wrote “Songs of Innocence,” “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “Gates of Paradise,” and “Songs of Experience”; was an intensely religious man of deep spiritual insight, most vivid feeling and imagination; illustrated Young's “Night Thoughts,” Blair's “Grave,” and the “Book of Job.” He was a man of stainless character but eccentric habits, and had for wife an angel, Catherine Boucher (1757‒1828).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Blake, Robert * Blanc, Charles