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Cornelius Varley, and then be away the next morning, tramping through the predawn darkness to his latest painting job. He could turn from the labour of love which his own engravings represented to receive some distinguished sitter and then shift focus again to give a lesson to a pupil for whom drawing had to be included in a plethora of fashionable accomplishments. But, for all his many aspects, Linnell never lost his sense of purpose, never abandoned his professional focus or his religious quest.
    Palmer was impressed. But then Linnell, for all that he was small in stature – he was only five foot five – had a powerful presence. He had a firm mouth, a penetrating stare and a loud and unexpectedly raucous voice that commanded the attention of those who met him. To shake him by the hand was to be assured of his strength. He had the hard, bony grip of a labourer. This was the grip that he kept on his life. It was precisely what the aimless Palmer was looking for.

9
    The Primitive
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    A pure quaint crinkle-crankle goth
    from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
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    Blake was obsessed with the idea of a lapsed spiritual age. All his life he would look for what he called ‘lost originals’, 1 peering back through the layers of successive civilisations, through the veils of history and the confusions of belief, to discover the purified lineaments of some fundamental truth. It was in Westminster Abbey that he had first glimpsed it, he told Palmer. It was there that, with ‘his mind simplified by Gothic forms & his Fancy imbued with the livid twilight of past days’, he had found what he knew to be ‘a true Art’. 2 The abbey’s Gothic memorials had revealed a ‘simple and plain road to a style . . . unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice’. They had taught him how, by working within native traditions, he could recapture the unsullied virtues of the artists he most admired: the sanctified purity of Fra Angelico’s frescos, the linear chastity of Mantegna’s designs, the innocent perfection of Raphael’s paintings, the hieratic clarity of Dürer’s woodcuts. ‘Everything connected with Gothic art and churches, and their builders, was a passion to him,’ 3 Palmer recalled.
    Blake was not alone in his preoccupation with the past. In the eighteenth century, inspired by a growing fascination with the researches of such historical figures as John Aubrey, who had made haphazard investigations into anything from pre-Catholic rituals in the lives of the peasantry to circular depressions in the ground at Stonehenge, or William Stukeley, who had published recondite studies of druidical cultures and giant geomantic ‘worms’, the people of England began popularly to indulge a passion for antiquarianism. It developed into a sort of national hobby and by the time that Blake was growing up the country was crawling with amateurs hunting for evidence of ancient tombs or heathen temples, shamanistic totems or the lost city of Atlantis; Blake was certainly not the only person to believe that the British Isles might be the last surviving remnant of this legendary antediluvian empire. What might in retrospect look like a cranky predilection for esoterica was very much a product of the cultural fashions of the period.
    Blake encouraged his ardent young protégé to look back to primitive beginnings, to try to recover the dreams of an earlier age. Often what might now in Palmer’s work appear most forward-looking – the simplifications of shape to the point of abstraction or the distortions of scale – was paradoxically intended to be facing in the opposite direction: to be gazing backwards towards the beauties of a long bygone age.
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    Palmer’s feeling for Gothic art forms, for the soaring grandeur and spiritual grace of a vernacular British aesthetic, accorded well with the wider mood of his era. In 1815, with the battle of