<P> The most famous publication of the poem was by Robert Hartley Cromek, in part because it occasioned an initial friendship between Cromek and William Blake to turn to acrimony, and in turn because it led to Blake's Public Address, in which he criticized the work of engravers relative to that of illustrators for being as derivative as (amongst others) the translation of the works of Homer by Alexander Pope into rhyming couplets . </P> <P> Cromek, making his first venture into publication after giving up a career as an engraver, commissioned Blake for a series of illustrations for an edition of The Grave that he was to publish in 1808 . He commissioned from Blake, in 1805, forty illustrations, a selected twenty of which were to be engraved for the book . Blake understood that he was also to do those engravings . However, Cromek gave that work to Luigi Schiavonetti . </P> <P> Blake was angered by both Cromek and Schiavonetti; Schiavonetti he re-christened "Assassinetti", and of Cromek he wrote in his notebook: "A petty Sneaking Knave I knew / O Mr Cr----, how do ye do ." He was also stung both by the criticism by Robert Hunt, writing in The Examiner on July 31, 1808, to object to Blake's depiction of the soul as if it were nothing but the mortal body; and by the similar criticism in the November 1808 edition of the Anti-Jacobin Review which described his illustrations as "the offspring of morbid fancy" and an attempt "to connect the visible with the invisible world" that had "totally failed". It was this that almost certainly prompted him to ask, in his 1809 advertisement for A Descriptive Catalogue, his only exhibition of his work in his lifetime, that people "do (him) the justice to examine before they decide". </P> <P> Blake's biographer Alexander Gilchrist relates the tale opining that Cromek was right to employ the services of Schiavonetti, and that what Schiavonetti did was "a graceful translation and, as most would think, an improvement". Had Schiavonetti been likewise employed to similarly transcribe Blake's Canterbury Pilgrims and alter it by "correct smooth touches" then "a different fate would have awaited the composition" from the somewhat lacklustre one that it actually enjoyed . He describes Blake's illustrations of The Grave using words such as "extremes", "ravings", and "wild"; a wildness that Schiavonetti tamed . </P>

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