house in South Molton Street, and there engraved 'Jerusalem' and 'Milton.' These, with the exception of 'The Ghost of Abel,' a dramatic fragment written very early, but not appearing until 1822, were the last poems published by him. He continued until the end of his life to find occasional purchasers for these and other 'Prophetic Books,' but never any to read and understand. He did not, however, cease to write. 'I have written more than Voltaire or Rousseau,' he said, in one of the last years of his life; 'six or seven epic poems as long as Homer, and twenty tragedies as long as Macbeth. I write when commanded by the spirits, and the moment I have written, I see the words fly about the room in all directions. It is then published, and the spirits can read.'

Henceforth, his published works were to be wholly pictorial. He was now conscious that the 'light' so long hid from him 'as by a door and window shutters' was come again, and foresaw a great period of artistic creation; for had he not conquered 'the spectrous fiend' which had marred his power and obscured his inspiration? The first works of this new and better period were done for a certain Cromeck, a publisher, who set him to illustrate Blair's 'Grave.' These illustrations must always remain among his greatest. They are much less illustrations of Blair than expressions of his own

moods and visions. We see the body and soul rushing into each other's arms at the last day, the soul hovering over the body and exploring the recesses of the grave, and the good and bad appearing before the judgment seat of God, not as these things appeared to the orthodox eyes of Blair, but as they appeared to the mystical eyes of William Blake. The body and soul are in one aspect corporeal energy and spiritual love, and in another reason and passion, and their union is not that bodily arising from the dead, dreamed of by the orthodox, but that final peace of God wherein body and soul cry 'hither' with one voice. The grave was in his eyes the sleep of reason, and the last judgment no high session of a personal law-giver, but the 'casting out' of 'nature' and 'corporeal understanding.'

Cromeck gave these designs into the hands of Schiavonetti, an excellent engraver, but a follower of the fashionable school of 'blots and blurs,' of soft shadows and broken lights, and not of the unfashionable school of 'firm and determinate outline' to which Blake belonged. Blake likewise had been promised the engraving, and the choice of another was a serious money loss to him. The result was a quarrel, which grew to the utmost vehemence when Cromeck added the further wrong of setting Stothard to paint for engraving a picture of 'The Canterbury Pilgrims,' having taken the idea from seeing Blake at work on the same subiect

with like intentions. Blake tried to vindicate himself by an exhibition of his paintings, 'The Canterbury Pilgrims' among them. The exhibition was held at his brother James', in Golden Square, in 1809, and proved an utter failure. I give many extracts from the printed catalogue and from an address to the public, which never got beyond the MS. stage. Both catalogue and address are full of magnificent and subtle irony and of violent and petulant anger. He would not moderate his passion, for he was ever combative against a time which loved moderation, compromise, and measured phrase, because it was a time of 'unbelief and fear' and of imaginative dearth. Had he not said, 'bring out number, weight, and measure in a time of dearth'? and with him there was no dearth; and also that 'the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom'? His fault was not that he did not moderate his passion, but that he did not feel the error he so often warns himself against, of being angry with individuals instead of 'states' of mind. The evil he denounced was really evil, but the men he denounced did not really personify that evil. The turbulent heart of the mystic could not but feel wrath against a time that knew not him or his. No wonder that he should fall, from sheer despair of making any man understand his subtle philosophy of life, into many an unsubtle unphilosophical rhapsody of hate

when too angry even to hide himself in storm clouds of paradox. He had probably never seen any good painting of the Florentine and Flemish schools, but holding them to be the source of the art of his day, denounced them with violence. Had they not sacrificed the intellectual outline to indefinite lights and shadows, and renounced imaginative things for what seemed to him unimaginative copying of corporeal life and lifeless matter? Were they not his enemies in all things, and the enemies of Raphael and Angelo and Durer? He made, in a blind hopeless way, something of the same protest made afterwards by the preRaphaelites with more success. They saw nothing but an artistic issue, and were at peace; whereas he saw in every issue the whole contest of light and darkness, and found no peace. To him the universe seemed filled with an intense excitement at once infinitesimal and infinite, for in every grass blade, in every atom of dust, Los, the 'eternal mind,' warred upon dragon Urizen, 'the God of this world.' The 'dots and lozenges,' and the 'indefinite' shadows of engraver or painter, took upon them portentous meanings to his visionary eyes. I know that the great majority of Englishmen are fond of the indefinite,' he writes to a correspondent, which they measure by Newton's doctrine of the fluxions of an atom, a thing which does not exist' (that is to say, be

longs to reason, not to imagination; to nature, not to mind). 'These are politicians, and think that Republican art' (a system of thought or art which gives every one of the parts separate individuality and separate rights as in a Republic) 'is inimical to their atom, for a line or lineament is not formed by chance. A line is a line in its minutest subdivisions, straight or crooked. It is itself, not intermeasurable by anything else. .... But since the French Revolution Englishmen are all intermeasurable by one another, certainly a happy state of agreement in which I for one do not agree.' 'The dots or lozenges,' 'the blots and blurs,' have no individuality when taken apart, and what is true of them is true also of the men for whom the blots and blurs' are made; for are not all things symbolic, and is not art the greatest of symbols? In his philosophy, as expounded in 'The Prophetic Books,' he had a place for everything, even for 'nature' and the corporeal hindrance, but he left a place for the highest only in his interpretation of the philosophy, and forgot that we must never be partisans, not even partisans of the spirit.

For a time now his purse was very empty, he and his wife, if Cromeck is to be believed, which he probably is not, living for a time on IOS. a weck, and it might, perhaps, have kept empty to the end had not he met in 1818 John Linnell, the landscape painter, and found in