him the most generous patron of his life. Now, too, he made the acquaintance of another good friend, John Varley, 'the father of modern water-colour,' and did for him a series of drawings of his spiritual visitants: 'The Ghost of a Flee' (a symbol of the rapacious man), 'The Man who built the Pyramids' (probably a builder of the pyramidal form in nature and in thought, for the pyramid is a very definite mystical symbol both in 'Jerusalem' and 'Vala'), and many others. In 1821 he moved from Poland Street to Fountain Court, and made for Mr. Linnell the famous series of designs to 'Job,' which is perhaps his masterpiece. Their austere majesty, too well known to need any description here, contrasts with the fanciful prettiness and delicate grace of his early work. Life had touched his imagination with melancholy. He received £100 for the plates, and was to get another £100 out of the profits of publication. He got £50 of this second £100 before his death, the slow sale not making a bigger sum possible. In 1822 he painted a very fine series of water-colours illustrating 'Paradise Lost' for Mr. Linnell, filling them with the peculiarities of his own illumination as usual, and in 1825 began an immense series of designs to 'Dante' for the same friend, sketching them in water-colour and engraving seven. Of those he engraved, 'Fransesco and Paola' is the most perfect and the most moving, and must always haunt the memory with a beauty at once tender and august. Had he lived to finish the whole series, or even the hundred and odd drawings he began, it had surely been the veritable crown of his labours as an artist; but he was to pass the gate he had called 'of pearl and gold,' and to stand where Dante stood by Beatrice, and to enter the great white Rose before his hands had half transcribed the story of that other mystic traveller. In 1827 he fell ill of a strange complaint, a shivering and sinking, which told him he had not long to live. He wrote to a friend, 'I have been very near the gates of death, and have returned very weak, and an old man, feeble and tottering, but not in spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination which liveth for ever. In that I grow stronger and stronger as this foolish body decays;' and then passed on to discuss matters of business, and matters of engraving and politics, but soon burst out again. 'Flaxman is gone, and we must soon follow every one to his own eternal house, leaving the delusions of Goddess Nature and her laws to get into freedom from all the laws of the numbers—into the mind in which every one is king and priest in his own house. God grant it on earth as it is in heaven.' 'On the day of his death,' writes a friend who had his account from Mrs. Blake, 'he composed songs to his Maker, so sweetly to the ear of his Catherine, that, when she stood to hear him, he, looking upon her most affectionately, said, "My beloved! they are not mine. No! They are not mine." He told her they would not be parted; he should always be about her to take care of her.' Another account says, 'he said he was going to that country he had all his life wished to see, and expressed himself happy, hoping for salvation through Jesus Christ. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened, and he burst out into singing of the things he saw in heaven.' 'He made the rafters ring,' said Tatham. 'The death of a saint,' said a poor woman who had come in to help Mrs. Blake. The wife continued to believe him always with her in the spirit, even calling out to him at times as if he were but a few yards away; but, none the less, fretted herself into the grave, surviving him only two years. No spiritual companionship could make up for the lack of daily communion in the common things of life, for are we not one half 'phantoms of the earth and water'? She left his designs and unpublished manuscripts, of which there were, according to Allan Cunningham, a hundred volumes ready for the press, to Tatham, who had shown her no little friendliness. Tatham was an 'angel' in the Irvingite Church, and coming to hold that the designs and poems alike were inspired by the devil, pronounced sentence upon them, and gave up two days to their burning. 'I have,' wrote Blake, 'always found that angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.' Though Tatham, bound in by systematic theology, did him well nigh the greatest wrong one man can do another, none the less is Tatham's MS. life of Blake a long cry of admiration. He speaks of 'his noble and elastic mind,' of his profound and beautiful talk, and of his varied knowledge. Yet, alas, could he only have convinced himself that it was not for him to judge whether, when Blake wrote of vision 'a bad cause to use his own phrase, 'made a bad book'— we might still have that account of Genesis, 'as understood by a Christian visionary,' of which a passage, when read out, seemed even to conventional Crab Robinson to be 'striking,' and perhaps 'The Book of Moonlight,' a work upon art, though for this I do not greatly long, and the 'Othoon,' and many lyrics and designs, whereof the very names are dead. Blake himself would have felt little anger, for he had thought of burning his MS. himself, holding, perhaps as Boehme held, and Swedenborg also, that there were many great things best unuttered within earshot of the world. Boehme held himself permitted to speak of much only among his 'schoolfellows;' and Blake held there were listeners in other |