WILLIAM BLAKE'S MARRIAGE OF

HEAVEN AND HELL.

HOUGH it was only within the last few years that Mr. Muir issued from his "Blake Press" a very accurate and beautiful facsimile of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, yet up to the present time this most remarkable of all Blake's prose writings has never been printed with ordinary types. True it is that many extracts from it were given by Mr. Swinburne and by the authors of the Life, still any work of art, and whatever may be its faults the Marriage of Heaven and Hell is eminently a work of art, cannot be judged rightly by fragments; so that now for the first time it will be possible for the many students of Blake, to whom the few original, and the scarcely more plentiful facsimile copies are inaccessable, to judge of it as a whole, and form some estimate of its worth as a prose work apart from the decorative designs in which it was set by Blake.

By the courtesy of Mr. Montague Rhodes James of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, I have been enabled to give the text exactly as it was originally published, he having kindly collated a transcript of a copy in private possession with a very beautiful copy in that Museum, the only original one, so far as I am aware, in any public library. I have however thought it advisable to alter the stops in many places, for otherwise it would often necessitate much trouble on the part of the reader to arrive at the true sense of the text. But wherever it was possible I have kept Blake's punctuation, and invariably his