precision of facsimile, or the legitimate use of the various methods of wood engraving according to his own judgment. He never put name or initial to his work, trusting to my occasional acknowledgment of the relations between us,-heaven knows-not given grudgingly, but carelessly and insufficiently, as in the stray note at p. 72 of Ariadne or sometimes with mere commendation of the engraving— as at p. 78 of Aratra, without giving his name. At that time I had entire confidence in my own power, and hope in his progressive skill-and expected that we should both of us go on together, doing better and better, or else that he would take up some line of separate work which would give him position independently of any praise of mine. Failing myself in all that I attempted to do at Oxford I went into far away work, historical and other, at Assisi and in Venice, which certainly not in pride, but in the habit fixed in me from childhood of thinking out whatever I cared for silently, partly also now in states of sadness which I did not choose to show, or express was all done without companions; poor Arthur suffering more than I knew, (though I ought to have known) in being thus neglected. The year '78 brought us together again once more;-he was several times at Brantwood: the last happy walk we had together was to the top of the crags of the south west side of the village of Coniston. He was again in London after that and found there and possessed himself of some of Blake's larger drawings-known to me many and many a year before. George Richmond had shown them to me-with others -I suppose about 1840,-original studies for the illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts-and some connected with the more terrific subjects etched for the Book of Job. I bought the whole series of them at once;-carried it home triumphantly-and made myself unhappy over it—and George Richmond again delivered me from thraldom of their possession. They were the larger and more terrific of these which poor Arthur had now again fallen in with-especially the Nebuchadnezzar -and a wonderful witch with attendant owls and grandly hovering birds of night unknown to ornithology. : No one at the time was, so far as I know, aware of the symptoms of illness which had been haunting me for some days before, and I only verify their dates by diary entries,-imaginative, then beyond my wont, and proving that before the Blake drawings came, my thoughts were all wandering in their sorrowful direction, -with mingled corruscations of opposing fancy, too bright to last. As I have no intention of carrying Praeterita beyond the year '75,-up to which time none of my powers, so far as I can judge, were anywise morbid, I may say here, in respecting the modes of overstrain which affected alike Arthur Burgess and myself in our later days that our real work, and habits of consistent thought-were never the worse for them that we always recognized dream for dream, and truth for truth-that Arthur's hand was as sure with the burin after his illness at Verona as in the perfect woodcuts of which examples are given with this paper; and that whatever visions came to me of other worlds higher or lower than this, I remained convinced that in all of them, two and two made four. Howbeit we never saw each other again, though Arthur was for some time employed for me at Rouen, in directing the photography for which I had obtained permission to erect scaffolding before the north gate of the west front of the cathedral and in spite of my own repeated illnesses, I still hoped with his help, to carry out the design of "Our Fathers have told us." But very certainly-any farther effort in that direction is now 1 |