It was a fresh study of old engravings and other works of art, to which he was roused by the sympathy and encouragement of younger artists like Linnell, Palmer, and Calvert, which caused the great improvement in Blake's illustrations to the Book of Job. This work must really count among the finest ever produced in England; the designs for Dante,' begun later, are of much inferior promise, being less coherent and less central in conception.

Folk who complain of Blake's bad or incorrect drawing usually do not understand what they are talking about; for such censure is as relevant as complaints of the incorrectnesses of Japanese paintings, or those of a Gothic statue, in the same respects. It is not fidelity to natural fact that is wanting to Blake, but sensitiveness as to what forms are cheap and empty, what fully developed and refined. He did not pretend to copy nature, but visions; unfortunately he neglected to insure that these visions were always the best he was capable of receiving; and sometimes, in his impatience, he treated them more cavalierly than even the shoddiest deserved. We shall not be brought nearer to his art by tracing all his borrowings to their sources, as Mr Hewlett elaborately tried to do. It is always very difficult not to deceive one's self in such enquiries; and the characteristics on which so impulsive and inobservant a nature seizes are sure to be essentially common to a whole group or period. Besides, nothing comes of nothing'; the works of Michael Angelo and Raphael would provide as long a list of correspondences with those of their forerunners, were the records as complete, though no doubt in their case the correspondences would be less accidental.

'As is the case with each of us, Blake's philosophy was the offspring of a union between his education and his personal peculiarities.' So Mr Ellis tells us; and here he hits the truth, not about Blake's philosophy alone, but all his work, all his failure. His education was wretched; and his genius makes its inadequacy horribly obtrusive. His personal peculiarities would have made it difficult for him to profit by a good education; he was too impatient to feel the force of ignorance, while the intuitive power of his mind made it easy for him to despise received con

clusions. Blake's enemy was the confidence of a mind that has never surveyed the world it presumes to judge, and judges most things by standards not applicable to them. His madness is that of ignorance, with the best intentions, trying to work machinery it does not understand.

Like those citizens at the time of the French Revolution who, by making monstrous mistakes, revealed to the world that they had not received preparation as a governing class, Blake reveals that he had not received or been able to achieve the culture necessary for the adequate treatment of themes which he rightly perceived to be the proper ones for great poetry. He alone felt the need, and answered it to the best of his ability; though his effort was abortive, it is honourable. The main result of all his spiritual warfare was determined by the assumptions of popular Christianity, which he had imbibed in childhood before he could think for himself. These he never doubted, though he did reinterpret them. The question of his sanity will be reduced to this question: Have not many of the greatest intellects done less to conquer their faults of temper and sensuality than did this man to conquer his ignorance? Is not his victory, with its industry supported without weariness, its poverty free from all envy, its violent temper subdued almost entirely to peace and forgiveness, its disappointed ambition accepted finally without rancour or despair, its lifelong preference for the things of the spirit to those of this world, for being to seeming and having-is this not of the very essence of sanity? Is it not holiness? Could we have hoped for a judgment from Voltaire on a man like Blake, comparable to that vision reported by Crabb Robinson in which Voltaire said to Blake, 'I blasphemed the Son of Man, and it shall be forgiven me; but my enemies blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me, and it shall not be forgiven them.'

He perceived that the recreative power in art and religion was identical-an idea with which the most modern thinkers are preoccupied to-day. It is tempting to say that Blake wrote and thought about things that in another hundred years it may be easy to express clearly. Yet I cannot reject the atavistic explanation as absurd; children and savages see visions and confuse them with reality. Mr Ellis takes for granted that the

glories of early art and early poetry are the greatest; and that, as Blake recalls their beauties, his works are to be ranked with those. Yet much of his drawing has affinities with the fashion-plate, and his poetry with the tendencies of extreme decadents. There may have been periods when a nation's mind had need of men like Blake; when, under Druid oaks, the reverent colleges of elect souls would have listened in the moonlight to his admired dreams. The ideal is always partly located in the past, partly in the future; the Father and the Son of Man are divine. We lose while we gain. Blake may have been born too late; he may have been born too early. I prefer to think that nothing essential divided him from the men with whom he lived ;.that he was no belated antediluvian, nor yet' fallen all before his time on this sad world,' but that accidental circumstances prevented his full effectiveness. The improvement shown in the style of the 'Ghost of Abel' may have been due to the influence of Lord Byron's poetry. Can we not imagine his having felt, when reading that or Wordsworth's, how ill-fitted were his own books, true and vital as their burden was, for publication in this world? Are not his words to Crabb Robinson an arch and gentle confession of this? I shall print no more. When I am commanded by the spirits, then I write; and, the moment I have written, I see the words fly about the room in all directions. It is then published. The spirits can read, and my MS. is of no further use.'

.

Every young and, in consequence, half-educated man of pregnant parts has been through a similar experience. Things written and thought with the eccentricity natural to ignorance he has come across done adequately by fully equipped minds, and perhaps been convinced that some tasks once lightly undertaken were not for him, for he could never acquire the scholarship, breadth of experience, or dexterity required. Yet they truly had been revelations to him, and some may receive them even now best from him; besides, it often happens that the more fully equipped prophets have only half the message or have mingled it with errors. Blake did not talk like that about his designs; he was surrounded by young and ardent admirers of them, and had no need to fall back on a merely spiritual publicity. The illustrations to Job and the Ancient of Days striking the First Circle,' done for

Tatham, are his most consummate achievements, as they are his latest. His artistic education, though poor, had not been so hopeless as his intellectual preparation for understanding and being understood in this world. Gazing on his picture of 'Cain Fleeing from the Face of his Parents by the Grave of Abel,' in that distracted figure he came to see, not, as he had intended, the murderer, but the spiritual form of the murdered in agony demanding vengeance.* A murder was an accident of no consequence, a material event; vengeance, the living influence of the dead man on his living friends, was big with evil import and strong to perpetuate war against the forgiveness of sins.

'In Hell all is self-righteousness. There is no such thing there as the Forgiveness of Sin.' 'Forgiveness of sin is only at the judgment-seat of Jesus the Saviour, where the accuser is cast out, not because he sins, but because he torments the just (the self-righteous) and makes them do what he condemns as sin, and what he knows is opposite to their own identity.' 'Men are admitted into Heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings.' The fool shall not enter into Heaven, let him be ever so holy.' (MS. Book; Ellis, p. 325.)

These interpretations are beautifully apt to prick the bubbles of popular religion which the rich blow for the poor and the clever for the stupid, that they may amuse them. Intelligence is an essential part of the ideal; and Blake is right in declaring that holiness is not holy enough without it. Some day the records of this beautiful old man's life will become, we may hope, a national food; and children will at school learn how he died singing' songs of joy and triumph.'

'He sang loudly and with true ecstatic energy, and seemed so happy that he had finished his course, and that he was shortly to arrive at the goal to receive the prize of his high calling. . . . Such was the entertainment of the last hour of his life. His bursts of gladness made the room peal again,' and then 'his spirit departed like the sighing of a gentle breeze.'

T. STURGE MOORE.

* See the 'Ghost of Abel.'

Art. III. THE ENGLISH BOROUGH.

1. Records of the Borough of Leicester. Edited by Mary Bateson. Three vols. Cambridge: University Press, 1899-1905.

2. Cambridge Gild Records, 1298-1389. Edited by Mary Bateson. Cambridge: University Press, 1903.

3. Mediaeval England, 1066-1350. By Mary Bateson. ('Story of the Nations' Series.) London: Unwin, 1903. 4. Borough Customs. Edited for the Selden Society by Mary Bateson. Two vols. London: Quaritch, 1904-6. 5. The Laws of Breteuil. The Creation of Boroughs. A London Municipal Collection of the Reign of John. By Mary Bateson. 'English Historical Review,' vols xv, XVI, XVII. London: Longmans, 1900-2. And other works.

THE untimely death of Miss Mary Bateson (Nov. 30, 1906) is a loss to be deplored not only in Cambridge, but by all students of the Middle Age. She was a true scholar; and her abilities, in themselves of a high order, were the more valuable to historical science because consistently applied to task-work of a kind which is less fashionable than it should be in our universities. That Miss Bateson could generalise felicitously, that she had the knack of presenting ascertained results in a popular form, that she was the reverse of indifferent to the broader issues and tendencies of history, is proved by the admirable sketch of medieval England which she wrote, not long ago, for the Story of the Nations' series. But, by preference, she played the part of a pioneer; and her best work was done as an editor of new materials or as an interpreter of documents which, although in print before her time, had never received their due meed of attention. Inferior no doubt to Maitland in analytic subtlety, and in that rare gift of scientific imagination which sees the most familiar facts from a new angle and finds a law in the midst of seeming chaos, she possessed in equal measure with her master the faculty of apprehending at a glance how new materials bore upon old theories. Even in the field of municipal institutions, which she had made peculiarly her own, her usual method was to follow up a clue which a precursor had suggested. But she seldom left a hypo