suffer accordingly. These things sank deep into Blake, to reappear again as poems in his Ideas of Good and Evil. Many times he himself felt the same discomfort both at Mrs Mathew’s and later at Mr Hayley’s. The words he puts into Mary’s (Catherine’s) lips he speaks in his own person in lines that he afterwards addressed to Flaxman:

“Oh, why was I born with a different face?
Why was I not born like this envious race?
Why did Heaven adorn me with bountiful hand,
And then set me down in an envious land?”

Still Blake was “allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.” The songs he sang were inspired by his reading of the Elizabethans, whom the Blues could appreciate. The Poetical Sketches came within the purview of professed admirers of Ben Jonson and Spenser; and therefore Mrs Mathew could genuinely agree with Flaxman that it was worth helping Blake to get them published. The Poetical Sketches were gathered together and printed at the expense of Flaxman and the Mathews, Mr Mathew himself writing an apologetic Advertisement which would save his skin and lack of discernment if the pieces were unapproved by the great Public. Since it is short, I will quote it entire:

“The following sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year; since which time, his talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession, he has been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye. Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetical originality, which merited some respite from oblivion. These their opinions remain, however, to be now reproved or confirmed by a less partial public.”

It was hardly want of leisure that had prevented Blake from polishing his verses. Mr Mathew had argued with him on the necessity, and he had proved tiresomely obstinate, and, what is worse, remained of the same opinion eight years afterwards when he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.”

Mr Mathew was but one of those Bunglers that “can never see perfection, but in the journeyman’s labour.” However, he saved his name for his generation and lost it for posterity.

Blake’s Poetical Sketches were printed but not published. The copies were handed over to him to give or sell, but they brought him neither fame nor money.

It is long since anyone doubted the worth of the Poetical Sketches. The twentieth century wholly endorses the glowing and just criticism that Swinburne wrote fifty years ago. It must have startled the stolid bookish people of the ’sixties to be told that the best of Blake’s Poetical Sketches—To Spring, To Memory, To the Muses, To the Evening Star—were comparable to the world’s best in any age. Swinburne frequently exaggerated in his excitement; but here was no exaggeration, and the poems which were once thought by a partial friend “to merit some respite from oblivion” are now reckoned among the chief pearls of great price in England’s rich treasury of Songs.

There remains little more for the critic to say, but the biographer turns to these Sketches for any intimation of Blake’s spiritual and mental growth.

We must not be misled by the “scent and sound of Elizabethan times” that is upon them. It is of course interesting to the literary mind to discover Ben Jonson in How sweet I roamed, Beaumont and Fletcher in My Silks and fine Array, Webster in the Mad Song, and Shakespeare in King Edward the Third; but these intimations of kinship are only such as are found in original geniuses of the same age. That which gives life and immortality and irresistible sweetness to the songs is Blake’s own child-spirit seeing with wide-eyed simplicity the simple commonplace things of this world that God made, and that are to the pure in heart the immediate revelation of Him. If in fashioning into Song the things that he saw Blake refuses the artifice of his time and catches the scent and sound of a more robust age, yet the prime inspiration was entirely his own; and we can only wonder that such inspiration should have come to him while still a mere boy.

The other pieces in the collection, though of much less importance, have their interest. Fair Elinor with the “silent tower,” the “castle gate,” the “dreary vaults,” and “sickly smells,” like Horace Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and Castle of Otranto, is not of the time but anticipatory of the romantic horrors that Mrs Radcliffe was to make entirely her own. Gwen King of Norway and King Edward the Third are remarkable for their martial language. This was no accident. Blake was a born fighter. The heroic side of War stirred his spirit, even though

“The God of War is drunk with blood;
The Earth doth faint and fail:
The stench of blood makes sick the Heav’ns;
Ghosts glut the throat of Hell!”

His feeling for England recalls old John of Gaunt’s speech:

“Lord Percy cannot mean that we should suffer
This disgrace: if so, we are not sovereigns
Of the sea—our right, that Heaven gave
To England, when at the birth of nature
She was seated in the deep; the Ocean ceas’d
His mighty roar, and fawning play’d around
Her snowy feet, and own’d his awful Queen.”

Grim War is a means to glorious liberty:

“Then let the clarion of War begin;
I’ll fight and weep, ’tis in my country’s cause;
I’ll weep and shout for glorious liberty.
Grim War shall laugh and shout, decked in tears,
And blood shall flow like streams across the meadows,
That murmur down their pebbly channels, and
Spend their sweet lives to do their country service:
Then shall England’s verdure shoot, her fields shall smile,
Her ships shall sing across the foaming sea,
Her mariners shall use the flute and viol,
And rattling guns, and black and dreary war,
Shall be no more.”

Later on the War spirit in him, without diminishing, underwent a change. It is still England’s green and pleasant fields that he loves, and he still longs for glorious liberty. This shall be effected by the building of Jerusalem. But as the root of the evil is in man, the weapons of his warfare become spiritual. Casting aside the rattling guns, he shouts:

“Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear; O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.”

For War breeds hate and every evil thing. Until we arouse ourselves and fight like warriors the evil that is in ourselves, there can be no glorious liberty, whether for England or any other nation of the world.

The Poetical Sketches were a failure. Mrs Mathew had generously tried to help, but her influence was not wide.

A magnificent opportunity had come to the Blue-stockings, and to Mrs Montagu in particular, who with all her money and wide influence, which she was always ready to use for her needy friends, might have helped quite incalculably when Blake most needed it, and earned