Literary and Political Character of James I. (1816); Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I. (1828–31); Eliot, Hampden, and Pym (1832). Though labouring under partial blindness, he in 1840 issued three volumes entitled The Amenities of Literature, consisting, like the Curiosities and Miscellanies, of detached papers and dissertations on literary and historical subjects, written in a pleasant but somewhat slipshod style, which present the fruits of much curious and miscellaneous research, though verified accuracy is not their strong point (as was insisted on in a sarcastic volume of Illustrations by Bolton Corney in 1837). The observant and suggestive compiler was apt to magnify overmuch the importance of small literary discoveries. His most systematic and elaborate work-that on Charles I. -secured him the D.C.L. of Oxford. Byron admired the work of 'that most entertaining and researching writer,' Scott knew some of his poems by heart, and Southey and Rogers were his intimate friends. D'Israeli died at his seat of Bradenham House, Bucks, in 1848, aged eightytwo. His fortune was sufficient for his wants, his literary reputation was considerable, and he possessed a happy equanimity of character. His feelings,' says his famous son, though always amiable, were not painfully deep, and amid joy or sorrow, the philosophic vein was ever evident.' His thoughts centred in his library. Always lax in his attitude towards Jewish belief and ritual, he broke with the Synagogue in 1817 and had all his children baptised-a daughter and four sons, of whom Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield, illustrious both in literature and in statesmanship, was the eldest. The following extract is from an essay in the second series of the Curiosities of Literature, referred to by Wordsworth in support of an argument on the timidity of authors (in the 'Essay Supplementary to the Preface' of 1815).

Shenstone's 'School-Mistress.'

The inimitable School-Mistress' of Shenstone is one of the felicities of genius; but the purpose of this poem has been entirely misconceived. Johnson, acknowledg ing this charming effusion to be the most pleasing of Shenstone's productions,' observes, I know not what claim it has to stand among the moral works.' The truth is, that it was intended for quite a different class by the author, and Dodsley, the editor of his works, must have strangely blundered in designating it 'a moral poem.' It may be classed with a species of poetry till recently rare in our language, and which we sometimes find among the Italians, in their rime piacevoli, or poesie burlesche, which do not always consist of low humour in a facetious style with jingling rhimes, to which we attach our idea of a burlesque poem. There is a refined species of ludicrous poetry, which is comic yet tender, lusory yet elegant, and with such a blending of the serious and the facetious that the result of such a poem may often, among its other p'easures, produce a sort of ambiguity; so that we do not always know whether the writer is laughing at his subject, or whether he is to be laughed

at. Our admirable Whistlecraft met this fate! The School-Mistress' of Shenstone has been admired for its simplicity and tenderness, not for its exquisitely ludicrous turn.

This discovery I owe to the good fortune of possessing the original edition of The School-Mistress,' which the author printed under his own directions, and to his own fancy. To this piece of 'ludicrous poetry,' as he calls it, 'lest it should be mistaken,' he added a ludicrous index, 'purely to show fools that I am in jest.' But the foo, his subsequent editor, thought proper to suppress this amusing ludicrous index,' and the consequence is, as the poet foresaw, that his aim has been mistaken.'

The whole history of this poem, and this edition, may be traced in the printed correspondence of Shenstone. Our poet had pleased himself by ornamenting 'A sixpenny pamphlet' with certain 'seemly' designs of his, and for which he came to town to direct the engraver: he appears also to have intended accompanying it with 'The deformed portrait of my old school-dame, Sarah Lloyd.' The frontispiece to this first edition represents the Thatched house' of his old school-mistress, and before it is the 'birch tree,' with the sun setting and gilding the scene.' He writes on this, I have the first sheet to correct upon the table. I have laid aside the thoughts of fame a good deal in this unpromising scheme; and fix them upon the landskip which is engraving, the red letter which I propose, and the fruit-piece which you see, being the most seemly ornaments of the first sixpenny pamphlet that was ever so highly honoured. I shall incur the same reflection with Ogilby, of having

nothing good but my decorations. I expect that in

your neighbourhood and in Warwickshire there should be twenty of my poems sold. I print it myself. I am pleased with Mynde's engravings.'

On the publication Shenstone has opened his idea on its poetical characteristic. 'I dare say it must be very incorrect; for I have added eight or ten stanzas within this fortnight. But inaccuracy is more excusable in ludicrous poetry than in any other. If it strikes any, it must be merely people of taste; for people of wit without taste, which comprehends the larger part of the critical tribe, will unavoidably despise it. I have been at some pains to recover myself from A. Philips' misfortune of mere childishness, “Little charm of placid mien," &c. I have added a ludicrous index purely to show (fools) that I am in jest; and my motto, “O, quà sol habitabiles illustrat oras, maxime principum!" is calculated for the same purpose. You cannot conceive how large the number is of those that mistake burlesque for the very foolishness it exposes; which observation I made once at the rehearsal, at Tom Thumb, at Chrononhotonthologos, all which are pieces of elegant humour. I have some mind to pursue this caution further, and advertise it "The School-Mistress, &c., a very childish performance everybody knows" (novorum more). But if a person seriously calls this, or rather burlesque, a childish or low species of poetry, he says wrong. For the most regular and formal poetry may be called trifling, folly, and weakness, in comparison of what is written with a more manly spirit in ridicule of it.'

This first edition is now lying before me, with its splendid red-letter,' its 'seemly designs,' and, what is more precious, its 'Index.'

Lord Beaconsfield prefixed a memoir of his father to an edition of the Curiosities in 1849; see also Beaconsfield's own Letters, and the books about the statesman-novelist.

Whatever may have been the precise moment of their meeting, there is no doubt that the three stars of the romantic renascence mingled their radiance. Blake's poems 'excited great interest in Wordsworth,' who finely said that they were 'undoubtedly the production of insane genius, but there is something in the madness of this man that interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.' When Crabb Robinson in 1825 read to Blake Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality, the stanza ending with the lines,

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream? 'threw him almost into an hysterical rapture.' It is significant that in Wordsworth's Evening Walk

WILLIAM BLAKE.

From the Portrait by Thomas Phillips, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.

and Descriptive Sketches (1793), and in Coleridge's Borderers (1795), there is no trace of the romantic wonder that revealed itself in the Lyrical Ballads (1798). Was it Blake's poetry that wrought the transfiguration? On the whole, it seems possible, although decisive evidence on the point is not available.

In 1784, his father having died, and his eldest brother having succeeded to the hosier's business at 28 Broad Street, Blake set up shop next door (No. 27) as printseller and engraver, in partnership with James Parker; Blake's youngest brother, Robert, living with him as an apprentice. In 1787 Robert died, the partnership was dissolved, and Blake went to lodge at 28 Poland Street. While pondering over the problem of finding a publisher for his poems, his beloved brother appeared to him in a dream, and revealed a

somewhat obvious solution of the difficulty. The process was a kind of relief etching. The poems and designs were outlined on copper with an impervious liquid. The rest of the plate was then eaten away with an acid, so that the outline was left in relief. After the impressions had been tinted, they were done up in boards by Mrs Blake. Thus with their own hands the poet and his wife made every part of that lyrical missal, the Songs of Innocence. In the same year (1789) Blake engraved in like fashion The Book of Thel, the first of his prophetic books. A year later he produced The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In 1791 the first book of The French Revolution was issued by Johnson the bookseller, at whose shop Blake forgathered with Godwin, Tom Paine, and Fuseli, his republican zeal leading him to flaunt the bonnet rouge in the streets.

In 1793 he left Poland Street for 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, where he passed seven busy years, designing, engraving, and issuing further prophetic books, The Gates of Paradise, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and America. At this time began his long friendship with Thomas Butts, for nearly thirty years a regular purchaser of his drawings, temperas, and 'frescoes.' In 1794 he issued the Songs of Experience and the prophetic books Europe and The Book of Urizen, followed next year by The Song of Los and The Book of Ahania. In 1800 Flaxman introduced Blake to Hayley, a popular poetaster who posed as 'the Hermit of Eartham.' Hayley induced Blake to settle at Felpham while engraving the illustrations for his Life of Cowper. There he remained three years; but Hayley's vapid triviality vexed his ethereal spirit, and in 1804 he returned to London, taking a first floor at 17 South Molton Street, where he lived nearly seventeen years. Here he produced the prophetic books Jerusalem and Milton, and fell into the unscrupulous hands of Cromek, who, after buying his designs for Blair's Grave, cheated him out of the copyright. Cromek crowned this treachery by plagiarising Blake's design for the 'Canterbury Pilgrimage,' which he persuaded Stothard to forestall, thus bringing about a permanent estrangement between the two friends. Blake vindicated himself by opening an exhibition for which he wrote a brilliant Descriptive Catalogue, containing the famous study of Chaucer that delighted Lamb. But the public remained deaf and blind, and the poet sank into laborious poverty, indomitably toiling over innumerable designs and scores of manuscripts, never resting, never taking a holiday, working valiantly whether ill or well. In 1813 he found a new friend and patron in John Linnell, who was the staff and stay of his declining years, and through whom he met others, such as John Varley. It was for Varley that Blake drew the wonderful 'Spiritual Portraits,' or 'Visionary Heads,' the most celebrated of which are the grotesquely satirical 'Man who built the

Pyramids' and the fantastically humorous Ghost of a Flea.' In 1813 Blake moved, for the last time, to 3 Fountain Court, Strand, where he engraved the most sublime of all his drawings, the 'Inventions to the Book of Job,' and the noble designs for Dante. On 12th August 1827 he died, his last hours being radiant with ecstatic visions and spiritual rapture.

A divinely patient painter and a divinely impatient poet, his impatient poetry is rarer and finer in quality than his patient designs. His revolt against form in poetry, which marched beside his loyalty to form in art, was partly due to his Ossianism and partly to his Swedenborgian mysticism. These things choked his imagination with weedy symbolism and wild rhetoric. Although Blake was not quite sane, neither was he quite insane. He lived in that unexplored region which separates madness from sanity, and in which imagination is supreme. He was too sane to be called mad, and too mad to be called sane. Wordsworth said the last word on this question. The madness of Blake interests us more than the sanity of other men. His swift word flashes out of the clouds, leaping on us like lightning in brief miracles of lyrical beauty. He was the first child to be a poet, the first poet to be a child. He did not merely sing childhood: rather childhood sang in him as it never sang before or since. was the first evangelist of youth. His songs have influenced our social temper not less than our literature, for to them may be traced the beginnings of that modern reverence for childhood which has followed afar off the modern reverence for womanhood. There are gleams of poetry in the chaotic symbolism of the prophetic books, such as the splendid line that breaks through the mists of Milton:

Time is the mercy of eternity.

He

But as a whole the prophetic books may be left to the high priests of dogmatic mysticism whose fantastic exegesis lies outside literature.

Song.

My silks and fine array,

My smiles and languished air,

By love are driven away;

And mournful lean Despair

Brings me yew to deck my grave:
Such end true lovers have.

His face is fair as heaven

When springing buds unfold;

Oh, why to him was 't given

Whose heart is wintry cold?

His breast is love's all-worshipped tomb, Where all love's pilgrims come.

Bring me an axe and spade,

Bring me a winding-sheet; When I my grave have made,

Let winds and tempests beat: Then down I'll lie, as cold as clay. True love doth pass away.

'Introduction' to 'Songs of Innocence.'

Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:

'Pipe a song about a lamb !'

So I piped with merry cheer.
'Piper, pipe that song again ;'
So I piped he wept to hear.
'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!'
So I sang the same again,

While he wept with joy to hear.
'Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read :'
So he vanished from my sight,
And I plucked a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.

The Chimney-Sweeper.
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying, 'Weep! weep!' in notes of woe
Where are thy father and mother, say?

'They are both gone up to the church to pray. 'Because I was happy upon the heath,

And smiled among the winter's snow, They clothed me in the clothes of death

And taught me to sing the notes of woe: 'And because I am happy and dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God and His Priest and King Who make up a heaven of our misery.'

Infant Joy.

'I have no name,

I am but two days old.' What shall I call thee?

'I happy am,

Joy is my name.'

Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy,

Sweet joy, but two days old,

Sweet joy I call thee;

Thou dost smile,

I sing the while,

Sweet joy befall thee!

Infant Sorrow.

My mother groaned, my father wept,
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.

The Blossom.
Merry, merry sparrow !
Under leaves so green

A happy blossom

Sees you, swift as arrow,
Seek your cradle narrow
Near my bosom.

Pretty, pretty robin!

Under leaves so green

A happy blossom

Hears you sobbing, sobbing,

Pretty, pretty robin,

Near my bosom.

Holy Thursday.

'Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean, Came children walking two and two, in red and blue and green:

Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white

as snow,

Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow.

O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town,

Seated in companies they were, with radiance all their

own:

The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,

Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice

of song,

Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among :

Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the

poor.

Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from the door.

Nurse's Song.

When the voices of children are heard on the green,

And laughing is heard on the hill,

My heart is at rest within my breast,

And everything else is still.

Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And the dews of night arise;

Come, come, leave off play, and let us away,

Till the morning appears in the skies.'

'No, no, let us play, for it is yet day, And we cannot go to sleep;

Besides, in the sky the little birds fly

And the hills are all covered with sheep.'

'Well, well, go and play till the light fades away,

And then go home to bed.'

The little ones leaped and shouted and laughed And all the hills echoed.

The Tiger.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize thy fire?

And what shoulder and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand framed thy dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dared thy deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did He smile His work to see?

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

'Introduction' to 'Songs of Experience.' Hear the voice of the bard,

Who present, past, and future sees,
Whose ears have heard

The Holy Word

That walked among the ancient trees,

Calling the lapsed soul,

And weeping in the evening dew, That might control

The starry pole

And fallen fallen light renew.

O Earth, O Earth, return!
Arise from out the dewy grass:
Night is worn,

And the morn

Rises from the slumbrous mass.

Turn away no more :

Why wilt thou turn away?

The starry floor,

The watery shore,

Are given thee till the break of day.

Ah! Sunflower!

Ah! Sunflower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the sun, Seeking after that sweet, golden clime, Where the traveller's journey is done, Where the youth pined away with desire, And the pale virgin shrouded in snow, Arise from their graves and aspire Where my sunflower wishes to go.

A Cradle Song.

Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,
Dreaming in the joys of night;

Sleep, sleep, in thy sleep

Little sorrows sit and weep.

Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.

As thy softest limbs I feel,
Smiles as of the morning steal
O'er thy cheek, and o'er thy breast
Where thy little heart doth rest.