'probably men shut up as mad in Bedlam, who are not so: that 'possibly the madmen outside have shut up the sane people.' Which, by the way, is not the kind of talk a madman, or a man conscious of lying under such a suspicion among his friends, would indulge in. Madmen, and those suspected of madness, do not make common cause with the mad; they rather shun, or take side against them, as animals treat a diseased or wounded comrade. Above all, a madman, with his uneasy sense of his own true condition, has a sensitive horror of so personal a topic and cunningly avoids it.

One ground of the exaggerated misconception of Blake's eccentricities prevalent among those who had heard about Blake rather than sat at his feet, those strange 'visions' of his, we have accounted for quite consistently with sanity. As we said, he, in conversation with his friends, admitted so much,-viz. the inchoate power of others to see the same things he saw,-as to eliminate any outrageous extravagance from his pretensions as a soothsayer. Bearing on this point, it is to be remarked that a madman insists on others seeing as he sees. But Blake did not expect his companion of the moment, John Varley, or Mrs. Blake, to behold the visionary spectres summoned from the void before his eyes, of prophet, king, and poet.

One curious but indubitable historical fact is worth remembrance here. It is full of suggestion in connexion with our present subject. For Blake was, in spirit, a denizen of other and earlier ages of the world than the present mechanical one to which chance had rudely transplanted him. It is within the last century or so, that the heavens have gone further off,' as Hazlitt put it. The supernatural world has during that period removed self further from civilized, cultivated humanity than it was ever e-in all time, heathen or Christian. There is, at this moinfinitely less practical belief in an invisible world, or even

apprehension of it, than at any previous historical era, whether Egyptian, classic, or mediæval. It is only within the last century and a half, the faculty of seeing visions could have been one to bring a man's sanity into question. Ever before, by simple, believing Romanist, by reverent awe-struck pagan, or in the fervent East, the exceptional power had been accepted as a matter of course in gifted men, and had been turned to serious account in the cause of religion. Even so late a manifestation of this abiding tendency (the visionary) in all spíritual persons, as that in the case of Jacob Boehmen in Lutheran time, excited, not sceptical disbelief, but pedantic hostility, as presumably a delusive gift from the Father of Evil rather than from the Author of all Good.

Another source of the false estimate formed of Blake by many, is traceable to the wild and hurling words' he would utter in conversation,—especially when provoked. In society, people would disbelieve and exasperate him, would set upon the gentle yet fiery-hearted mystic, and stir him up into being extravagant, out of a mere spirit of opposition. Then he would say things on purpose to startle, and make people stare. In the excitement of conversation he would exaggerate his peculiarities of opinion and doctrine, would express a floating notion or fancy in an extreme way, without the explanation or qualification he was, in reality, well aware it needed; taking a secret pleasure in the surprise and opposition such views aroused. Often,'-to this effect writes Mr. Linnell,—' he said things on purpose to puzzle and provoke those 'who teased him in order to bring out his strongest peculiarities. With the froward, he showed himself froward, but with the gentle, 'he was as amiable as a child. . . . His eccentricities have been 'enlarged upon beyond the truth. He was so far from being so 'absurd in his opinions, or so nearly mad as has been represented, 'that he always defended Christian truth against the attacks of infidels, and its abuse by the superstitious. . . . It must be con

'fessed, however, he uttered occasionally sentiments sadly at variance 'with sound doctrine.'

Some persons of a scientific turn were once discoursing pompously and, to him, distastefully, about the incredible distance of the planets, the length of time light takes to travel to the earth, &c., when he burst out, 'Tis false! I was walking down a lane the other day, and at the end of it I touched the sky with my stick;' perhaps with a little covert sophistry, meaning that he thrust his stick out into space, and that, had he stood upon the remotest star, he could do no more; the blue sky itself being but the limit of our bodily perceptions of the Infinite which encompasses us. Scientific individuals would generally make him come out with something outrageous and unreasonable. For he had an indestructible animosity towards what, to his devout old-world imagination, seemed the keen polar atmosphere of modern science. In society, once, a cultivated stranger, as a mark of polite attention, was showing him the first. number of The Mechanic's Magazine. Ah, sir,' remarked Blake, with bland emphasis, 'these things we artists HATE!' The latter years of Blake's life were an era when universal homage was challenged for mechanical science, as for some new Evangel; with a triumphant clamour on the part of superficial enthusiasts, which has since subsided.

But, after all, no candid person would, even in society, have taken Blake for mad. Nor did he really believe his own vaunt, say his friends, when he uttered such things as the above, or as, 'I can reach the sun with my hand, if I stretch it out,' &c. He believed them only in a non-natural sense. If it gave him pleasure to think of the welkin, as the old Hebrews did, as a smooth surface which he might feel with his hand, he would believe it as well as he could; contending (among friends) that the idea had a spiritual reality. For, to recur to the explanation of his

character I lately quoted, he was not mad, but perverse and wilful;' believing a thing because he chose to do so. His reasoning powers were far inferior, as are, more or less, those of all artists, to his perceptive, above all to his perceptions of beauty. He elected his opinions because they seemed beautiful to him, and fulfilled the desires of his mind.' Then he would find reasons for them. Thus, Christianity was beautiful to him, and was accepted even more because it satisfied his love of spiritual beauty, than because it satisfied his religious and moral sense. Again, the notion was attractive and beautiful to him that 'Christianity is Art,' and conversely, that 'Art is Christianity :' therefore he believed it. And it became one of his standing theological canons, which, in his sybilline writings, he is for ever reiterating.

Both in his books, and in conversation, Blake was a vehement assertor; very decisive and very obstinate in his opinions, when he had once taken them up. And he was impatient of control, or of a law in anything,-in his Art, in his opinions on morals, religion, or what not. If artists be divided into the disciplined and undisciplined, he must fall under the latter category. To this, as well as to entire want of discipline in the literary art, was due much of the incoherence in his books and design; incoherence and wildness, which is another source of the general inference embodied by Wordsworth and Southey, who knew him only in his poems, when they described him as a man of great, but undoubtedly insane genius.' If for insane we read undisciplined, or ill-balanced, I think we shall hit the truth.

I have spoken of Blake's daring heterodoxy on religious topics. He not only believed in a pre-existent state, but had adopted, or thought out for himself, many of the ideas of the early Gnostics; and was otherwise so erratic in his religious opinions as to shock orthodox Churchmen. Once, in later years, a disputant got up and left his company. Ah,' said Blake, 'we could not get on at all:

he wanted to teach me, and I to teach him.' A transcendental Christian rather than a literal one, he would often hazard wild assertions about the Sacred Person. Yet he would consider that a believer only in the historical character of Christ in reality denied Christ. 'I have unspeakable pleasure,' says Smith, ‘in

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being able to state, that though I admit he did not, for the last forty years, attend any place of Divine worship, yet he was not

a Free-thinker, as some invidious detractors have thought proper to 'assert, nor was he ever in any degree irreligious. Through life, his Bible was everything with him.'

friend of Blake's writes to me:

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And, to the same effect, another

If it must be told, that he did

'not go to church, it should also be told that he was no scoffer

at sacred mysteries; and, although thus isolated from the com'munion of the faithful, ever professed his preference of the Church

to any sort of sectarianism. On one occasion, he expressed the uneasiness he should have felt (had he been a parent) at a 'child of his dying unbaptized. One day, rather in an opposing mood, I think, he declared that the Romish Church was the only 'one which taught the forgiveness of sins.' 'Forgiveness of sins' was the corner-stone of Christianity to Blake's mind. He was for ever inscribing the tenet over his Gates of Paradise and elsewhere. The English Church, as he thought, too little inculcated it. He had a sentimental liking for the Romish Church, and, among other paradoxes, would often try to make out that priestly despotism was better than kingly. He believed no subjects of monarchies were so happy as the Pope's ;' which sounds still more absurd now, than in times nearer those of the First Napoleon, when the poor Pope had, for a while, seemed the victim of military force, and an object of legitimate sympathy. Blake's friend may well

add I fancy this was one of his wilful sayings, and meant that

he believed priests to be more favourable to liberty than kings:

which he certainly did. He loved liberty, and had no affection