In the serious things of character the two men were curiously contrasted. Blake hated money, and died poor but solvent. Goldsmith actually worried himself to death in his last illness over a debt of two thousand pounds, and when he died earned Dr. Johnson's caustic funeral oration,-"Was ever poet so trusted?" But the thing that both Blake and he had in common was conscience. It restrained the strong man who hated restraint, and killed the weak one who could not restrain himself.

But Blake was only as yet arriving at the possession of a knowledge of his own character. He tried to feed his emulousness now with the consolation that he knew how to grind his tools better than Woollett, who became a more popular engraver.

After the first two years, however, his position with his master changed. Two new pupils came. They seem to have been idle apprentices. Basire desired to exercise his authority, and expected Blake, who he had discovered was the strongest character in his studio, to help him to do so. He had got quite a wrong idea of Blake. To shine, to be accounted a leader and a hero, was one thing, but to play chief constable to a master as magistrate was quite another. Blake was, in blood and spirit, an Irish chieftain. He was not a Dogberry. Malkin says that the new pupils were too cunning for him, and that he was too simple for them. Nothing is more probable. Here he began to feel the first disadvantage of having had no school experience. Blake had not only escaped being "flogged into following the style of a fool," but he had also escaped seeing little fools growing up and revealing their little meannesses as they did so. He was always ready to suspect authority, but was not shrewd enough to suspect rebellion. Veneration or regard was a feeling that during his whole life he only felt towards two qualities, genius and forgiveness.

Basire needed careful drawings made in Westminster Abbey for some engravings that he was commissioned to execute. He could not leave Blake in charge of his other apprentices. He had only one thing to do. He sent him to the Abbey to make the drawings. That he worked well and faithfully now-1772-1773-is seen by the fact that he was allowed to continue copying the tombs month after month, and that a scaffolding was erected for him to study details that could not be seen from the ground. He not only worked with

fidelity but with delight and exultation, which had both an immediate and a lasting result.

The lasting result was that he ceased to admire Greek form exclusively and adopted Gothic form as his favourite. "Greek form is permanent in the mathematical memory," he afterwards wrote, "Gothic is living form." He even so far abused the word Gothic as to apply it to all art that was not directly derived from the antique without fresh reference to imagination through nature. Raphael and Michael Angelo became Gothic in his mind, and certainly there have been terms applied to them less illuminating and descriptive than this.

The immediate result was that, in the state of imaginative rapture in which he brooded while working, he was visited by a vision of Christ and His apostles. They appeared, as all his visions did, to have life of their own, just as the personages do who appear to us in dreams. That they shared his views on Gothic form is certain, for long afterwards he puzzled good Christians by writing that our Saviour and His chosen twelve were artists.

The effect of this visit did not wear off. We must not suppose that it consisted merely of an insane delusion, an affection of the optic nerve or the centres immediately behind, such as persons in a state of alcoholic poisoning suffer from when they begin to see black dogs. It shows the beginning of Blake's symbolic system of thought, although it came some years before that system took literary shape as a myth and became the great message of his life. None the less, that it was a hallucination in the ordinary sense we need not doubt; only, it did not hallucinate. He believed it to be real only in a particular sense. It was not real as nature is, for the best of all reasons. Nature is not real. Blake never forgot that. Nature is a mental conception as much as vision is a corporeal appearance. He may have been frightened childishly or delighted childishly with his visions at an earlier time. They were beginning to be viewed now by his mind from a very high philosophic standpoint. He had, as it were, a private scaffolding built in the region of his intellect, and when he climbed this he was above the level of insane delusions. Of this mental scaffolding some account will be given when speaking of the period, not many years later, when he lived on it altogether, like St. Simeon Stylites on his column.

It has been recalled that at the time when Blake was

copying in the Abbey for Basire, a company of learned persons belonging to the Society of Antiquaries, for which Basire was making the engravings, obtained Royal permission to open the tomb of Edward I, and saw for a moment the King's face as it was at the time of his death. It fell to dust under the outer air immediately. Blake probably saw it. He represented Basire, and would not be likely to have refrained from using his position.

In our own time a similar visit was paid to the body of Charles I. The head was found replaced on the neck, neatly sewn round, the stitches being in the skin of the throat. The face looked calm and handsome. No excuse, such as was valid in Blake's day, can be offered for the fact that a flashlight photograph was not taken at the very first moment of exposure. While the selfish and unprovident persons for whom the tomb was opened were gloating over the sight, the nose of the King's face fell in, and the mask became a horror. Such must have been what the desecrators of King Edward's rest saw. It is hoped that they all went home feeling like regicides, and dreaming of it for a month after. Perhaps the next time such disgraceful permissions are granted, proper precautions will be taken to save for history a sight that no group of antiquarians has any right to possess exclusively and to destroy for posterity.

There was another result of Blake's Westminster Abbey studies. He altogether ceased to be even in the remotest degree tied and bound with the consciousness of his social position. At school and college he would have been constantly reminded of it. The Kings, whether on-or in-the tombs at Westminster, knew nothing about it, and in their company he ceased to know more. He became their equal. In the Poetical Sketches that were written at about this time, the drama of Edward III is not composed by a plebeian. The author is as much on a level with the King and his nobles as Shakespeare himself was, although it was by seeing the great ones of the earth reposing in eternal sleep that he acquired his equality, and not by observing them at their revels.

Both poets had, for their medium of expression, a certain literary convention to start with. But the greater miracle remains to us in Blake's one unfinished historical play. He was a boy in his teens when he wrote it. He had an overwhelming amount of suggestion in Shakespeare's plays and yet was not overwhelmed by it. He had the most meagre

с

fragment of document outside the pages of books to reveal majesty to him as it lived-merely its carven effigy made after death, and perhaps one spice-bound corpse. Yet the vitality of his work is as easy and as complete as that of Shakespeare's, who must have been behind the scenes with the British royalty and nobility in more senses than one.

Did visions of Edwards or Dagworths come to Blake and perform before him? Were they real? Were they lost echoes of now silent truth, from the far-off lives of the men themselves? We are not yet advanced enough on the road that begins in a rash guess and ends in a truism, to attempt to chronicle our conjecture of the answer to this riddle. One result, certainly, is left by Blake's historic poetry. The argument against Shakespeare's authorship of his own plays, which gentlemanly but unilluminated minds occasionally feel the weight of oppressively, and that consists chiefly in the suspicion that a man of the middle classes could not have written as Shakespeare wrote of the highest in the land, is laid to rest for ever, and becomes as unfit for public gaze as the face of a dead monarch when the cold air has destroyed its form and dignity.

But the drawing-room fallacy, as this absurd contention may be called, is not an enemy to be despised. It seems to have been against Shakespeare's reputation, even in his own lifetime. It continually revives. Men of the highest literary position are known to have allowed it lately to use their superciliousness to obscure their judgments. Their raised eyebrows (to translate the long word) really seem to have taken something away from the strength as well as from the height of their foreheads. They are not to be too severely blamed. All second-class literature is full of amusing failures in the tempting task of describing classes of society to which the writer had no entrance. The modern Baconian's error lies in judging the best by the second best.

One reason may be offered for supposing that Blake had visions among the tombs. He considered the heads as portraits. He can hardly have given this opinion merely from the fact that they were not of academic or classic type. He is not at all likely to have thought that institutions like Parr's life school existed then, or could have obtained casts of antique statues whose originals were still hidden, to make the taste of the sculptors of our early Westminster tombs so classical that only portraits from life could escape the

academic influence or exhibit natural types different from those that are to be learned from Greeks and Romans. This was true in the times of the Kings George, but in Blake's most fanciful moment he did not suspect the days of the Kings Edward of any such misfortune. He probably took the short cut of consulting vision, and formed his opinion of the portraits from this, though we have often to remind ourselves that he sometimes criticised and distrusted vision itself. He did not on that account omit to make what use he could of it, or cease to believe that it arose in some way out of a vanished actuality. It was part of God's mind, like everything else, and, coming to him through his own imperfect mind, was liable to perversion or, as he called it, "infection." Still, in some cases, it is all that a man can have to go by, and Blake made what he could of it, as a historian will make what use he can of the gossip in some scrap of an ancient private letter, while admitting that gossip is not gospel.

But Blake had visitors in the Abbey of a less august and dignified character than learned committees in the flesh, or historical or sacred visions. The boys of Westminster School had, in those days, the privilege of considering the Abbey as" within bounds," and went there as often as they liked. It is possible that Blake, innocently supposing that some of them took a real interest in the monuments, allowed them to climb up on his scaffolding. He once more had reason to feel the disadvantage of not having learned at school what mischievous young savages the youths of our civilised nation often are. One of the rascals climbed a cornice, especially to get above Blake and annoy him,--probably by scattering dirt on his drawing. This would quite account for the fury which seized on Blake then and there. He did not recall afterwards that he said a word to that boy. He simply grasped him like a sack and flung him down on to the floor of the Abbey below, and then, leaving him lying there, walked off without waiting to see whether he was dead or alive, and laid a complaint before the Dean. He was only sixteen, but he made the Dean listen to him. It may be supposed that the boy recovered, as the only result of the affair recorded is that Westminster boys lost their privilege of making the Abbey a part of their playground.

All his life Blake claimed to recognise a sharp distinction between friends and enemies. Nothing was too good for a friend. Magnanimity to an enemy was not only absurd, but