preciousness that was, along with better things, to be found at the evening parties given by Mrs. Mathews. Of what was worth respecting or enjoying there she probably did not understand enough to enable her to annoy her husband by being any more just to the dilettante circle than he was.

For what happened, and how they both felt about it, we have several sources of information, the best of which are Blake's own poems about "Mary." They are not dated, but were composed probably in 1783 or 1784, since, it seems, they were found by Mr. R. Herne Shepherd jotted down on the fly-leaves of Blake's bound copy of the Poetical Sketches, if we read his hint on the subject rightly. In the first of these "Mary" poems we learn that a very pretty and very simple girl (Mrs. Blake was both) went for the first time into a drawingroom among artificial people of eighteenth-century habits, and received the usual high-flown compliments which were considered suitable to good breeding at that period. That Blake would ever have thought of writing verses on such a subject had not Mrs. Blake had such an experience, is not probable. He would not even have discovered the possibility or the possibilities of such a situation. We have already seen how rapidly a suggestion would call up in his mind a poetic conception; a word would sometimes be enough, or the sight of an engraving. Here he had the sight of the drama being acted in real life, with his wife as heroine.

In the poem, "Mary" does not adopt the tone of mock modesty expected from her in an atmosphere of mock gallantry. She is not well-bred. She shows her love for her husband in the drawing-room as coolly as though she were alone in a wide garden. There was only a look of the eye or a touch of the hand, perhaps. The outrageousness was not so much in the sign of love given as in the shameless sincerity of it. Very naturally, all the others felt outraged. The selfishness of such a proceeding is the sin. Catherine did not know that, so when she was scolded she did not take it meekly. She thought that she had as much right to love her husband in her own way as he thought that he had to write his verses in his own way. Both were condemned. He was pronounced obstinate, and she indecent.

Cut to the heart, and not at all understanding what she had done, Catherine tried to efface herself as ignorantly as she had put herself forward. She became a dowdy. This was not what was wanted at all. It offended the hostess and the gallant young guests at the same time. They all combined

against her once more. She left off going into the little corner of society that she had rashly entered, and took with her sad, bitter, and ineffaceable memories, but not the smallest spark of real comprehension of the fact that would have been obvious to almost any one else that the whole trouble was at least as much her own fault as that of the people who hurt her feelings. There was just one person who understood it all as little as she did. Blake, his perceptions of conduct darkened by the ideal, could no more see truly what had happened than a man who walks about carrying a large and brilliant lamp in his hand that shines in his face can judge the faces of people at the farther side of that lamp.

Blake certainly continued to go to Rathbone Place for literary purposes, but from now began the "unbending demeanour that Smith noticed a year after the Poetical Sketches were printed. It is not because Blake wrote down the story of his wife's début in the poem of Mary, or because this is found in the leaves of a book that he had in his hands at the time, that we know the story to be true. All this was so because it must have been. We rather understand the poem from the truth than the truth from the poem. Not in any single page, but yet legibly and plainly, the story of what else happened now is written a little later in Blake's works. When Catherine had first entered the Rathbone Place drawing-room, and Blake, who was not yet quite in love with her, though he loved her, saw her beauty, as all who were there saw it, in its fresh country sweetness and charm, a new and natural love awoke in him that was not merely gratitude nor pity, but actual desire. He saw her in full dress. Her smooth neck and long, slender, but firmly rounded arms were, though he knew them at home, revealed to him all over again, as they bore the looks of admiration that pressed on them from every man in the room. He was roused to a new pride and a new craving. l'olly Woods was forgotten at last. Catherine learned that she had married a giant. The volcanic energy with which Blake did all that roused his enthusiasm was now shown in the fire of newmarried life lived at its highest and fullest.

In marrying Catherine he had come to his wife as innocent as she had come to him. He had lived at home. He had lived poor. He had spent his little pocket-money on art. He had thrown his energy into long walks and his desires into early love-making of the most chaste and ideal kind. Catherine was not a feeble maid. She was well able

to respond to his needs. She had been brought up in the open air, and in future years was to show the vigour that was in her by sharing with her husband the thirty- and fortymile walks in which he delighted to spend the long hours of a summer's day. But at the very outset of this honeymoonyear she received, along with the revelation of love's violence, the blow of blighting censorious contempt just as her heart was opening out to faith in life, and trust in those whose position enabled them to claim to be her superiors.

Till now she had always been the superior. As the only daughter of a substantial tradesman, and as a pretty brunette, tall, graceful, attractive, she had not lived to be five-andtwenty without being courted over and over again, and learning how to hold her own against the elbow-pinching, waist-gripping, lip-snatching gallantries of the robust seedsmen in her father's nursery garden. Their manners must have been a rough caricature of the liberties that frolicsome young bloods in those days were accustomed to take publicly in Covent Garden. Now she had a new experience. Suave and artificial compliments were followed by the most wounding contempt. She had never been so praised before. She had never been despised at all.

In bitter misery of heart she lost the power to find her whole world in her husband's arms, in the divine fever of married love. His confident demands of rapture revolted her. She lost sympathy and unity with him. They saw themselves suddenly as two strangers. The modesty that had been so long the stronghold of her self-respect had only been lulled asleep in the Venusberg for a moment. And now, just when it ought to have most firmly and sedulously kept its eyes shut, it woke up. She alienated by rebuke the husband whose love she had won by pity first, and by pleasure after.

The shock to him was as unforeseen and deadly as had been the shock of the drawing-room world's contempt to her. In the perfect selfishness of their warm and undisciplined hearts, they neither of them saw what was happening. It was quite hidden from her that she was telling him that the spite of a few strangers who had no claim whatsoever on her consideration was of more weight with her than the whole heart's love and whole body's vigour of her pure, true, and fiery husband, and could sadden her more than his love could delight and absorb. Yet this was exactly what her inability to forget their slights and respond to his love as before, when they

still admired her, said to him more plainly than she could have spoken it in words. She did not see that she herself was inflicting on him a slight made up of all that she had received, that she was passing on the wounds, and in her hands the knife was driven deep into the soul by the addition to its power of the vigour of a new love and new hope. But that, of course, is what he felt. When his love did first begin she did call that love a sin, as he reminded her long afterwards in the verses called Broken Love. She was now like Vala in the net of religion, and not Vala the innocent, who in olden days" forgave the furious love" of Albion (Jerusalem, page 20, line 37). Blake did not take his disaster easily. He rebelled with fury against her pretence of claiming in the bridal room to repeat the high-handed law-giving from the female to the male that might have been becoming in her as a pure maid among enterprising and unpolished suitors. Virginity is a throne; matrimony is another. But they are not the same throne, and the dignity and sovereignty of one is so unlike the dignity and sovereignty of the other as to be almost its opposite. What is to be done with a wife whose heart does not teach her this?

For a while Blake's fury and indignation made him almost blunder into wickedness. Modesty seemed to him now to be the only sin. He never quite disentangled it from prudery all his life long. He began by making a mistake, as unjustifiable as his wife had made in claiming to map out the limits of the passionate love that he offered to her. He told her that if she set up such boundaries he had a right to give to others what she shut off from herself. Just as a man becomes half a thief from the moment that he discusses the stability of the rights of property, and questions how far these may be forfeited by a neglect of the duties that go with them, so Blake became half unfaithful to her in his anger. Half unfaithful only, however, the theoretic half. He fumed out to his wife a theory of matrimony as preposterously arrogant and patriarchal as hers was preposterously vestal. He claimed the right of Abraham to give to Hagar what Sarah refused. Both these poor children of the heart must be forgiven. They were very miserable. They were lost in the labyrinth of love's forest, and were leading one another astray.

Blake lay down on his bed, choked with the love that was flung back on him. His wife sat weeping and pale, feeling not only despised, but deserted. She did not know that if

her husband had really deserted her he would not be ill in this way, but would be only ill in the soul, while his health would have been sparkling, and his cheerfulness hard, brazen, and inaccessibly unscrupulous. His wife now called in his sister, with the instinct that makes woman turn to woman when in despair of man, and Blake, in a delirium of misery, rebellious and estranged, refusing to be tortured by the frigidity of his foolish and sobbing wife any longer, burst out with his announcement that he would take some one else in her place, some merry and attractive girl who should do him justice.

At this a deadly fear and horror came over poor Catherine, whose sore heart could bear no more. That her husband had led her into the false and falsely-educated world, where she had been despised, was bad enough in him, and that he had shown not an atom of sympathy with her in her misery, but had expected her to come home, forget it all, and blend herself entirely in his masterful appetite, was worse. There was desertion of the heart, in this claim to use her like a slave for his pleasure when unhappiness had taken from her the power to answer as a bride should to his love. But now had come the worst of all. She was to be publicly cast off and shamed before his family. She felt her courage give way, and crying out in her desolation, she fell down in a heap by the bed.

Something else as well as her courage gave way then. In that cry and that heavy fall, and in the great trouble Blake and his sister had to bring her to consciousness again when, with a sudden pang of pity, he threw off selfishness from his heart, and once for all gave himself entirely to her, we have the sad knowledge why this vigorous and unstained young couple lived childless all their lives.

Catherine was at that moment on her way to become a mother. But, as is often the case with those who are checked by a sudden shock or accident when in this condition, she could never from that hour go through it to the end of the allotted months of preparation where another life should wait to meet her, giving and receiving welcome.

Fortunately for us poor mortals, there is nothing so robust in all the world as wedded love. If it is not absolutely killed, nothing can prevent it from recovering most of its youth and strength in a very short time.

Within a month or two after this incident Mr. and Mrs. Blake were laughing together over the follies of the Mathews