A VISION OF THE LAST JUDGMENT.

THE Last Judgment is not fable, or allegory, but vision. Fable, or allegory, is a totally distinct and inferior kind of poetry. Vision, or imagination, is a representation of what actually exists, really and unchangeably. Fable, or allegory, is formed by the daughters of Memory. Imagination is surrounded by the daughters of inspiration, who, in the aggregate, are called Jerusalem. Fable is allegory, but what critics call the fable is vision itself. The Hebrew Bible and the Gospel of Jesus are not allegory, but eternal vision, or imagination, of all that exists. Note here that fable, or allegory, is seldom without some vision. Pilgrim's Progress is full of it; the Greek poets the same. But allegory and vision ought to be known as two distinct things, and so called for the sake of eternal life. The [ancients produce fable] when they assert that Jupiter usurped the throne of his father, Saturn, and brought on an iron age, and begot on Mnemosyne or Memory the great Muses, which are not inspiration, as the Bible is. Reality was forgot, and the varieties of time and space only remembered, and called reality. The Greeks represent Chronos, or Time, as a very aged man. This is fable, but the real vision of Time is an eternal youth. I have, however, somewhat accommodated my figure of Time to the common opinion; as I myself am also infected with it, and my vision is also infected, and I see Time aged-alas! too much so. Allegories are things that relate to moral virtues.

Moral virtues do not exist: they are allegories and dissimulations. But Time and Space are real beings, a male and a female; Time is a man, Space is a woman, and her masculine portion is Death. Such is the mighty difference between allegoric fable and spiritual mystery. Let it here be noted that the Greek fables originated in spiritual mystery and real vision, which are lost and clouded in fable and allegory; while the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Gospel are genuine, preserved by the Saviour's mercy. The nature of my work is visionary, or imaginative; it is an endeavour to restore what the ancients called the Golden Age.

Plato has made Socrates say that poets and prophets do not know or understand what they write or utter. This is a most pernicious falsehood. If they do not, pray is an inferior kind to be called 'knowing'? Plato confutes himself.

The Last Judgment is one of these stupendous visions. I have represented it as I saw it. To different people it appears differently, as everything else does.

In eternity one thing never changes into another thing: each identity is eternal. Consequently, Apuleius's Golden Ass, and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and others of the like kind, are fable; yet they contain vision in a sublime degree, being derived from real vision in more ancient writings. Lot's wife being changed into a pillar of salt alludes to the mortal body being rendered a permanent statue, but not changed or transformed into another identity, while it retains its own individuality. A man can never become ass nor horse; some are born with shapes of men who are both; but eternal identity is one thing, and corporeal vegetation is another thing. Changing water into wine by Jesus, and into blood by Moses, relates to vegetable nature also.

The nature of visionary fancy, or imagination, is very little known, and the eternal nature and permanence of its everexistent images are considered as less permanent than the things of vegetable and generative nature. Yet the oak dies as well as the lettuce; but its eternal image or individuality

never dies, but renews by its seed. Just so the imaginative image returns by the seed of contemplative thought. The writings of the prophets illustrate these conceptions of the visionary fancy by their various sublime and divine images as seen in the worlds of vision.

The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation, or vegetation, is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the permanent realities of every thing which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.

All things are comprehended in these eternal forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the true vine of eternity. who appeared to me as coming to judgment, among His saints, and throwing off the temporal, that the eternal might be established. Around him were seen the images of existences according to a certain order, suited to my imaginative eye, as follows:

Jesus seated between the two pillars, Joachin and Boaz, with the word divine of revelation on His knee, and on each side. the four-and-twenty elders sitting in judgment; the heavens opening around Him by unfolding the clouds around His throne. The old heavens and the old earth are passing away, and the new heavens and the new earth descending: a sea of fire issues from before the throne. Adam and Eve appear first before the judgment-seat, in humiliation; Abel surrounded by innocents; and Cain, with the flint in his hand with which he slew his brother, falling with the head downwards. From the cloud on which Eve stands, Satan is seen falling headlong, wound round by the tail of the serpent, whose bulk, nailed to the cross round which he wreathes, is falling into the abyss. Sin is also represented as a female bound in oneof the serpent's folds, surrounded by her fiends. Death is chained to the cross, and Time falls together with Death, dragged down by a demon crowned with laurel. Another

demon, with a key, has the charge of Sin, and is dragging her down by the hair. Beside them a figure is seen, scaled with iron scales from head to feet, precipitating himself into the abyss with the sword and balances: he is Og, king of Bashan.

On the right, beneath the cloud on which Abel kneels, is Abraham, with Sarah and Isaac, also with Hagar and Ishmael on the left. Abel kneels on a bloody cloud, descriptive of those Churches before the Flood, that they were filled with blood and fire and vapour of smoke. Even till Abraham's time the vapour and heat were not extinguished. These states exist now. Man passes on, but states remain for ever: he passes through them like a traveller, who may as well suppose that the places he has passed through exist no more, as a man may, suppose that the states he has passed through exist no more: everything is eternal.

Beneath Ishmael is Mahomed and beneath the falling figure of Cain is Moses, casting his tables of stone into the deeps. It ought to be understood that the persons, Moses and Abraham, are not here meant, but the states signified by those names; the individuals being representatives, or visions, of those states, as they were revealed to mortal man in the series of divine revelations, as they are written in the Bible. These various states I have seen in my imagination. When distant, they appear as one man; but, as you approach, they appear multitudes of nations. Abraham hovers above his posterity, which appear as multitudes of children ascending from the earth, surrounded by stars, as it was said: 'As the stars of heaven for multitude.' Jacob and his twelve sons hover beneath the feet of Abraham, and receive their children from the earth. I have seen, when at a distance, multitudes of men in harmony appear like a single infant, sometimes in the arms of a female. This represented the Church.

But to proceed with the description of those on the left hand. Beneath the cloud on which Moses kneels are two figures, a male and a female, chained together by the feet.

They represent those who perished by the Flood. Beneath them a multitude of their associates are seen falling headlong. By the side of them is a mighty fiend with a book in his hand, which is shut he represents the person named in Isaiah xxii. c. and 20 v., Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah. He drags Satan down headlong. He is crowned with oak. By the side of the scaled figure, representing Og, king of Bashan, is a figure with a basket, emptying out the varieties of riches and worldly honours. He is Araunah, the Jebusite, master of the threshing-floor. Above him are two figures elevated on a cloud, representing the Pharisees, who plead their own righteousness before the throne: they are weighed down by two fiends. Beneath the man with the basket are three fiery fiends, with grey beards, and scourges of fire: they represent cruel laws. They scourge a group of figures down into the deeps. Beneath them are various figures in attitudes of contention, representing various states of misery, which, alas! every one on earth is liable to enter into, and against which we should all watch. The ladies will be pleased to see that I have represented the Furies by three men, and not by three women. It is not because I think the ancients wrong; but they will be pleased to remember that mine is vision, and not fable. The spectator spectator may suppose them clergymen in the pulpit, scourging sin, instead of forgiving it.

The earth beneath these falling groups of figures is rocky and burning, and seems as if convulsed by earthquakes. A great city, on fire, is seen in the distance. The armies (?) are fleeing upon the mountains. On the foreground Hell is opened, and many figures are descending into it down stone steps, and beside a gate beneath a rock, where Sin and Death are to be closed eternally by that fiend who carries the key in one hand, and drags them down with the other. On the rock, and above the gate, a fiend with wings urges the wicked onward with fiery darts. He is Hazael, the Syrian, who drives abroad all those who rebel against their Saviour.