In the next design we have a little island of the sea, where an infant springs to its mother's bosom. From the birth-cleft ground a spirit has half emerged. Below, with outstretched arms and hoary beard, an awful ancient man rushes at you, as it were, out of the page.

At the top of the fourteenth page a spirit, with streaming locks, extends her arms across, pointing hither and thither. She hovers, poised over a corpse, which looks as if laid out,' the arms straight by the sides; helpless, uncoffined; flames are rolling onward to consume it.

The ninth design is of an eagle flying and gazing upwards: his talons gripe a long snake trailing and writhing. Both are flecked with gold, and coruscate as from a light within.

The tenth presents a huddled group of solemn figures seated on the ground. The next is a surging of mingled fire, water, and blood, wherein roll the volumes of a huge doublefanged serpent, his crest erect, his jaws wide open.

In the twelfth, the disembodied spirit, luminous and radiant, sits lightly upon its late prison house, gazing upwards whither it is about to soar. It is the same figure as that in Blair's Grave, where you see also the natural body, bent with years, tottering into the dark doorway beneath.

The thirteenth and last design gives Blake's idea of Nebuchadnezzar in the wilderness. Mr. Palmer tells me that he has old German translations of Cicero and Petrarch, in which, among some wild and original designs, almost the very same figure occurs; but that many years had elapsed after making his own design before Blake saw the woodcut.

The designs are highly finished: Blake had worked upon them so much, and illuminated them so richly, that even the letterpress seems as if done by hand. The ever-fluctuating colour, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping among the letters; the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and bursts of flame, the spires and tongues of fire vibrating with the full prism, make the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries, and you lay the book down tenderly, as if you

had been handling something sentient. A picture has been said to be midway between a thing and a thought; so in these books over which Blake had long brooded, with his brooding of fire, the very paper seems to come to life as you gaze upon it-not with a mortal life, but with a life indestructible, whether for good or evil.

The volume is an octavo, consisting of twenty-four pages; all of them illuminated. In some copies the letters are red, in others a golden brown. The engraved page is about six inches by four. Occasionally a deep margin was left so as to form a quarto. Lord Houghton possesses a fine quarto, Mr. Linnell an octavo copy.

The subjoined outline of Nebuchadnezzar is not copied from the design just spoken of in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but is a facsimile of what was probably the original sketch for this, and is taken from a MS. volume by Blake, of rare interest and value, in the possession of Mr. Rossetti. This book contains, besides rough sketches and rough draughts, afterwards elaborated into finished designs and poems, much that exists in no other form. The kindness of the owner enables me freely to draw from this source.

CHAPTER XI.

BOOKSELLER JOHNSON'S. 1791-92. [ÆT. 34-35.]

THESE were prolific years with Blake, both in poetry and design. In 1791 he even found a publisher, for the first and last time in his life, in Johnson of St. Paul's Churchyard, to whom Fuseli had originally introduced him, and for whom he had already engraved. Johnson in this year—the same in which he published Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Women -issued, without Blake's name, and unillustrated, a thin quarto, entitled The French Revolution, a Poem in Seven Books. Book the First. One Shilling. Of the Revolution itself, only the first book, ending with the taking of the Bastille, had as yet been enacted. In due time the remainder followed. Those of Blake's epic already written were never printed, events taking a different turn from the anticipated one.

The French Revolution, though ushered into the world by a regular publisher, was no more successful than the privately printed Poetical Sketches, or the privately engraved Songs of Innocence, in reaching the public, or even in getting noticed by the monthly reviewers. It finds no place in their indices, nor in the catalogue of the Museum Library.

In this year Johnson employed Blake to design and engrave six plates to a series of Tales for Children, in the then prevailing Berquin School, by Johnson's favourite and protégée,

Mary Wollstonecraft; tales new and in demand in the autumn of 1791, now unknown to the bookstalls. 'Original stories' they are entitled, from real life, with conversations calcu'lated to regulate the affections and form the mind to truth.

'and goodness.' The designs, naïve and rude, can hardly be pronounced a successful competition with Stothard, though traces of a higher feeling are visible in the graceful female forms-benevolent heroine, or despairing, famishing peasant group. The artist evidently moves in constraint, and the

accessories of these domestic scenes are as simply generalised as a child's result of an inobservant eye for such things. They were not calculated to obtain Blake employment in a capacity in which more versatile hands and prettier designers, such as Burney and Corbould (failing Stothard), were far better fitted to succeed. The book itself never went to a second edition. More designs appear to have been made for the little work than were found available, and some of the best were among the rejected. It may interest the reader to have a sample of him in this comparatively humble department. Possessing most of the original drawings, we therefore give a print from one. There is, however, a terrible extremity of voiceless despair in the upturned face of the principal figure which, perhaps, no hand but that of him who conceived it could accurately reproduce. He also re-engraved for Johnson some designs by Chodowiecki to a book of pinafore precepts, called Elements of Morality, translated from the German of Salzmann by Mary Wollstonecraft;1 and among casual work engraved a plate for Darwin's Botanic Garden-The Fertilization of Egypt-after Fuseli.

Bookseller Johnson was a favourable specimen of a class of booksellers and men now a tradition: an open-hearted tradesman of the eighteenth century, of strict probity, simple habits, liberal in his dealings, living by his shop and in it, not at a suburban mansion. He was, for nearly forty years, Fuseli's fast and intimate friend, his first and best; the kind patron of Mary Wollstonecraft, and of many another. He encouraged Cowper over The Task, after the first volume of Poems had been received with indifference; and when The Task met its sudden unexpected success, he righteously pressed 1,000l. on the author, although both this and the previous volume had been assigned to him for nothing-as an equivalent, that is, for the bare cost of publication. Το Blake, also, Johnson was friendly, and tried to help him as far as he could help so unmarketable a talent.

1 Notes and Queries, June 19, 1880.