vehicle of publication excellently suited to his genius, but in other respects hardly convenient. This method was to execute text and illustrations at once on copper-plates, which were then treated in slightly different fashions. Impressions worked off from these by hand-press were coloured by hand, Blake and his wife executing the entire process. In this fashion were produced the lovely little gems of literature and design called Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794); in this way for the most part, but with some modifications, the vast and formidable mass of the so-called "Prophetic" Books. With the artistic qualities of Blake we are not here concerned, but it is permissible to remark that they resemble his literary qualities with a closeness which at once explains and is explained by their strangely combined method of production. That Blake was not entirely sane has never been doubted except by a few fanatics of mysticism, who seem to think that the denial of complete sanity implies a complete denial of genius. And though he was never, in the common phrase, "incapable of managing" such very modest affairs as were his, the defect appears most in the obstinate fashion in which he refused to perfect and co-ordinate his work. He could, when he chose and would give himself the trouble, draw quite exquisitely; and he always drew with marvellous vigour and imagination. But he would often permit himself faults of drawing quite inexplicable and not very tolerable. So, too, though he had the finest gift of literary expression, he chose often to babble and still oftener to rant at large. Even the Songs of Innocence and Experience—despite their double charm to the eye and the ear, and the presence of such things as the famous "Tiger," as the two "Introductions" (two of Blake's best things), and as "The Little Girl Lost"—show a certain poetical declension from the highest heights of the Poetical Sketches. The poet is no longer a poet pure and simple; he has got purposes and messages, and these partly strangle and partly render turbid the clear and spontaneous jets of poetry which refresh us in the "Mad Song" and the "Memory." And after the Songs Blake did not care to put forth anything bearing the ordinary form of poetry. We possess indeed other poetical work of his, recovered in scraps and fragments from MSS., and some of it is beautiful. But it is as a rule more chaotic than the Sketches themselves; it is sometimes defaced (being indeed mere private jottings never intended for print) by personality and coarseness; and it is constantly puddled with the jargon of Blake's mystical philosophy, which, borrowing some of its method from Swedenborg and much of its imagery and nomenclature from Ossian, spreads itself unhampered by any form whatever over the Prophetic Books. The literary merit of these in parts is often very high, and their theosophy (for that is the best single word for it) is not seldom majestic. But despite the attempts of some disciples to evolve a regular system from them, students of philosophy as well as of literature are never likely to be at much odds as to their real character. "Ravings" they are not, and they are very often the reverse of "nonsense." But they are the work of a man who in the first place was very slightly acquainted with the literature and antecedents of his subject, who in the second was distinctly non compos on the critical, though admirably gifted on the creative side of his brain, and who in the third had the ill luck to fall under the fullest sway of the Ossianic influence. To any one who loves and admires Blake—and the present writer deliberately ranks him as the greatest and most delectable poet of the eighteenth century proper in England, reserving Burns as specially Scotch—it must always be tempting to say more of him than can be allowed on such a scale as the present; but the scale must be observed.
There is all the more reason for the observance that Blake exercised on the literary history of his time no influence, and occupied in it no position. He always had a few faithful friends and patrons who kept him from starvation by their commissions, admired him, believed in him, and did him such good turns as his intensely independent and rather irritable disposition would allow. But the public had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of reading his books; and though the admiration of Lamb led to some appreciation from Southey and others, he was practically an unread man. This cannot be said of Robert Burns, who, born as was said a year or two after Blake, made his first literary venture three years after him, in 1786. Most people know that the publication, now famous and costly, called "the Kilmarnock Edition," was originally issued in the main hope of paying the poet's passage to Jamaica after an unfortunate youth of struggle, and latterly of dissipation. Nay, even after the appearance of the Poems and their welcome he still proposed to go abroad. He was summoned back to Edinburgh to reprint them, to make a considerable profit by them, and to be lionised without stint by the society of the Scottish capital. He then settled down, marrying Jean Armour, at Ellisland in Dumfriesshire, on a small farm and a post in the Excise, which, when his farming failed and he moved to Dumfries itself, became his only regular means of support. He might have increased this considerably by literature; but as it was he actually gave away, or disposed of for trifling equivalents, most of the exquisite songs which he wrote in his later years. These years were unhappy. He hailed the French Revolution with a perfectly innocent, because obviously ignorant, Jacobinism which, putting all other considerations aside, was clearly improper in a salaried official of the Crown, and thereby got into disgrace with the authorities, and also with society in and about Dumfries. His habits of living, though their recklessness has been vastly exaggerated, were not careful, and helped to injure both his reputation and his health. Before long he broke down completely, and died on the first of July 1796, his poetical powers being to the very last in fullest perfection.
Burns' work, which even in bulk—its least remarkable characteristic—is very considerable when his short life and his unfavourable education and circumstances are reckoned, falls at once into three sharply contrasted sections. There are his poems in Scots; there are the verses that, in obedience partly to the incompetent criticism of his time, partly to a very natural mistake of ambition and ignorance, he tried to write in conventional literary English; and there is his prose, taking the form of more or less studied letters. The second class of the poems is almost worthless, and fortunately it is not bulky. The letters are of unequal value, and have been variously estimated. They show indeed that, like almost all poets, he might, if choice and fate had united, have become a very considerable prose-writer, and they have immense autobiographic value. But they are sometimes, and perhaps often, written as much in falsetto as the division of verse just ruled out; their artificiality does not take very good models; and their literary attraction is altogether second-rate. How far different the value of the Scots poems is, four generations have on the whole securely agreed. The moral discomfort of Principal Shairp, the academic distaste of Mr. Matthew Arnold for a world of "Scotch wit, Scotch religion, and Scotch drink," and the purely indolent and ignorant reluctance of others to grapple with Scottish dialect, need not trouble the catholic critic much. The two first may be of some use as cautions and drags; the third may be thrown aside at once. Scots, though a dialect, is not a patois; it has a great and continuous literature; it combines in an extraordinary degree the consonant virtues of English and the vowel range of the Latin tongues. It is true that Burns' range of subject, as distinct from that of sound, was not extremely wide. He could give a voice to passion—passion of war, passion of conviviality, passion above all of love—as none but the very greatest poets ever have given or will give it; he had also an extraordinary command of genre-painting of all kinds, ranging from the merely descriptive and observant to the most intensely satirical. Perhaps he could only do these two things—could not be (as he certainly has not been) philosophical, deeply meditative, elaborately in command of the great possibilities of nature, political, moral, argumentative. But what an "only" have we here! It amounts to this, that Burns could "only" seize, could "only" convey the charms of poetical expression to, the more primitive thought and feeling of the natural man, and that he could do this supremely. His ideas are—to use the rough old Lockian division—ideas of sensation, not of reflection; and when he goes beyond them he is sensible, healthy, respectable, but not deep or high. In his own range there are few depths or heights to which he has not soared or plunged.
That he owed a good deal to his own Scottish predecessors, especially to Ferguson, is not now denied; and his methods of composing his songs are very different from those which a lesser man, using more academic forms, could venture upon without the certainty of the charge of plagiarism. We shall never understand Burns aright if we do not grasp the fact that he was a "folk-poet," into whom the soul of a poet of all time and all space had entered. In all times and countries where folk-poetry has a genuine existence, its forms and expressions are
