be by no means the oddest thing ever known, if Messrs. Hume and Foster and Davenport were possessed of supernatural faculties. But, because many unaccountable things are true, that is no reason why I should believe a thing simply because it is unaccountable. Then I am told that, admitting as I do the theoretical possibility of Spiritualism being true, I ought to devote myself to the investigation of it truth, because, if true, the discovery is so important a one. Now, there are a score of sects in the world who each profess that, only by adhering to their tenets can I, or any other human being, avoid everlasting misery. Nothing can be more important than this, if true; and yet I ask, is any reasonable man bound to investigate the claims of Johanna Southcote to divinity or of Joe Smith to inspiration? Life is not long enough to investigate every new theory that is started either about this world or the next.

Then, as a last argument, I am constantly asked how I account for the belief entertained in Spiritualism by many men of distinction and eminence and talent far greater than ninety-nine persons out of a hundred can ever pretend to. Now, I grant, as I did at starting, that the adherence of some of these persons to their new creed is a serious puzzle to me. Still, in every spiritualistic believer I have known, I have observed, or fancied that I observed, some predisposing cause which accounted more or less for his or her conversion. Moreover, my experience

-as I think that of any one connected with journalism-has led me to perceive how utterly untrustworthy is the evidence even of honest men about facts which fall under their own observation. There are plenty of men in the world, happily, who tell the truth; there are many also who tell the whole truth; but the number of those who tell "nothing but the truth" is very small. I remember once, in the early days of table-turning, having tried the experiment of turning a table in the company of a lady, now dead. Of all persons I have ever known, she was, I think, one of the most truthful. I believe that, sooner than tell a lie, even on the most trivial matter, she would have suffered martyrdom. The table undoubtedly turned, and the lady in question-not herself, by the way, a believer in Spiritualismdeclared positively she had not pressed it. Yet I happened to be watching her fingers all the time, and, if ever I saw pressure distinctly shown by the tension of the muscles, it was in the case I allude to. I merely mention this instance to show, that the fact that I distrust the stories told me of their own experiences by friends of my own, does not imply any disbelief on my part in their intentional veracity. All I demand is that, if I am to believe a table jumps of its own accord, I must require some less suspicious evidence than that afforded me by the manifestations vouchsafed through the medium of the various operators I have witnessed in my lifeincluding the Davenport Brothers.

CHAPTER LIII.

FEEDS THE BOAR AT THE OLD FRANK?

THE pleasant summer passed away, and Gerty found to her terror that the days when she dared creep out into the sun with Baby, and warm herself under the south wall, were become fewer; that the

cruel English winter was settling down once more, and that she and her little one would have to pass it together in the great house alone.

At first after George's departure people continued to call; but Gerty never returned their visits, and before the later nights of September began to grow warningly chill, it was understood that

Sir George was abroad; and very soon afterwards Lady Tattle found out that Lady Hillyar was mad, my dear, and that Sir George had refused to let her go into an asylum, but had generously given up Stanlake to her and her keeper. That florid grey-headed man whom we saw driving with her in Croydon was the keeper. Such stories. did they make about poor Gerty and Mr. Compton; which stories, combined with Gerty's shyness, ended in her being left entirely alone before autumn was well begun.

Soon after Sir George's departure Mr. Compton heard from him on business, and a very quiet business-like letter he wrote. He might be a very long time absent, he said, and therefore wished these arrangements to be made. The most valuable of the bricabrac was to be moved from Grosvenor-place to Stanlake; Lady Hillyar would select what was to be brought away, and then the house was to be let furnished. The shooting on the Wiltshire and Somersetshire estates was to be let if possible. The shooting at Stanlake was not to be let, but Morton was to sell all the game which was not required for the house by Lady Hillyar. Mr. Compton would also take what game he liked. He wished the rabbits killed down: Farmer Stubble, at Whitespring, had been complaining. The repairs requested by Farmer Stubble were to be done at once, to the full extent demanded; and so on in other instances-yielding quietly, and to the full, points he had been fighting for for months. At last he came to Stanlake. Stanlake was to be kept up exactly in the usual style. Not a servant discharged. Such horses as Lady Hillyar did not require were to be turned out, but none sold, and none bought, except under her ladyship's directions. He had written to Drummonds, and Lady Hillyar's cheques could be honoured. There was a revolution here (Paris), but how the dickens it came about, he, although on the spot, couldn't make out. There were no buttons here such as Lady Hillyar wished for; but, when he got to Vienna, he might get some, and would write to

her from that place and put her in possession of facts. She might, however, rely that, if money could get them, she should have them.

He did not write one word to Gerty. His old habits were coming back fastamong others, that of laziness. Boswell, enlarging on a hastily expressed opinion of Johnson's, tries to make out the ghastly doctrine that all men's evil habits return to them in later life. What Boswell says is, possibly, no matter-although he was not half such a fool as it has pleased my Lord Macaulay to make him out; yet there is a horrible spice of truth in this theory of his, which makes it noticeable. Whether Boswell was right or not in general, he would have been right in particular if he had spoken of Sir George Hillyar; for, from the moment he cut the last little rope which bound him to his higher life, his old habits began flocking back to him like a crowd of black pigeons.

The buttons came from Vienna, and a letter. The letter was such a kind one that she went singing about the house for several days, and Mr. Compton, coming down to see her, was delighted and surprised at the change in her. After Sir George's departure, the poor little woman had one of her periodical attacks of tears, which lasted so long that she got quite silly, and Mr. Compton and the housekeeper had been afraid of her going mad. But she had no return of tearfulness after the letter from Vienna, but set cheerfully to work to garrison her fortress against the winter.

She would have had a few trees cut down for firewood in the Australian manner, had not the steward pointed out to her ladyship the inutility and extravagance of such a proceeding. She therefore went into coals to an extent which paralysed the resources of the coal merchant, who waited on her, and with tears in his eyes begged her not to withdraw her order, but to give him time; that was all he asked for

time. The next thing she did was, by Baby's advice, to lay in a large stock of toys, and then, by her own, an

"not originally have been scribblers in 66 verse, were gained, and the art of "tagging smooth couplets, without any "reference to the character of a poet, "became an almost indispensable requi"site in a fashionable education;" that hence arose "a spurious taste" which "reprobated and set at defiance our older masters;" and that "to cull "words, vary pauses, adjust accents,

diversify cadence, and by, as it were, "balancing the line, make the first part "of it betray the second," had become the chief accomplishment of an age whose poetical art seemed to consist entirely "of a suite of traditional

66

imagery, hereditary similes, readiness "of rhyme, and volubility of syllables." But the revolt thus openly proclaimed by the daring young critic, in 1787, had for some time been secretly fermenting, and it is common in this connexion to fix upon the publication of Percy's "Reliques," in 1765, as the first distinct sign of a change. Now it is universally allowed that the most remarkable specimens in Percy, of what may be termed ballad-thinking, are of Scottish origin; and Mr. Robert Chambers, in a recent tract which has not received the attention it deserves, attempts to make good the position that these famed Scottish ballads are by no means of such ancient origin as Percy imagined; that, in fact, they were produced in the early part of last century. We have not yet examined into this question so closely as to be able to give a decisive answer to it, and we reserve to ourselves the right of hereafter rejecting Mr. Chambers's theory; but in the meantime we cannot help thinking that he has made out a fair case for inquiry. The great difficulty of the question depends on the nature of the evidence which has to be weighed.

It turns

almost wholly on the delicacies of style and other points of internal evidence, which no cautious critic will care to decide off-hand. To detect and follow out resemblances is always a very ticklish task. The resemblance which strikes us to-day we cannot see tomorrow, and it is necessary to approach

the comparison many fresh times before we can quite make up our minds. In this case we start back with astonishment from the conclusion that "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens" is a veritable product of Pope's own day and generation. Yet Mr. Chambers has made out a strong case in favour of that conclusion. And if in accordance with this theory it should in the end prove that some of the best ballads in Percy-those which secured for his three volumes their chief influencewere produced in Scotland at the very time when Pope was in England elaborating his style and establishing his supremacy, it will then follow that the seeds of the revolt against the English poet were being sown at the very same time when his authority began to be planted in the hearts of the people. Parallel with the movement of poetry in England there began a movement of poetry in Scotland. Nothing could be more splendid or self-asserting than the beginnings of the former; nothing more humble and retiring than the beginnings of the latter. But ere long the influence of the unpretending crept into the domain of pretentious song, grew there into favour, at length overthrew the giant, and great was the downfall.

Now Blake asserted his originality at a time when it was an extraordinary merit to do so- -when as yet the ballad style which Percy favoured had not thoroughly told upon the public ear. Blake was eight years of age when, in 1765 (Mr. Gilchrist is wrong in the date 1760), Percy published his ballads, and he began to write in his eleventh year. His poems show a remarkable precocity, that does not suffer by comparison with the similar precocity of Chatterton, who was but four years ahead of him in age. By the year 1770 Chatterton had done his work and died at the age of seventeen. His younger compeer had begun to compose two years before, and had produced some strains which, for his age, are quite wonderful. The following piece was written certainly before the boy was fourteen, and shows a rare precocity:

How sweet I roam'd from field to field,
And tasted all the summer's pride,
Till I the prince of Love beheld,

Who in the sunny beams did glide!

; He shew'd me lilies for my hair,

And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow.

With sweet May-dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.

He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,

And mocks my loss of liberty.

To our thinking the finest verses penned by Blake are those addressed to a tiger; and whoever will read them, remembering the sort of style which was in vogue at the time of their composition, will have no difficulty in detecting in them the notes of a man of true genius. If this be madness, it is that species of it to which all genius is said to be near akin :

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Framed thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burned that fire within thine eyes?
On what wings dared he aspire?
What the hand dared seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
When thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand formed thy dread feet?

What the hammer, what the chain,
Knit thy strength and forged thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dared thy deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Blake, we say, never surpassed these verses, and it is curious that though here we have the true sublime, and though with his pencil he could at any time reach the sublime, yet the more ambitious efforts of his pen are usually the least successful. Sometimes-we must say it, with all deference to the really subtle criticism of Mr. Dante Rossetti

he is quite unintelligible; if he is not unintelligible, then he is either enigmatical, or he says common things with a disproportionate ponderosity, not of words, but of images. We gave some examples from the passage in which Blake tells us that a cock-fight "doth the rising sun affright." Here is more in the same style of disproportionate grandeur :

Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the last judgment draweth nigh:
The beggar's dog and widow's cat,
Feed them and thou shalt grow fat;
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;

The bleat, the bark, bellow and roar,
Are waves that beat on heaven's shore.

It is when he turns from the sublime and the difficult to the simple and easy, that he shows to best advantage. Witness the following bit of simplicity:

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,

And he, laughing, said to me:
'Pipe a song about a Lamb!'
So I piped with merry cheer.
'Piper, pipe that song again;'

So I piped: he wept to hear.
'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!'
So I sang the same again,

While he wept with joy to hear.

'Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.'
So he vanish'd from my sight,
And I pluck'd a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,

And I stain'd the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.

Blake was peculiar in his mode of publication. He engraved his poems, he surrounded each page with drawings to illustrate the text, and he carefully coloured these drawings by hand. His illustrative designs, whether mixed up with the text or drawn on a separate page, are of various degrees of merit and of interest. In every design there is evident the perfect ease of a master. There is no doubt that he could draw

well, but frequently he chose to draw impossibilities-heads and legs in impossible attitudes, muscles developed beyond all possible tension. In this he was supposed to resemble Michael Angelo; but the great Italian, if he strained to the utmost degree the appearance of muscular action, never represented actions which the muscles were incapable of performing. Blake often outdid nature in this way. Sometimes, too, he seemed to have no idea of what composition is. The first glance at many of his designs is so far from exciting expectation of any good thing, that it is bewildering. The details of the picture are tossed about in hopeless confusion, which it takes some little time to understand. Yet, notwithstanding these defects, there is scarcely a drawing of Blake's in which close study does not detect rare beauties and suggestions. He was wonderfully suggestive, and it is not without reason that the authors and editors of the present biography attribute to Blake's influence much that is peculiarly impressive in the style both of Flaxman and Stothard. His angels are among the finest things we have ever seen, and his treatment of angelic forms is famous for originality. His sense of colour, too, is most remarkable, and receives high praise from a colourist, Mr. Dante Rossetti, than whom no living painter is better able to judge. The painters who are known among us as pre-Raphaelites are most excellent of all in their sense of colour, and Blake may be regarded as the herald and forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite system of colour, "in which tints laid on side by side, "each in its utmost force, are made by masterly treatment to produce a start'ling and novel effect of truth." Mr. Rossetti admits, however, that now and then an unaccountable perversity may be apparent in Blake's colour, as when a "tiger is painted in fantastic streaks of "red, green, blue, and yellow, while a "tree stem at his side tantalizingly "supplies the tint which one might venture to think his due, and is perfect 86 tiger-colour!" A mistake of this kind in colour is more easily detected than

one of form, but it is to impossibilities of drawing not less wonderful than the impossibility of colouring a tiger blue and green that we ventured to refer when just now speaking of the supposed resemblance of his style to that of Michael Angelo. Neither for colouring nor for drawing, however, should Blake be judged by only a few of his works. Much of his art looks like mere nightmare, and oppresses one sometimes with the oppressive hideousness, sometimes with the oppressive loveliness, of night-mare. To understand the man

well he ought to be studied as a whole, and his admirers ought to make some attempt to bring his innumerable works together. Then we should see the enormous energy of the man; his prodigious power of invention; how grand and how graceful he could be in design; how spiritual and poetical were all his thoughts and views of life. He is best

known by his illustrations to Blair's Grave; but the volumes of coloured designs are even more interesting. Some of these will be found in the Print-room of the British Museum. But still finer examples belong to the collections of Lord Houghton and Captain Butts. In the possession of Captain Butts are three works which we have never seen; but Mr. William Rossetti is a competent judge, we accept his opinion of them without misgiving, and we shall quote that opinion as a remarkable testimony to the wonderworking faculty of Blake's pencil. Mr. Rossetti has made a descriptive catalogue of every one of Blake's works of which he could find a traceno matter how slight; and the three works to which we refer bear in his catalogue respectively the numbers 18, 44, and 54. Here is what Mr. Rossetti says:

ELOHIM CREATING ADAM.

The Creator is an amazingly grand figure, worthy of a primeval imagination or intuition. He is struggling, as it were, above Adam, who lies distended on the ground, a serpent twined around one leg. The colour has a terrible power in it; and the entire design is truly a mighty one-perhaps on the whole the greatest monument extant of Blake's genius.