on more than half your acquaintance had you will or right to turn their pockets inside out;' the artist candidly acknowledges that he 'seldom carries money in his pockets, they are generally full of paper,' which we readily believe. Towards the close, Lavater drops a doubt that he may have 'perhaps already offended his readers;' which elicits from Blake a final note of sympathy. 'Those who are offended with anything in this book, would be offended with the innocence of a child, and for the same reason, because it reproaches him with the errors of acquired folly.'
Enough of the Annotations on Lavater, which, in fulfilment of biographic duty, I have thus copiously quoted; too copiously, the reader may think, for their intrinsic merit. To me they seem mentally physiognomic, giving a near view of Blake in his ordinary moments at this period. We, as through a casually open window, glance into the artist's room, and see him meditating at his work, graver in hand.
Lavater's Aphorisms not only elicited these comments from Blake, but set him composing aphorisms on his own account, of a far more original and startling character. In Lavater's book I trace the external accident to which the form is attributable of a remarkable portion—certain 'Proverbs of Hell,' as they were waywardly styled—of an altogether remarkable book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, engraved two years later; the most curious and significant book, perhaps, out of many, which ever issued from the unique man's press.
Turning from the Annotations on Lavater to higher, less approachable phases of this original Mind, the indubitably INSPIRED aspects of it, it is time to note that the practice of verse had, as we saw in 1784, been once more resumed, in a higher key and clearer tones than he had yet sounded. Design more original and more mature than any he had before realized, at once grand, lovely, comprehensible, was in course of production. It must have been during the years 1784—88, the Songs and Designs sprang from his creative brain, of which another chapter must speak.
