could spell any words. . . . He knew the Greek alphabet'; and on his fourth birthday, in that year, he writes to his mother saying that he has got a Latin grammar and English prints. In October 1800 he says: 'I know a deal of Latin,' and in December he is reading Burns's poems, 'which I am very fond of.' Influence or accident, the coincidence is singular, and at least shows us something in Blake's brain working like the brain of a precocious child.
In 1806 Blake wrote a generous and vigorous letter to the editor of the Monthly Review (July 1, 1806) in reply to a criticism which had appeared in Bell's Weekly Messenger on Fuseli's picture of Count Ugolino in the Royal Academy. In 1808 he had himself, and for the fifth and last time, two pictures in the Academy, and in that year he wrote the letter to Ozias Humphrey, describing one of his many 'Last Judgments,' which is given, with a few verbal errors, by J. T. Smith. In December he wrote to George Cumberland, who had written to order for a friend 'a complete set of all you have published in the way of books coloured as mine are,' that 'new varieties, or
