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drawn by Linnell, is given in Mr. Story's Life of Linnell. Varley, though an astrologer on the mathematical side, was no visionary. He persuaded Blake to do a series of drawings, naming historical or legendary people to him, and carefully writing down name and date of the imaginary portraits which Blake willingly drew, and believing, it has been said, in the reality of Blake's visions more than Blake himself. Cunningham, in his farcical way, tells the story as he may have got it from Varley (see p. 420 below), for he claims in a letter to Linnell to have 'received much valuable information from him.' But the process has been described, more simply, by Varley himself in his Treatise of Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828), where the 'Ghost of a Flea' and the 'Constellation Cancer' are reproduced in engraving. Some of the heads are finely symbolical, and I should have thought the ghost of a flea, in the sketch, an invention more wholly outside nature if I had not seen, in Rome and in London, a man in whom it is impossible not to recognise the type, modified to humanity, but scarcely by a longer distance than the men from the