Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
    And binding with briers my joys and desires;

and one cannot help hazarding the conjecture, that Blake’s prophetic vision recognised, in the lineaments of the ‘priests in black gowns,’ most of his future editors.  Perhaps, though, if Blake’s prescience had extended so far as this, he would have taken a more drastic measure; and we shudder to think of the sort of epigram with which the editorial efforts of his worshippers might have been rewarded.  The present edition, however, amply compensates for the past.  Mr. Sampson gives us, in the first place, the correct and entire text of the poems, so printed as to afford easy reading to those who desire access to the text and nothing more.  At the same time, in a series of notes and prefaces, he has provided an elaborate commentary, containing, besides all the variorum readings, a great mass of bibliographical and critical matter; and, in addition, he has enabled the reader to obtain a clue through the labyrinth of Blake’s mythology, by means of ample quotations from those passages in the Prophetic Books, which throw light upon the obscurities of the poems.  The most important Blake document—­the Rossetti MS.—­has been freshly collated, with the generous aid of the owner, Mr. W.A.  White, to whom the gratitude of the public is due in no common measure; and the long-lost Pickering MS.—­the sole authority for some of the most mystical and absorbing of the poems—­was, with deserved good fortune, discovered by Mr. Sampson in time for collation in the present edition.  Thus there is hardly a line in the volume which has not been reproduced from an original, either written or engraved by the hand of Blake.  Mr. Sampson’s minute and ungrudging care, his high critical acumen, and the skill with which he has brought his wide knowledge of the subject to bear upon the difficulties of the text, combine to make his edition a noble and splendid monument of English scholarship.  It will be long indeed before the poems of Blake cease to afford matter for fresh discussions and commentaries and interpretations; but it is safe to predict that, so far as their form is concerned, they will henceforward remain unchanged.  There will be no room for further editing.  The work has been done by Mr. Sampson, once and for all.

In the case of Blake, a minute exactitude of text is particularly important, for more than one reason.  Many of his effects depend upon subtle differences of punctuation and of spelling, which are too easily lost in reproduction.  ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright,’ is the ordinary version of one of his most celebrated lines.  But in Blake’s original engraving the words appear thus—­’Tyger!  Tyger! burning bright’; and who can fail to perceive the difference?  Even more remarkable is the change which the omission of a single stop has produced in the last line of one of the succeeding stanzas of the same poem.