There are doubtless many to whom Blake is known simply as a charming and splendid lyrist, as the author of Infant Joy, and The Tyger, and the rest of the Songs of Innocence and Experience.  These poems show but faint traces of any system of philosophy; but, to a reader of the Rossetti and Pickering MSS., the presence of a hidden and symbolic meaning in Blake’s words becomes obvious enough—­a meaning which receives its fullest expression in the Prophetic Books.  It was only natural that the extraordinary nature of Blake’s utterance in these latter works should have given rise to the belief that he was merely an inspired idiot—­a madman who happened to be able to write good verses.  That belief, made finally impossible by Mr. Swinburne’s elaborate Essay, is now, happily, nothing more than a curiosity of literary history; and indeed signs are not wanting that the whirligig of Time, which left Blake for so long in the Paradise of Fools, is now about to place him among the Prophets.  Anarchy is the most fashionable of creeds; and Blake’s writings, according to Sir Walter Raleigh, contain a complete exposition of its doctrines.  The same critic asserts that Blake was ’one of the most consistent of English poets and thinkers.’  This is high praise indeed; but there seems to be some ambiguity in it.  It is one thing to give Blake credit for that sort of consistency which lies in the repeated enunciation of the same body of beliefs throughout a large mass of compositions and over a long period of time, and which could never be possessed by a, madman or an incoherent charlatan.  It is quite another thing to assert that his doctrines form in themselves a consistent whole, in the sense in which that quality would be ordinarily attributed to a system of philosophy.  Does Sir Walter mean to assert that Blake is, in this sense too, ‘consistent’?  It is a little difficult to discover.  Referring, in his Introduction, to Blake’s abusive notes on Bacon’s Essays, he speaks of—­

The sentimental enthusiast, who worships all great men indifferently, [and who] finds himself in a distressful position when his gods fall out among themselves.  His case [Sir Walter wittily adds] is not much unlike that of Terah, the father of Abraham, who (if the legend be true) was a dealer in idols among the Chaldees, and, coming home to his shop one day, after a brief absence, found that the idols had quarrelled, and the biggest of them had smashed the rest to atoms.  Blake is a dangerous idol for any man to keep in his shop.

We wonder very much whether he is kept in Sir Walter Raleigh’s.