The Vale of Tempe is one of Martin’s larger plates seldom seen in the collector’s catalogue.  We have viewed it and other rare prints in the choice collection referred to already.  Satan holding council, after Milton, is a striking conception.  The Prince of Eblis sits on a vast globe of ebony.  About him are tier upon tier of faces, the faces of devils.  Infernal chandeliers depend from remote ceilings.  Light gashes the globe and the face and figure of Satan; both are of supernal beauty.  Could this mezzotint, so small in size, so vast in its shadowy suggestiveness, have stirred Baudelaire to lines that shine with a metallic poisonous lustre?

And there is that tiny mezzotint in which we find ourselves at the base of a rude little hill.  The shock of the quaking earth, the silent passing of the sheeted dead and the rush of the affrighted multitudes tell us that a cosmic tragedy is at hand.  In a flare of lightning we see silhouetted against an angry sky three crosses at the top of a sad little hill.  It is a crucifixion infinitely more real, more intense than Dore’s.  Another scene—­also engraved by Le Keux:  On a stony platform, vast and crowded, the people kneel in sackcloth and ashes; the heavens thunder over the weeping millions of Nineveh, and the Lord of Hosts will not be appeased.  Stretching to the clouds are black basaltic battlements, and above rear white-terraced palaces as swans that strain their throats to the sky.  The mighty East is in penitence.  Or, Elijah is rapt to heaven in a fiery whirlwind; or God creates light.  This latter is one of the most extraordinary conceptions of a great visionary and worthy of William Blake.  Or Sadak searching for the waters of oblivion.  Alas, poor humanity! is here the allegory.  A man, a midget amid the terrifying altitudes of barren stone, lifts himself painfully over a ledge of rock.  Above him are vertiginous heights; below him, deadly precipices.  Nothing helps him but himself—­a page torn from Max Stirner is this parable.  Light streams upon the struggling egoist as he toils to the summit of consciousness.  Among the designs of nineteenth-century artists we can recall none so touching, so powerful, so modern as this picture.  Martin was not equally successful in portraying celestial episodes, though his paradises are enormous panoramas replete with architectural beauties.  His figures, as exemplified in Miltonic illustrations, are more conventional than Fuseli’s and never naively original as are Blake’s.  Indeed, of Blake’s mystic poetry and divination Martin betrays no trace.  He is not so much the seer as the inventor of infernal harmonies.  Satan reviewing his army of devils is truly magnificent in its depiction of the serried host armed for battle; behind glistens burning Tophet in all its smoky splendour.  Satan in shining armour must be a thousand feet high; he is sadly out of scale.  So, too, in the quarrel of Michael and Satan over the sleeping Adam and Eve.  Blake is here recalled