In the meanwhile some of us had read his books:  chromo-lithographs, struck in the primary colours; pasteboard complications of passion and adventure, with the conservative entanglement of threadbare marionnettes—­a hero, tall, with golden brown moustaches and blue eyes; a heroine, lissome, with ‘sunny locks;’ then a swarthy villain, for the most part a nobleman, and his Spanish-looking female accomplice, who had an uncomfortable habit of delivering her remarks ‘from between clenched teeth,’ and, generally, ’in a blood-chilling hiss’—­the narrative set forth in a sustained fortissimo, and punctuated by the timely exits of the god from the machine.  Never a felicity, never an impression.  I fancy he had made his notes of human nature whilst observing the personages of a melodrama at a provincial theatre.  He loved the obvious sentiment, the obvious and but approximate word.

But the climax of his infatuation was not disclosed till the night before he left us.  Again we were in session at the Cafe des Souris, and the talk had turned upon metempsychosis.  Blake, for a wonder, pricked up his ears and appeared to listen, at the same time watching his chance to take the floor.  Half-a-dozen men had their say first, however; then he cut in.

’Metempsychosis is not a theory, it is a fact.  I can testify to it from my personal experience.  I know it.  I can distinctly recall my former life.  I can tell you who I was, who my friends were, what I did, what I felt, everything, down to the very dishes I preferred for dinner.’

Chalks scanned Blake’s features for an instant with an intentness that suggested a mingling of perplexity and malice; then, all at once, I saw a light flash in his eyes, which forthwith began to twinkle in a manner that struck me as ominous.

‘In my early youth,’ Blake continued, ’this memory of mine was, if I may so phrase it, piecemeal and occasional.  Feeling that I was no ordinary man, conscious of strange forces struggling in me, I would obtain, as it were, glimpses, fleeting and unsatisfactory, into a former state.  Then they would go, not for long intervals to return.  As time elapsed, however, these glimpses, to call them so, became more frequent and lasting, the intervals of oblivion shorter; and at last, one day on Hampstead Heath, I identified myself in a sudden burst of insight.  I was walking on the Heath, and thinking of my work—­marvelling at a certain quality I had discerned in it, which, I was convinced, would assure it everlasting life:  a quality that seemed not unfamiliar to me, and yet which I could associate with none of the writers whose names passed in review before my mind; not with Byron, or Shelley, or Keats, not with Wordsworth or Coleridge, Goethe or Dante, not even with Homer.  I mean the quality which I call universal—­universal in its authenticity, universal in its appeal.  By-and-bye, I took out a little pocket mirror that I always carry, and looked into it, studying my face.  One glance sufficed.  There, suddenly, on Hampstead Heath, the whole thing flashed upon me.  I saw, I understood; I realised who I was, I remembered everything.’