When William Blake flashed across the path of English polite society, society was confounded.  It had never had to do with such an apparition before, and was at its wits’ end.  But some Daniel was found wise enough to come to judgment, and pronounce the poet-painter mad; whereupon society at once composed itself, and went on its way rejoicing.

There are a few persons, however, who are not disposed to let this verdict stand unchallenged.  Mr. Arthur Gilchrist, late a barrister of the Middle Temple, a man, therefore, who must have been accustomed to weigh evidence, and who would not have been likely to decide upon insufficient grounds, wrote a life of Mr. Blake, in which he strenuously and ably opposed the theory of insanity.  From this book, chiefly, we propose to lay before our readers a slight sketch of the life of a man who, whether sane or insane, was one of the most remarkable productions of his own or of any age.

One word, in the beginning, regarding the book before us.  The death of its author, while as yet but seven chapters of his work had been printed, would preclude severe criticism, even if the spirit and purpose with which he entered upon his undertaking, and which he sustained to its close, did not dispose us to look leniently upon imperfections of detail.  Possessing that first requisite of a biographer, thorough sympathy with his subject, he did not fall into the opposite error of indiscriminate panegyric.  Looking at life from the standpoint of the “madman,” he saw how fancies could not only appear, but be, facts; and then, crossing over, he looked at the madman from the world’s standpoint, and saw how these soul-born facts could seem not merely fancies, but the wild vagaries of a crazed brain.  For the warmth with which he espoused an unpopular cause, for the skill with which he set facts in their true light, for the ability which he brought to the defence of a man whom the world had agreed to condemn, for the noble persistence with which he forced attention to genius that had hitherto received little but neglect, we cannot too earnestly express our gratitude.  But the greater our admiration of material excellence, the greater is our regret for superficial defects.  The continued oversight of the author would doubtless have removed many infelicities of style; yet we marvel that one with so clear an insight should ever, even in the first glow of composition, have involved himself in sentences so complicated and so obscure.  The worst faults of Miss Sheppard’s worst style are reproduced here, joined to an unthriftiness in which she had no part nor lot.  Not unfrequently a sentence Is a conglomerate in which the ideas to be conveyed are heaped together with no apparent attempt at arrangement, unity, or completeness.  Surely, it need be no presumptuous, but only a tender and reverent hand that should have organized these chaotic periods, completing the work which death left unfinished, and sending it forth to the world in a garb not unworthy the labor of love so untiringly bestowed upon it by the lamented author.