To show that our strictures are not undeserved, we transcribe a few sentences, taken at random from the memoir:—­

“Which decadence it was led this Pars to go into the juvenile Art-Academy line, vice Shipley retired.”

“The unusual notes struck by William Blake, in any case appealing but to one class and a small one, were fated to remain unheard, even by the Student of Poetry, until the process of regeneration had run its course, and, we may say, the Poetic Revival gone to seed again:  seeing that the virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began by bringing once more into the foreground, are those least practised now.”

“In after years of estrangement from Stothard, Blake used to complain of this mechanical employment as engraver to a fellow-designer, who (he asserted) first borrowed from one that, in his servile capacity, had then to copy that comrade’s version of his own inventions—­as to motive and composition his own, that is.”

“And this imposing scroll of fervid truisms and hap-hazard generalities, as often disputable as not, if often acute and striking, always ingenuous and pleasant, was, like all his other writings, warmly welcomed in this country.”

Let us now go back a hundred years, to the time when William Blake was a fair-haired, smooth-browed boy, wandering aimlessly, after the manner of boys, about the streets of London.  It might seem at first a matter of regret that a soul full of all glowing and glorious fancies should have been consigned to the damp and dismal dulness of that crowded city; but, in truth, nothing could be more fit.  To this affluent, creative mind dinginess and dimness were not.  Through the grayest gloom golden palaces rose before him, silver pavements shone beneath his feet, jewelled gates unfolded on golden hinges turning, and he wandered forth into a fair country.  What need of sunshine and bloom for one who saw in the deepest darkness a “light that never was on sea or land”?  Rambling out into the pleasant woods of Dulwich, through the green meadows of Walton, by the breezy heights of Sydenham, bands of angels attended him.  They walked between the toiling haymakers, they hovered above him in the apple-boughs, and their bright wings shone like stars.  For him there was neither awe nor mystery, only delight.  Angels were no more unnatural than apples.  But the honest hosier, his father, took different views.  Never in all his life had that worthy citizen beheld angels perched on tree-tops, and he was only prevented from administering to his son a sound thrashing for the absurd falsehood by the intercession of his mother.  Ah, these mothers!  By what fine sense is it that they detect the nascent genius for which man’s coarse perception can find no better name than perverseness, and no wiser treatment than brute force?