I am more famed in heaven for my works than I could well conceive.  In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of Eternity, before my mortal life, and those works are the delight and study of archangels.  Why, then, should I be anxious about the riches or fame of mortality?  The Lord our Father will do for us and with us according to Ins Divine will, for our good.

“You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime archangel,—­my friend and companion from Eternity.  In the Divine bosom is our dwelling-place.  I look back into the regions of reminiscence, and behold our ancient days, before this earth appeared in its vegetated mortality to my mortal vegetated eyes.  I see our houses of eternity, which can never be separated, though our mortal vehicles should stand at the remotest corners of heaven from each other.

“Farewell, my best friend!  Remember me and my wife in love and friendship to our dear Mrs. Flaxman, whom we ardently desire to entertain beneath our thatched roof of rusted gold.  And believe me forever to remain your grateful and affectionate

    “WILLIAM BLAKE.”

Other associations than spiritual ones mingle with the Felpham sojourn.  A drunken soldier one day broke into his garden, and, being great of stature, despised the fewer inches of the owner.  But between spirits of earth and spirits of the skies there is but one issue to the conflict, and Blake “laid hold of the intrusive blackguard, and turned him out neck and crop, in a kind of inspired frenzy.”  The astonished ruffian made good his retreat, but in revenge reported sundry words that exasperation had struck from his conqueror.  The result was a trial for high treason at the next Quarter Sessions.  Friends gathered about him, testifying to his previous character; nor was Blake himself at all dismayed.  When the soldiers trumped up their false charges in court, he did not scruple to cry out, “False!” with characteristic and convincing vehemence.  Had this trial occurred at the present day, it would hardly be necessary to say that he was triumphantly acquitted.  But fifty years ago such a matter wore a graver aspect.  In his early life he had been an advocate of the French Revolution, an associate of Price, Priestley, Godwin, and Tom Paine, a wearer of white cockade and bonnet rouge.  He had even been instrumental in saving Tom Paine’s life, by hurrying him to France, when the Government was on his track; but all this was happily unknown to the Chichester lawyers, and Blake, more fortunate than some of his contemporaries, escaped the gallows.