was that of the soldier who had brought a charge of sedition against Blake at Felpham. Whether the other English names given were in some way connected with the trial would be worth any practicable inquiries. When we consider the mystical connection in which this name of Scofield is used, a way seems opened into a more perplexed region of morbid analogy existing in Blake's brain than perhaps any other key could unlock. It is a minute point, yet a significant and amazing one. Further research discovers further references to 'Scofield,' for instance,
'Go thou to Skofield:
Ask him if he is Bath or if he is Canterbury:
Tell him to be no more dubious: demand explicit words:
Tell him I will dash him into shivers where and at what time
I please. Tell him, Hand and Skofield, they are ministers of evil
To those I hate: for I can hate also as well as they.'
Again (not without Jack the Giant Killer to help):—
'Hark! hear the giants of Albion cry at night,—
We smell the blood of the English, we delight in their blood on our altars;
The living and the dead shall be ground in our crumbling mill.
For bread of the sons of Albion, of the giants Hand and Skofield:
Skofield and Cox are let loose upon the Saxons; they accumulate
A world in which man is, by his nature, the enemy of man.'
Again (and woe is the present editor!):—
"These are the names of Albion's twelve sons and of his twelve daughters:—'
(Then follows a long enumeration,—to each name certain countries attached):—
'Skofield had Ely, Rutland, Cambridge, Huntingdon,
Norfolk, Suffolk, Hertford, Essex, and his emanation is Guinivere.' (!!!)
The first of the three above quotations seems meant really as a warning to Scholfield to be exact in evidence as to his place of birth or other belongings, and as to the 'explicit words' used by Blake! Cox and Courthope are Sussex names: can these be the 'Kox' and 'Kotope' of the poem, and names in some way connected, like Schofield's, with the
