Napoleon, betrayed by a star which no eye can see save their own. To this rare class belonged William Blake.'
That the present writer shares the view of his predecessors and of Blake's personal intimates, is doubtless already apparent And, perhaps, the deliberate opinion, on such a point, of a biographer who has necessarily devoted a bonâ fide slice of his life to deciphering the character of him he writes of, is entitled to some weight,—to more, say, than the rough and ready decisions, which are based on an isolated anecdote or two, or on certain incoherent passages in a series of professedly mystical writings. So far as I am concerned, I would infinitely rather be mad with William Blake than sane with nine-tenths of the world. When, indeed, such men are nicknamed 'mad,' one is brought in contact with the difficult problem ' What is madness? 'Who is not mad—in some other person's sense, himself, perhaps, not the noblest of created mortals? Who, in certain abstruse cases, is to be the judge? Does not prophet or hero always seem 'mad' to the respectable mob, and to polished men of the world, the motives of feeling and action being so alien and incomprehensible?
In a letter respecting Blake, addressed by the late James Ward, in June, 1855, to his son, George Raphael, the engraver, the venerable artist gave expression to an interesting view of his own—itself, some may think, tinged by eccentricity. 'There can be no doubt,' he writes, 'of his having been what the world calls a man of genius. But his genius was of a peculiar character, sometimes above, sometimes below the comprehension of his fellow-men. ... I have considered him as amongst the many proofs I have witnessed, of men being possessed of different orders of spirits now, as well as in the time when the Saviour Christ was upon the earth,—although our Established Church (to its shame) set itself against it—some good, some evil, in their different degrees. It is evident Blake's was not an evil one, for he was a good man, the most harmless and free from guile. But men, and even our Church, set
