dependence on a technique not as flexible as his imagination was intense that we must attribute what is unsatisfying in such remarkable inventions as 'The House of Death' (Milton's lazar-house) in the Print Room of the British Museum. Its appeal to the imagination is partly in spite of what is 'organised and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.' Death is a version of the Ancient of Days and of Urizen, only his eyes are turned to blind terror and his beard to forked flame; Despair, a statue of greenish bronze, is the Scofield of Jerusalem; the limbs and faces rigid with agony are types of strength and symbols of pain. Yet even here there is creation, there is the energy of life, there is a spiritual awe. And wherever Blake works freely, as in the regions of the Prophetic Books, wholly outside time and space, appropriate form multiplies under his creating hand, as it weaves a new creation of worlds and of spirits, monstrous and angelical.
Blake distinguished, as all great imaginative artists have distinguished, between allegory, which is but realism's excuse for
