their united voices have carried further than the guffaws of vulgar persons, repeated generation after generation. And so in due course, when Blake has been properly dead long enough, there is a little public which, bidding against itself, gambles cheerfully for the possession of the scraps of paper on which he sent in his account, against the taste of his age and the taste of all the ages.
Blake himself had never any doubt of his own greatness as an artist, and some of the proud or petulant things which he occasionally wrote (the only outbreaks of impatience in a life wholly given up to unceasing and apparently unrewarded labour) have been quoted against him as petty or unworthy, partly because they are so uncalculated and so childlike. Blake 'bore witness,' as he might have said, that he had done his duty: 'for that I cannot live without doing my duty, to lay up treasures in heaven, is certain and determined,' he writes from Felpham. And he asserted the truth of his own genius, its truth in the spiritual sense, its divine origin, as directly and as emphatically as he asserted everything which he had apprehended as truth. He is merely stating
