about him, but only by the edges; there is even a reflected ghost of the pseudo-Gothic of Walpole in 'Fair Elenor,' who comes straight from the Castle of Otranto, as 'Gwin, King of Norway,' takes after the Scandinavian fashion of the day, and may have been inspired by 'The Fatal Sisters' or 'The Triumphs of Owen' of Gray. 'Blind-man's Buff,' too, is a piece of eighteenth-century burlesque realism. But it is in the ode 'To the Muses' that Blake for once accepts, and in so doing clarifies, the smooth convention of eighteenth-century classicism, and, as he reproaches it in its own speech, illuminates it suddenly with the light it had rejected:
'How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoyed in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few!'
In those lines the eighteenth century dies to music, and from this time forward we find in the rest of Blake's work only a proof of his own assertion, that 'the ages are all equal; but genius is above the age.'
In 1778 Blake's apprenticeship to Basire
