venerable lady, we can picture. Her house, in which Blake often was, yet stands, somewhat altered, by the wayside to the right as you enter the hamlet of Mid Lavant, ten minutes' drive from Chichester; at the back, pleasant grounds slope down to the babbling Lavant brook, with a winding road beside it, across which rise other pleasant wooded slopes, and beyond, the solemn, rounded Downs,—-in this part bare of trees; among them, to the right, Goodwood, and that specially conspicuous hill, the Trundle (or St. Roche's). The 'peerless villa,' Hayley used to call it; everything of his, or of his friends, being more or less extraordinary and romantic. The lady herself was a woman respected far and wide, sociable, cheerful, and benevolent. She is still remembered in those parts, though none of her kin remain there. 'Ah! good creature!' exclaimed an infirm old labourer but the other day, on hearing mention of her name; he had worked for her. She died at a ripe age, suddenly, while dining among her friends at the Bishop's palace, a little more than three years after Blake's trial.
Poor Rose,—defendant's counsel,—never rallied from the illness which attacked him on that day. The 'severe cold' proved the commencement of a rapid consumption, of which he died at the close of the same year; sorrowful Hayley effervescing into an 'epitaph in the middle of the night.'
Not ten years before, quiet literary men and shoemakers, theoretic enthusiasts such as Horne Tooke the learned and witty, Holcroft, Thelwall, Hardy, members of a corresponding society—society corresponding with 'the friends of liberty' abroad that is—had been vindictively prosecuted by the Crown for (constructive) high treason, and almost convicted. At this very time, men were being hung in Ireland on such trivial charges. Blake's previous intimacy with Paine, Holcroft, and the rest, was doubtless unknown to an unlettered soldier, and probably at Chichester also. But as a very disadvantageous antecedent, in a political sense, of which counsel for the prosecution might have made good use, it was, in
