stature, despised the fewer inches of the owner. But between spirits of
earth and spirits of the skies there is but one issue to the conflict,
and Blake "laid hold of the intrusive blackguard, and turned him out
neck and crop, in a kind of inspired frenzy." The astonished ruffian
made good his retreat, but in revenge reported sundry words that
exasperation had struck from his conqueror. The result was a trial for
high treason at the next Quarter Sessions. Friends gathered about him,
testifying to his previous character; nor was Blake himself at all
dismayed. When the soldiers trumped up their false charges in court, he
did not scruple to cry out, "False!" with characteristic and convincing
vehemence. Had this trial occurred at the present day, it would hardly
be necessary to say that he was triumphantly acquitted. But fifty years
ago such a matter wore a graver aspect. In his early life he had been an
advocate of the French Revolution, an associate of Price, Priestley,
Godwin, and Tom Paine, a wearer of white cockade and _bonnet rouge_. He
had even been instrumental in saving Tom Paine's life, by hurrying him
to France, when the Government was on his track; but all this was
happily unknown to the Chichester lawyers, and Blake, more fortunate
than some of his contemporaries, escaped the gallows.

The disturbance caused by this untoward incident, the repeated failures
of literary attempts, the completion of Cowper's Life, which had been
the main object of his coming, joined, doubtless, to a surfeit of
Hayley, induced a return to London. He feared, too, that his imaginative
faculty was failing. "The visions were angry with me at Felpham," he
used afterwards to say. We regret to see, also, that he seems not always
to have been in the kindest of moods towards his patron. Indeed, it was
a weakness of his to fall out occasionally with his best friends; but
when a man is waited upon by angels and ministers of grace, it is not
surprising that he should sometimes be impatient with mere mortals. Nor
is it difficult to imagine that the bland and trivial Hayley,
perpetually kind, patronizing, and obvious, should, without any definite
provocation, become presently insufferable to such a man as Blake.

Returned to London, he resumed the production of his oracular
works,--"prophetic books," he called them. These he illustrated with his
own peculiar and beautiful designs, "all sanded over with a sort of
golden mist." Among much that is