g, in his Introduction, to Blake's abusive notes on
Bacon's _Essays_, he speaks of--

The sentimental enthusiast, who worships all great men
indifferently, [and who] finds himself in a distressful position
when his gods fall out among themselves. His case [Sir Walter
wittily adds] is not much unlike that of Terah, the father of
Abraham, who (if the legend be true) was a dealer in idols among
the Chaldees, and, coming home to his shop one day, after a brief
absence, found that the idols had quarrelled, and the biggest of
them had smashed the rest to atoms. Blake is a dangerous idol for
any man to keep in his shop.

We wonder very much whether he is kept in Sir Walter Raleigh's.

It seems clear, at any rate, that no claim for a 'consistency' which
would imply freedom from self-contradiction can be validly made for
Blake. His treatment of the problem of evil is enough to show how very
far he was from that clarity of thought without which even prophets are
liable, when the time comes, to fall into disrepute. 'Plato,' said
Blake, 'knew of nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil.
There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' And
this is the perpetual burden of his teaching. 'Satan's empire is the
empire of nothing'; there is no such thing as evil--it is a mere
'negation.' And the 'moral virtues,' which attempt to discriminate
between right and wrong, are the idlest of delusions; they are merely
'allegories and dissimulations,' they 'do not exist.' Such was one of
the most fundamental of Blake's doctrines; but it requires only a
superficial acquaintance with his writings to recognise that their whole
tenour is an implicit contradiction of this very belief. Every page he
wrote contains a moral exhortation; bad thoughts and bad feelings raised
in him a fury of rage and indignation which the bitterest of satirists
never surpassed. His epigrams on Reynolds are masterpieces of virulent
abuse; the punishment which he devised for Klopstock--his impersonation
of 'flaccid fluency and devout sentiment'--is unprintable; as for those
who attempt to enforce moral laws, they shall be 'cast out,' for they
'crucify Christ with the head downwards.' The contradiction is indeed
glaring. 'There is no such thing as wickedness,' Blake says in effect,
'and you are wicked if you think there is.' If it is true that evil does
not exist, all Blake's denunciations are so much