case to a gift
of melody which Dunbar never had) as were shown by Burns. There was
scarcely more than a twelvemonth between their births; for Blake was
born in 1757 (the day appears not to be known), and Burns in January
1759. But Blake long outlived Burns, and did not die till 1828, while
Burns was no more in July 1796. Neither the long life nor the short one
provided any events which demand chronicling here. Both poets were
rather fortunate in their wives, though Blake clave to Catherine Boucher
more constantly than Burns to his Jean. Neither was well provided with
this world's goods; Burns wearing out his short life in difficulties as
farmer and as excise-man, while all the piety of biographers has left it
something of a mystery how Blake got through his long life with no
better resources than a few very poorly paid private commissions for his
works of design, the sale of his hand-made books of poetry and prophecy,
and such occasional employment in engraving as his unconventional style
and his still more unconventional habits and temper allowed him to
accept or to keep. In some respects the two were different enough
according to commonplace standards, less so perhaps according to others.
The forty years of Burns, and the more than seventy of Blake, were
equally passed in a rapture; but morality has less quarrel with Blake,
who was essentially a "God-intoxicated man" and spent his life in one
long dream of art and prophecy, than with Burns, who was generally in
love, and not unfrequently in liquor. But we need no more either of
antithesis or of comparison: the purely literary matter calls us.

It was in 1783--a date which, in its close approximation to the first
appearances of Crabbe and Cowper, makes the literary student think of
another group of first appearances in the early "eighties" of the
sixteenth century foreshadowing the outburst of Elizabethan
literature--that Blake's first book appeared. His _Poetical Sketches_,
now one of the rarest volumes of English poetry, was printed by
subscription among a literary coterie who met at the house of Mr. and
Mrs. Mathew; but the whole edition was given to the author. He had
avowedly taken little or no trouble to correct it, and the text is
nearly as corrupt as that of the _Supplices_; nor does it seem that he
took any trouble to make it "go off," nor that it did go off in any
appreciable manner. Yet if many ears had then been open to true poetical
music, some of them co