Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/260

 244 CRITICAL STUDIES Blake went to live near him to engrave illustrations for some of his works. The " Lyrical Ballads " of Coleridge and Wordsworth did not appear until 1798; "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" until 1805. Byron was born in 1788, Shelley in 1792, Keats in 1796. The poems in this first volume had been written by Blake in the interval, 1768-17 7 7, between the ages of eleven and twenty years. Never, perhaps, was a book of verse printed more strange to the literature of its period; and one scarcely knows whether to account the novelty more or less wonderful because relative and not absolute, because the novelty of the long dead past come back to life rather than of a new future just born. The spirit of the great Elizabethan Age was incarnate once more, speaking through the lips of a pure and modest youth. " My Silks and Fine Array " might have been written by Shakespeare, by Beau- mont and Fletcher, or by Sir Walter Raleigh. Its sweet irregular artless cadences are not more different from the sharp measured metallic ring of the rhymes of the scholars of Pope, than is its natural sentiment from the affected sentimentalities then in the mode. Of all the other eighteenth century writers, I think Chatterton alone (as in the Dirge in "Ella") has anything kindred to it; and Chatterton was archaic consciously and with intent. The " Mad Song " immediately reminds us of the character assumed by Edgar in Zear (a common character in Shake- speare's time, else Edgar would not have assumed it), and of the old Tom o' Bedlam songs. In the fine specimen of these, preserved by the elder Disraeli in his •• Curiosities of Literature," three main elements