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 34^ CRITICAL STUDIES writer "has delivered to us a multitude of new hieroglyphics, which contain no presumable recon- diteness of meaning, and which we are obliged to account for, simply by the artist's having yielded himself up, more thoroughly than other men will do, to those fantastic impulses which are common to all mankind, and which saner men subjugate, but can- not exterminate." Here, also, " earth-born might has banished the heavenlier elements of art, and exists combined with all that is monstrous and diabolical." Here, also, " we have the impression that we are looking down into the hells," not indeed of the ancient people, but of the cold insanity of dogmatism fused in hot frenzies of fantasy. In short, "of the worst aspect of [Wilkinson's] genius it is painful to speak." But of the monstrous and diabolical hells, a few words must be spoken. All students must have frequently remarked, at first with very painful as- tonishment, the inexorable cruelty in dogma of the most placid and gentle and sweet-hearted innocents. We find it in good Jeremy Taylor, we find it in angelic Archbishop Leighton. As for Swedenborg, as Emer- son well puts it : — "There is an air of infinite grief, and the sound of wailing all over and through this lurid universe. A vampire sits in the scat of the prophet, and turns with gloomy appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily weave its nest, or a mole bore into the ground, than this seer of souls substructs a new hell and pit, each more abominable than the last, round every new crew of offenders. . . . He saw the hell of jugglers, the hell of assassins, the hell of the lascivious ; the hell of robbers who kill and boil men ; the infernal tun of the deceitful ; the excrementilious hells ; the hell of the revengeful, whose