Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/154

 means of subsistence when no others existed—at all events from his art. All honour to the solitary appreciator and to his zealous constancy! As years rolled by, Mr. Butts' house in Fitzroy Square became a perfect Blake gallery. Fitzroy Square, by the way built in great part by Adelphi Adams, was fashionable in those days. Noblemen were contented to live in its spacious mansions; among other celebrities, General Miranda, the South American hero, abode there.

Mr. Butts was no believer in Blake's 'madness.' Strangers to the man, and they alone, believed in that. Yet he could give piquant account of his protégé's extravagances. One story in particular he was fond of telling, which has been since pretty extensively retailed about town; and though Mr. Linnell, the friend of Blake's later years, regards it with incredulity, Mr. Butts' authority in all that relates to the early and middle period of Blake's life, must be regarded as unimpeachable. At the end of the little garden in Hercules Buildings there was a summer-house. Mr. Butts calling one day found Mr. and Mrs. Blake sitting in this summer-house, freed from 'those troublesome disguises' which have prevailed since the Fall. Come in! cried Blake; it's only Adam and Eve, you know! Husband and wife had been reciting passages from Paradise Lost, in character, and the garden of Hercules Buildings had to represent the Garden of Eden. For my reader here frankly to enter into the full simplicity and naïveté of Blake's character, calls for the exercise of a little imagination on his part. He must go out of himself for a moment, if he would take such eccentricities for what they are worth, and not draw false conclusions. If he or I—close-tethered as we are to the matter-of-fact world—were on a sudden to wander in so bizarre a fashion from the prescriptive proprieties of life, it would be time for our friends to call in a doctor, or apply for a commission de lunatico. But Blake lived in a world of Ideas; Ideas to him were more real than the actual external world. On this matter, as on all others, he had his own peculiar views. He thought that