Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/372

 well as for the circumstances of their production: truly original and often sublime. All are marked by a decisive, portrait-like character, and are in fact, evidently, literal portraits of what Blake's imaginative eye beheld. They are not seldom strikingly in unison with one's notions of the characters of the men they purport to represent. Some are very fine, as the Bathsheba and the David. Of these two, beauty is, of course, the special attribute. William Wallace and King Edward the First have much force, and even grandeur. A remarkable one is that of King Edward the Third as he now exists in the other world according to his appearance to Mr. Blake: his skull enlarged in the semblance of a crown,—swelling into a crown in fact,—for type and punishment of earthly tyranny, I suppose. Remarkable too are The Assassin lying dead at the feet of Edward the First in the Holy Land, and the ''Portrait of a Man who instructed Mr. Blake in Painting, in his Dreams. ''

Among the heads which Blake drew was one of King Saul, who, as the artist related, appeared to him in armour, and wearing a helmet of peculiar form and construction, which he could not, owing to the position of the spectre, see to delineate satisfactorily. The portrait was therefore left unfinished, till some months after, when King Saul vouchsafed a second sitting, and enabled Blake to complete his helmet; which, with the armour, was pronounced, by those to whom the drawing was shown, sufficiently extraordinary.

The ideal embodiment of supernatural things (even things so wild and mystic as some of these) by such a man—a man of mind and sense as well as of mere fancy—could not but be worth attention. And truly they have a strange coherence and meaning of their own. This is especially exemplified in one which is the most curious of all these Visionary Heads, and which has also been the most talked of, viz. the Ghost of a Flea or Personified Flea. Of it, John Varley, in that singular and now very scarce book, A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy, published in 1828, gave the first and best account;