Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/386

 knavery is wisdom. Cunning plotters were considered as wise Machiavels.'

Whatever Bacon may say, his singular annotator refuses to be pleased. When the former innocently enough tells us, 'It is great blasphemy to personate God, and bring him in saying, "I will demand,"' &c., Blake answers: 'Did not Jesus descend and become a servant? The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman and not a man: he is a Lord Chancellor.'

Characteristic comment on the Essay on Virtue is this: 'What do these knaves mean by virtue? Do they mean war and its horrors, and its heroic villains?' 'Good thoughts,' says Bacon, 'are little better than good dreams.' 'Thought is act,' replies Blake: 'Christ's acts were nothing to Caesar's, if this is not so.' When Bacon, after the fashion of his age, says, 'The increase of any state must be upon the foreigner,' the artist, innocent of political economy though he be, has for once what would be generally considered now-a-days, in part, a just retort: 'The increase of a State, as of a man, is from internal improvement or intellectual acquirement. Man is not improved by the hurt of another. States are not improved at the expense of foreigners.' Again: 'Bacon calls intellectual arts unmanly: and so they are for kings and wars, and shall in the end annihilate them,' 'What is fortune but an outward accident? for a few years, sixty at the most, and then gone!'

'King James was Bacon's primum mobile,' exclaims the scornful Blake. And elsewhere his political prejudices explode in an amusing way. The philosopher speaks of 'mighty Princes:' — the 'Powers of Darkness,' responds Blake. Again: 'A tyrant is the worst disease, and the cause of all others!' And in the same spirit: 'Everybody hates a king! David was afraid to say that the envy was upon a king: but is this envy or indignation?'

And here let the singular dialogue at cross-purposes end.