Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/505

 sometimes of the grandest colouring, through Old Testament compositions and through poetic and pastoral themes of every kind, to a special imaginative form of landscape. In all these he partakes greatly of Blake's immediate spirit, being also often nearly allied by landscape intensity to Samuel Palmer,—in youth, the noble disciple of Blake. Mr. Smetham's works are very numerous, and, as other exclusive things have come to be, will some day be known in a wide circle. Space is altogether wanting to make more than this passing mention here of them and of their producer, who shares, in a remarkable manner, Blake's mental beauties and his formative shortcomings, and possesses besides an individual invention which often claims equality with the great exceptional master himself.

Mr. W. B. Scott's two valuable contributions to Blake records—his Catalogue Raisonne of the Exhibition of Blake's Works, as held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1876, and his Etchings from Blakes Works, with Descriptive Text, — are both duly specified in the General Catalogues existing in our Vol. II. We will say briefly here that no man living has a better right to write of Blake or to engrave his work than Mr. Scott, whose work of both kinds is now too well known to call for recognition. Last but not least, the richly condensed and representative essay prefixed by Mr. W. M. Rossetti to his edition (in the Aldine series) of Blake's Poetical Works, demands from all sides—as its writer has, from all sides, discerned and declared Blake—the highest commendation we can here briefly offer.

The reader has now reached the threshold of the Second Volume of this work, in which he will be fortunate enough to be communicating directly with Blake's own mind, in a series of writings in prose and verse, many of them here first published. Now, perhaps, no poet ever courted a public with more apparent need for some smoothing of the way, or mild forewarning, from within, from without, or