Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/79

 own charge; and that he now bore a moiety of the cost. The book only runs to 74 pages, 8vo., and its unpretending title-page stands thus: Poetical Sketches; by W. B., London: Printed in the Year 1783. The clergyman 'with his usual urbanity' penned a preface stating the youthful authorship of the volume, apologizing for 'irregularities and defects' in the poems, and 'hoping their poetic originality merits some 'respite from oblivion.'

The author's absence of the leisure, 'requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye, is pleaded.' Little revisal certainly they had, not even correction of the press, apparently. The pamphlet, which has no printer's name to be discredited by it, is as carelessly printed as an old English play, evidently at an establishment which did not boast a 'reader.' Semi-colons and fullstops where commas should be, misprints, such as 'beds of dawn' for 'birds,' by no means help out the meaning. The whole impression was presented to Blake to sell to friends or publish, as he should think best. Unfortunately, it never got published and, for all purposes except that of preservation, might as well have continued MS. As in those days there still survived, singular to say, a bonâ fide market for even mediocre verse, publishers and editors actually handing over hard cash for it, just as if it were prose, Blaise's friends would have done better to have gone to the Trade with his poems. The thin octavo did not even get so far as the Monthly Review; at all events, it does not appear in the copious and explicit Index of 'books noticed' in that periodical, now quite a manual of extinct literature.

The poems J. T. Smith, in 1784, heard Blake sing, can hardly have been those known to his hearers by the printed volume of 1783, but fresh ones, to the composition of which the printing of that volume had stimulated him: some, doubtless, of the memorable and musical Songs of Innocence, as they were subsequently named.

Blake's course of soirées in Rathbone Place was not long a