Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/93

 CHAPTER VIII.

MEDITATION: NOTES ON LAVATER. 1788. [ÆT. 31.]

of Blake's engravings of the present period is a frontispiece after Fuseli to the latter's translation of the Aphorisms of his fellow-countryman, Lavater. The translation, which was from the original MS., was published by Johnson in 1788, the year of Gainsborough's death. If any deny merit to Blake as an engraver, let them turn from this boldly executed print of Fuseli's mannered but effective sitting figure, ostentatiously meditative, of Philosophic Contemplation, or whatever it may be, to the weak shadow of the same in the subsequent Dublin editions of this little book. For the Swiss enthusiast had then a European reputation. And this imposing scroll of fervid truisms and hap-hazard generalities, as often disputable as not, if often acute and striking, always ingenuous and pleasant, was, like all his other writings, warmly welcomed in this country. Now it, as a whole, reads unequal and monotonous; does not impress one as an elixir of inspired truth; induces rather, like most books of maxims, the ever recurring query, cui bono? And one readily believes what the English edition states, that the whole epitome of moral wisdom was the rapid 'effusion' of one autumn.

In the ardent, pious, but illogical Lavater's character, full of amiability, candour, and high aspiration, a man who in the eighteenth century believed in the continuation of miracles, of witchcraft, and of the power of exorcising evil spirits, who,