Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/109

 works 'now published and on Sale at Mr, Blake's, no. 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,' advertises the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience as two separate books, each being priced at 5s. and described as containing twenty-five designs, Blake here, according to his practice in other cases, does not include either frontispiece or title-page, which would make the entire number of plates in the two series fifty-four. As this is the full number in a perfect copy of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, including the general title-page which had not then been engraved, Blake in this prospectus must have reckoned 'A Divine Image' ('Cruelty has a Human Heart') among the number. Though this poem is inserted without question in all editions of Blake since Shepherd's, it would seem to have been deliberately rejected by the poet himself. The plate containing it is not found in any authentic copy of the Songs issued in the lifetime of the artist or his wife, and is known to us by only two examples. One of these is in the uncoloured copy of the Songs in the Reading Room of the British Museum, which, as the watermark shows, was printed not earlier than 1832, and the other is a proof impression in the possession of Mr, William Muir, which he has reproduced at the end of his facsimile of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

In 1794 Blake added a general title-page to both series, which thenceforward were issued by him as one work, the plates printed on one side of the leaf only and numbered by hand consecutively one to fifty-four. This is the form in which most copies of the Songs occur. It should be noted that there was never any true edition, in the ordinary sense of the term, of this or of any other of Blake's engraved works. Sets of impressions were struck off as required, the issue of the Songs extending from the completion of the Songs of Innocence in 1789 to the close of Blake's life. In 1863 ten of the original plates, yielding sixteen impressions (six being engraved on both sides of the copper), were still in existence, and were used by Mr. Gilchrist in the second volume of his Life of Blake, The outline designs there, as I learn from Mr. Frederick Macmillan, were printed from electrotypes which have every appearance of having been made from the actual plates engraved by Blake. The present whereabouts of these plates I have been unable to trace.

According to Gilchrist (Life, i. 125) a few copies were