Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/111

 drawings are here facsimilized by lithography, and the colouring added by hand from the finest examples accessible to the artist. The tinting of the Songs of Innocence is copied from the volume which Blake gave to Flaxman—though the plates, it may be noted, are arranged in a different order—that of the Songs of Experience from the famous Beckford Library copy, originally belonging to a Mr. Edwards, purchased by Mr. Quaritch at the Hamilton Palace sale, July 4, 1882, and now the property of Mr. W. A. White of Brooklyn. These exquisite facsimiles leave little to be desired in their general fidelity to the originals. Blake's cameo plates have, however, a sharpness and definiteness of outline impossible to achieve by printing from stone, and partly no doubt for this reason Mr. Muir fails in the difficult technical feat of reproducing the grace, beauty, and delicacy of Blake's lettering.

There is also a useful facsimile of the outlines of the Songs, edited by Mr. Edwin J. Ellis (Quaritch, 1903). The plates are here reproduced by a photographic process, which, as the editor points out, fails to represent the clearness of the originals where the copies have been made from tinted impressions. Neither of these facsimiles, however, though much more accurate than the reproduction of 1876, is a trustworthy guide for Blake's text.

In Blake's Songs of Innocence (including, as in the first issue, 'The Little Girl Lost,' 'The Little Girl Found,' and 'The School Boy') the body of the text is in minuscule roman, with the exception of ' The Voice of the Ancient Bard,' which is in italic. In the Songs of Experience, on the contrary, Blake substituted for roman the more easily formed italic characters which he first adopted in the Book of Thel (1789) and used in all his subsequent works; only four songs, 'The Tyger,' 'Ah! Sunflower,' 'London,' and 'A Poison Tree,' with the introductory stanza to 'A Little Girl Lost,' being written in the former style of lettering.

There is no engraved Table of Contents, and a collation of various copies of the Songs shows that the order in which the plates are arranged varies in almost every instance. The plates are without engraved foliation or pagination, and catchwords are only used where one of the longer songs is continued on to a second plate. The early issues of the Songs of Innocence are without manuscript pagination or border lines. Later issues of the two series, printed upon one side of the leaf only, are foliated at the top