Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/112

 corner, in the same brown or red ink with which Blake added the border lines surrounding the plates.

Blake's earliest arrangement is found in the extremely- rare first issue of the Songs printed upon both sides of the leaf. In Table I I give the collations of five copies of the Songs of Innocence and in Table II of one copy of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, plates printed upon the same leaf being bracketed together and those on the recto being placed first.

The first three plates of the Songs of Innocence, the frontispiece, title-page, and Introduction, are printed upon one side of the leaf only ; the frontispiece was generally bound, as if printed on the verso, to face the title-page.

It will be seen from these tables that although the order of plates is not identical in any of these six copies, yet in four of these the same designs are invariably found either as recto or verso of the same leaf. A further instance of the same juxtaposition is the example in the Print Room of the British Museum. This is evidently a made-up copy, the deficiency of the original being supplied by two leaves of the earlier issue, in which, as in A, B, and C, 'The Ecchoing Green' (two plates) and the 'Nurse's Song' and 'Holy Thursday' are printed upon either side of the same leaf. In a sale at Sotheby's of the library of J. B. Ditchfield, M.D., April 24, 1H93, among the books sold is recorded an incomplete copy of the Songs of Innocence in which these four plates are wanting. This volume was bound by C. Lewis in 1782, so that the two missing leaves, which we may reasonably conjecture have gone to supply the lacunae in the Print Room copy, must have disappeared at an early date. These coincidences of arrangement, however, are as likely to have arisen from the fact of a number of impressions having been printed at one time, as from any deliberate intention on the part of the author. Some copies bearing Blake's own foliation seem to be arranged regardless of system, and it was probably with the intention of rectifying this defect that Blake compiled, either for his own guidance or that of his wife, the table showing the order in which the songs should be paged and arranged, which Mr. Muir has given in facsimile at the end of his reproduction of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This index, which is written on two opposite leaves of quarto paper, may be dated approximately