Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/194

152 from the borrowed Pickering MS. He takes considerable liberty with the text and gives to several of the pieces titles of his own. From the MS. Book also he excerpts the prose manifesto which he calls ' Public Address,' Blake's Memo-randa on his modes of engraving, and his 'Vision of the Last Judgment' (i.e. Additions to Catalogue 1810).

Swinburne was the next to make use of the MS. Book in his Critical Essay (1868). He adds to the number of new poems printed, and, by his copious extracts and illuminative comment, gives for the first time some adequate conception of Blake's great and extraordinary poem 'The Everlasting Gospel.'

About the same time the Pickering MS., which has since disappeared, became the property of Basil Montague Pickering, the publisher, who printed the whole of it for the first time in his editions of 1866, 1868, and 1874 edited by R. H. Shepherd. Pickering's last edition, and the Aldine edition which appeared in the same year, mutually supplement each other. W. M. Rossetti was able to use that part only of the Pickering MS. which had already been printed by his brother, while Shepherd was prohibited from using any part of the larger MS. Book, W. M. Rossetti, who generally follows his brother's text, prints more, though not as stated all, of 'The Everlasting Gospel,' as well as a few new poems, chiefly epigrams.

The Rossetti MS. Book was purchased January 26, 1887, by its present owner, Mr. W. A. White, who soon after lent it for a time to the publisher of Ellis and Yeats' large edition of Blake's Works, 1893. A copy of the manuscript, made for Mr. Ellis, was used for their three-volume edition, as well as by Mr. Yeats' in his small 'Muses' Library' Blake, published in the same year. Mr. Ellis' transcript, if one may judge by the text of these editors, bears obvious marks of having been made in haste by a copyist unfamiliar with Blake's hand. In their description of the MS. Book (vol. i. pp. 202-32) Ellis and Yeats include for the first time a few minor poems which had been rejected or ignored by former editors. Their versions of some of the longer poems and prose pieces in the MS. Book must be sought elsewhere, e.g. 'Fayette' (vol. ii. pp. 24-7), 'My spectre around me night and day ' (vol. ii. pp. 37, 38), 'The Everlasting Gospel' (vol. ii. pp. 42-60), and 'To the Deists' in Jerusalem (vol. ii. pp. 221-4), and the prose ' Advertisement ' and ' Additions to Blake's Catalogue ' (vol. ii. pp. 333-403).