Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/30

xxiv respects as he could manage,' and his style betrays the influence of his model. There is also a tendency to dwell unduly upon unimportant incidents such as the 'Visionary Heads,' which gives the portrait a lack of proportion. Practically the whole of the first volume had been written, and the first eight chapters printed, when Gilchrist died on the 30th of November, 1861. The book, which was published two years later, was completed by his widow, aided by D. G. and W. M. Rossetti, the former supplying a supplementary chapter to the biography, and editing the 'Selections' from Blake's prose and verse, and the latter contributing a serviceable list of his pictures and engravings. The letters to Butts, 1800-1803, appear here for the first time. A second edition, with some new letters, was published in 1880. This Life, handsomely produced, and embellished with facsimiles of Blake's own glorious designs, achieved its main purpose in popularizing the poet, and in preparing the way for Swinburne's great critical appreciation. Gilchrist incorporates most of the material drawn from the preceding sources, though his manner of writing sometimes leaves it doubtful whether he is supplementing our knowledge or merely embroidering facts more simply narrated by earlier biographers.

11. Ellis and Yeats' Memoir, prefixed to their large edition of the Works, 1893, is especially intended, as the editors state, to supply new facts, or to discuss in greater detail aspects of Blake's life which they consider unsatisfactorily dealt with by Gilchrist. Of much importance, if substantiable on good evidence, is the discovery that Blake was of Irish ancestry, his grandfather, a certain John O'Neill, of Rathmines, Dublin, having assumed the name of Blake borne by his second wife. James O'Neill, his son by a previous union, also took the name of Blake, and settled in London, where he became the father of the poet. This account, however, is at variance with another, first given in Mr. Alfred T. Storey's William Blake, published in the same year, where, on the authority of two ladies, daughters