Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/364

 PREFACE TO THE EPIGRAMS

The nine epigrams which follow are found interspersed among a number of prose annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' 'Discourses,' written in Blake's autograph on the margins of the first volume of his copy of Reynolds' Works (2nd edition, 1798).

These marginal notes were made at first in pencil, and afterwards copied over and supplemented in ink. According to Ellis and Yeats (ii. 315) there 'can be no doubt that at the time Blake was writing extracts from the 'Discourses' to Butts, and reconsidering, as he says, all his thoughts on art, he was looking over his pencilled notes and adding to them.' His only reference, however, to Reynolds is in a letter to Mr. Butts dated Felpham, November 2, 1802, in which he quotes with approval a passage from the 'Discourses,' adding, 'So says Sir Joshua, and So say I.' Blake's later and more prejudiced view of the President of the Academy is forcibly expressed in his note on the title-page: 'This Man was Hired to Depress Art. This is the Opinion of Will. Blake: my Proofs of this Opinion are given in the following Notes.' These epigrams, moreover, are precisely of the same order as those scattered through the pages of the later part of the Rossetti MS. The annotations in Blake's Reynolds all refer to the first eight 'Discourses' contained in the first volume of the Works, while those on the following 'Discourses' are jotted down in the MS. Book. As the latter are mixed with verses referring to his quarrel with Cromek and Stothard the whole of the epigrams may be dated circa 1808, those written in the copy of Reynolds being probably rather the earlier of the two.

Gilchrist, on 'intrinsic evidence,' attributes the annotations and epigrams in the 'Discourses' to the year 1820. This is obviously a conclusion from the words * Aged Sixty-three 'in the lines beginning, 'When Nations grow Old.' Whatever Blake may have meant by this cryptic saying, it certainly cannot refer to his own age at the time