Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/94

 52 add to Blake's literary reputation. Its chief interest to general readers must lie in its giving us the first drafts of three of the Songs of Innocence, in its evidence, even at this early date, of Blake's rooted antipathy to science and experiment, and in its foreshadowing, some years beforehand, the 'illuminated printing' which he afterwards employed in the Songs of Innocence and in the Prophetic Books.

I do not repeat here the early versions of 'Holy Thursday,' 'Nurse's Song,' or 'The Little Boy Lost,' the variant readings to which are given in the footnotes to the Songs of Innocence. Besides the six songs which follow, a number of choruses and nonsense verses are placed in the mouths of several of the characters. Some of these, such as 'This frog he would a wooing ride' and the London street-cry, 'I cry my matches as far as Guildhall,' are plainly not Blake's at all; while others are, as the writer intended them, trivialities or doggerel sung by children or drunken boon-companions. Since these pieces have been referred to and partly quoted by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, I have thought it necessary to print the whole of them in an Appendix, which all lovers of Blake may pass over.

My text of these poems is taken from my transcript of the original MS., kindly lent to me by Mr. Charles Fairfax Murray, who has since presented it to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.