Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/47

 pestered with his genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation. His imbecile attempts to depress me only deserve laughter." Let a compassionate amateur of human poultry imagine what confusion must by this time have been reigning in the poor hen-roost and dove-cote of Eartham! Things, however, took some time in reaching the tragic pitch of these shrill discords. For months or years they appear to have run through various scales of very tolerable harmony. Blake, in the intervals of incessant engraving and occasional designing, was led by his good Hayley into the greenest pastures of literature and beside the stillest waters of verse; he was solicited to help in softening and arranging for public inspection the horrible and pitiful narrative of Cowper's life; he was prevailed upon to listen while Hayley "read Klopstock into English to Blake," with what result one may trust he never knew. For it was probably under the sting of this infliction that Blake scratched down in pencil a brief lyrical satire on the German Milton, which modern humanity would refuse to read in public if transcribed; although or because it might be, for grotesque ease and ringing breadth of melodious extravagance, a scrap saved from some tattered chorus of Aristophanes, or caught up by Rabelais as the fragment of a litany at the shrine of the Dive Bouteille. Let any man judge, from the ragged shred we can afford to show by way of sample, how a sight or handling of the stuff would have affected Hayley;