Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/76

60 bidden to divide the real palm. Who this reviewer was, no man need either know or care; but all may now understand the point of Blake's allusion. Next year however the real batteries were opened. It is but loathsome labour to shovel out this decomposed rubbish from the catacombs of liberal journalism; but if thus only we can explain an apparently aimless or misplaced reference on the great artist's part, it may be worth while to throw up a few spadefuls.

This second article bears date September 17th, 1809, No. 90 of the Examiner, and is labelled "Mr. Blake's Exhibition." The contributor has already lapsed from simple fatuity into fatuity compound with scurrility. Blake here figures as "an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement, and consequently of whom no public notice would have been taken, if he was not" (the man's grammar here goes mad on its own account, but what then?) "forced on the notice and animadversion of the Examiner in having been held up" (the case by this time is fairly desperate) "to public admiration;" such is the eccentricity of human error. The Blair of last year "was a futile endeavour by bad drawings to represent immateriality by bodily personifications," and so forth; once again, "the tasteful hand of Schiavonetti," one regrets to remember, was employed to bestow "an exterior charm on deformity and nonsense. Thus encouraged, the poor man" (to wit, Blake) "fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are"—any one may finish that for the critic. The catalogue is "a farrago of nonsense,