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 36 Abbey, too, that he flung an intrusive Westminster schoolboy from the scaffolding, 'in the impetuosity of his anger, worn out with interruption,' says Tatham, and then laid a complaint before the Dean which has caused, to this day, the exclusion of Westminster schoolboys from the precincts.

It was at this time that Blake must have written the larger part of the poems contained in the Poetical Sketches, printed (we cannot say published) in 1783, for in the 'Advertisement' at the beginning of the book we are told that the 'following Sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year,' that is to say, between the years 1768 and 1777. The earliest were written while Goldsmith and Gray were still living, the latest (if we may believe these dates) after Chatterton's death, but before his poems had been published. Ossian had appeared in 1760, Percy's Reliques in 1765. The Reliques probably had their influence on Blake, Ossian certainly, an influence which returns much later, curiously mingled with the influence of Milton, in the form