instance of a poet who could afford not to affect a class-technique: for he was on intimate terms with the angels and wrote like an angel rather than like a gentleman. His radicalism was part of his religion and not a sentimentality as Wordsworth’s early radicalism was. If a man has complete identity with his convictions, then he is tough about them, he is not sentimental; if not, then his convictions are a sentimental weakness however strongly he feels about them. The Romantic Revivalists were all spoiled as revolutionaries by their gentility. Blake was in no sense a Romantic Revivalist. He was a seer, or a poet. He despised the gentry in religion, literature and painting equally. That is why there is little or nothing of Blake’s mature work that could be confused with that of any contemporary or previous writer. He did not forfeit his personality by submitting to any conventional medium; and he did not complain of the neglect of his poems by the greater reading public. The sameness of poetry is likewise accentuated rather than diminished by the spirit of competition. Once there is a tacit or written critical agreement as to the historical form proper to the poetry of any period, all the poets of fashion or ‘taste’ vie with each other in approximating to the perfect period manner. In the eighteenth century such major poets as Pope and Shenstone were only to be distinguished from such minor ones as Ambrose Philips and Richard Graves by being more willing to polish away every vestige of personal eccentricity from their work. Period-monotony is further increased by imitation of the most successful ‘period’ poets. In the last century there were successively dozens of imitation Moores, Byrons, Wordsworths, Tennysons, Brownings, Swinburnes and Wildes; and dozens more who tried to synthesize the methods of these several inventors of slightly different styles. Among these, as we have seen, the several inventors themselves, who were all in search of a single period style. All such monotony sprang from the necessity of having socially secure convictions. Poetry was to poets of the school-room tradition the instrument, the illustration of their convictions, whether (to take examples only from the nineteenth century) patriotic as with Campbell, moral as with Tupper, religious as with Aubrey de Vere, ‘philosophical’ as with Wordsworth and Whitman, social as with Moore, ‘artistic’ as with Poe and the pre-Raphaelites. Even the decadents at the end of last century were decadent from conviction rather than from wilfulness or inertia. Decadence introduced no variety. It merely substituted self-satisfied pessimism for self-satisfied optimism; and one nationalism for another by moving the poetical centre from London to Paris.