And what a harvest of ideas was garnered here!--ideas which sprung like Athene fully developed and armed from the head of Blake--of which head a cast taken by Deville the phrenologist was conspicuously placed in the centre of the lower room of the exhibition. The closely-set mouth and jaw, arched and inflated nostrils, massy brow, and intense and rapt expression, tell one something of the nature of this rare and spiritual intellect. Out of forty-one exhibits, twenty-five were subjects from the Bible, three were single plates repeated from Blake's "Prophetic Books," one was an Indian ink drawing illustrating a scene in his poem "Tiriel," three were purely imaginative compositions, the keys to which were to be sought in themselves, and seven were illustrations to the poets (three of Milton's "Paradise Lost," one of a scene in Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and three sketches to illustrate Gray, Young, and Blair). Mainly, then, the exhibition might be said to have dealt with Biblical subjects, though good specimens of all kinds of Blake's work rendered it representative of his genius in its various phases. From the old Byzantine mosaicists through art's early springtime to her full summer in the Renaissance, and even since then, no class of subjects has so deeply occupied the mind of painters as sacred history. There are no incidents left untreated in the New Testament, and the Old has had a large meed of attention, yet we find a painter of such unique and peculiar genius as William Blake expending his strength and invention on this well-worn field of motives. But with results so new, so different from anything ever achieved before, that our interest and delight were stimulated in proportion to our susceptibility to Blake's influence. I am not saying that this new treatment of Biblical subjects, of the Gospel story, is finer than the work of the old masters of the golden age of Italy. Nor do I rank it lower. "The ages are all equal," Blake says himself, "but genius is always above its age." The great point is that it is entirely _different_, and that it exhibits a total disregard for traditional treatment. Blake only found it _possible_ to see these subjects from his own point of view--one never before attained by any artist. And as objects seen from different outlooks vary in colour, profile, and proportion, so as to be sometimes quite unrecognizable, so do these religious pictures of Blake's appear startlingly alien to any we have ever seen before. Or as he puts it himself, "If perceptive organs vary, objects of perception seem to vary too."