"The connoisseurs and artists who have made objections to Mr. Blake's mode of representing spirits with real bodies would do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues are all of them representations of spiritual existences--of gods immortal--to the ordinary perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied and organized in solid marble. Mr. Blake requires the same latitude and all is well. King Edward and Queen Eleanor are prostrated with their horses at the foot of the rock on which the Bard stands--prostrated by the terrors of his harp, on the margin of the river Conway, whose waves bear up a corpse of a slaughtered bard at the foot of the rock. The armies of Edward are seen winding among the mountains. He wound with toilsome march his long array! "Mortimer and Gloucester lie spellbound behind the King. The execution of this picture is also in water-colours or fresco," he added finally. It was probably painted in water-colours with white of egg or glue on a medium of gesso. The gloomy glory of its colour was a thing to ponder on. Like the dim silvery splendour of a pearl seen in the twilight of deep-sea waters, so does it glint and gleam. In no picture has Blake brought home to us more directly the visible population of the world of his mind--its power and grandeur and mystery--than in the complex imagery of this great work. The picture was probably painted in 1785, and was exhibited at the Royal Academy. It afterwards appeared again at Blake's own exhibition in 1809. It is a sad thing that he so seldom dated the pictures which he executed for his staunch friend and supporter Mr. Butts. The pictures in the Exhibition, with a very few exceptions, were originally done for him, but few of them could have an authentic date affixed to them. All Blake's original methods of working were here represented by splendid examples. First there are the tempera pictures, or "frescoes," as he termed them. He would never paint in oil-colour, because he thought and wrote that "oil, being a body itself, will drink, or absorb very little colour, and changing yellow, and at length brown, destroys every colour it is mixed with, especially every delicate colour. It turns every permanent white to a yellow or brown putty, and has compelled the use of that destroyer of colour, white lead, which when its protecting oil is evaporated will become lead again," and he hotly affirmed the opinion that "oil became a fetter to genius and a dungeon to art." This being so, he evolved a method of painting in water-colours, stiffened with white of egg or dilute glue, on a ground prepared with whiting or plaster and laid on copper or board.