"The Artist (Blake) having been taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriachates of Asia, has seen those wonderful originals called in the sacred scriptures the Cherubim, which were sculptured and painted on walls of temples, towers, cities, palaces, and erected in the highly-cultivated States of Egypt, Moab, Eden, Arum among the rivers of Paradise--being the originals from which the Greeks and Hetruvians copied Hercules Farnese, Venus of Medicis, Apollo Belvedere, and all the grand works of ancient art.... "No man can believe that either Homer's Mythology or Ovid's was the production of Greece or Latium; neither will anyone believe that the Greek statues, as they are called, were the invention of Greek artists; perhaps the Torso is the only original work remaining, all the rest being evidently copies, though fine ones, from the greater works of the Asiatic patriarchs. The Greek muses are daughters of Mnemosyne or Memory, and not of Inspiration or Imagination, therefore not authors of such sublime conceptions." In this ingenious way did Blake seek to justify his admiration for the old pagan art, the old pagan mythology. They were recollections of symbols and ideas given by God to the ancient patriarchs of the Old Testament, and from them had filtered through to the civilization of Greece and Rome. To Blake it all amounted to this, "God hath not left Himself without witnesses," and he vehemently protested against any race, age, or religion arrogating to itself the authorship of ideas which should only be ascribed to God. So that the "Judgment of Paris" is treated like the biblical subjects, as a spiritual parable. When the apple of desire is given to mere sensual beauty instead of to moral or intellectual beauty, Love, the winged spirit, flies away, and Discord, the malformed demon, arrives. The three goddesses' forms, delicate as reeds, pure as Blake's austere imagination, and modelled with tender care for their lovely limbs, hands and faces, awaken in us a great wonder at the technique he could command when he chose. One of the tenderest and most beautiful of Blake's slightly tinted drawings, "The Vision of Queen Katherine"--we are enabled to reproduce through the kindness of its present owner, Sir Charles Dilke. The composition is of exceeding harmony, the delicate outlines being suave, fluent, gracious, to a singular degree. Sweetness and tenderness are its predominant characteristics, and it is without a rival among Blake's works in this respect, saving perhaps for the picture, "And when they had sung an hymn they ascended unto the Mount of Olives." Katherine, sick unto death, has been soothed to sleep by music: Cause the musicians play me that sad note I named my knell, whilst I sit meditating On that celestial harmony I go to,