was what arrested his imagination. Here, in his rendering of the subject, the blast has torn upward in a visible ribbon-like vortex from the surface of the waters, bearing within it, as images in a crystal, the innumerable figures of the world's great lovers. From a spit of land, Paolo and Francesca, fluttering "light before the wind," appear in a single tongue of flame, and Dante lies stretched upon the ground--"through compassion fainting." Virgil is seen irradiated by the effulgent light which trembles around the disc wherein the immortal kiss--that which Rostand calls "_l'instant d'infini_"--is poetically represented. [Illustration: THE CIRCLE OF THE LUSTFUL Fine Indian ink pen drawing, in the Print Room, 1825-6. Francesca da Rimini, Canto V. of the "Inferno"] As usual, the force, the unusualness of the conception, rather than its ideal beauty are the points we notice first. But closer study attests to its beauty too. Mere literary interest would give the picture no real claim to artistic regard. But Blake felt the drawing of each bounding line as a thing of beauty in itself, having an aesthetic element of its own, apart from its representative or symbolic use. In that coil of entangled fates, what manifold themes of pure sensuous beauty are to be found! For instance--just at the leap and bend of the circle--appears a woman with arms extended in the fluent wind, like a bird in flight, and a man's embrace encircles her neck--a man whose face she kisses rapturously. Leaping, floating, falling, the multitudinous figures are borne onward by the resistless force of that terrible blast; and, however foreign or antipathetic this embodiment of Dante's vision may seem to us, we are bound to admit that its imaginative scope is of a temper characteristic not only of Blake, but of the Florentine himself. An aspect of Dante's conception is developed and emphasized here in a manner which has not been attempted in any other picture of the subject. The other pen-and-ink drawing from the "Inferno" represents Dante and Virgil in the Circle of the Traitors, with the head of Bocca degli Abati breaking through the lake of ice at the foot of Dante. Blake has given strangely passionless faces to his Dante and Virgil, but the pure simple lines of their figures are severely congruous with the scene, and the iceberg, formed of shadowy frozen figures to the right, is powerfully suggested by a few lines of sufficient economy. The picture is another of those unique embodiments from which, once seen and dwelt on, the modern imagination can never release itself. Gustave Dore's sensational rendering of the same scene seems to me to acknowledge an inspiration at this source.