Turning to his water-colour sketches in the Print Room, I consider the finest to be a very portrait-like head of an old man. It was evidently put in in pencil and pale washes of colour, and afterwards strengthened, rather daringly, with pen-and-ink outlines. The face with its deep eyes and noble contours is that of a seer, awestruck before his vision. It is in such work as this--swift, strong and delicate--that we see Blake at his best. In finished work--such little as he has left us--some heat, some fire seems to have escaped, but in sketches such as this the inspiration is contained in all its strongly-spiced vitality; that which is left undone, assisting that which is done, in producing an impression of energy and imaginative development. A pale-tinted, very careful and elaborate drawing of the Whore of Babylon, as Blake imagined her, next claims our attention. It was etched and reproduced by William Bell Scott. Never did Blake represent so voluptuous, so sensual a face, as this of the Whore of Babylon, which in spite of its beauty is of the same type as that of the Wife of Bath in his "Canterbury Pilgrimage." In its expression it has no fellow, save perhaps the face of Leda in Michael Angelo's small statuette in the Bargello. The woman is seated on a seven-headed semi-human monster, and she holds in her hand a cup out of which smoke issues and condenses in the forms of floating men and women of incomparable grace. These swim around her head in a long ribbon-like streamer, and as the little figures reach the ground they are devoured by the seven heads. They symbolize the pleasures, ambitions, lusts of this world. Another beautiful water-colour, in faint and tender colour, is perhaps the very vignette for Blair's "Grave," which Blake sent to Cromek with his verses of dedication to the Queen, and which was returned on his hands with such a cruel and insulting letter. Part of this design has been etched and reproduced by William Bell Scott. A mother and her young family, from whose ankles the chains of mortality have just been severed, ascend upward with looks of solemn exaltation on their rapt faces. They form a noble group. Above, on the left, is an angel with a sword and key who has presumably just set them free; he is Death, I suppose--a young and beautiful Death; while to the right is another Apollo-like being, who holds a pair of scales and represents St. Michael. In the most ancient Italian pictures the Archangel is often pictured as weighing the souls of the newly dead. A large and very important water-colour drawing is called the "Lazar House," from Milton. It is one of Blake's terrible works, and has a tendency to haunt the memory unpleasantly. It is very powerful. [Illustration: THE WHORE OF BABYLON Water colour drawing, 1809]