This so-called poem owed its birth to the fact that about this period Blake became one of a literary, artistic, and political set who met at the house of Johnson the publisher. At these gatherings Mary Wollstonecraft arrayed her charms to storm the citadel of Fuseli's cynical heart, unavailingly. Among other guests were Tom Paine, author of "The Rights of Man," whom eventually Blake was the means of saving, by a timely word of warning, from arrest in England. He judiciously advised his flight to France, at the right moment for his safety. Godwin and Holcroft and several revolutionary dreamers were members of this _coterie_. Blake's enthusiasm was set all aglow by a philosophy which saw in the French Revolution a great renovating process,--the fire to burn up the ignorance and superstition and class boundaries of the ancient order, the introduction of a new reign of righteousness and peace. In effect, this new philosophy which fired the imagination of Blake had a basis of materialism and violence which would have found no answering response in his soul, had he sought to investigate it. His sympathy with the group was intellectual, and with the higher manifestations of its creed alone. It led to no political action. He had far other work to do than that of a political agitator, but all expansive doctrines which made for liberty and individuality fired the imagination and fed the intellect of Blake. Democracy was his ideal, and democratic virtues won his admiration; indeed, he dared to flaunt the "_bonnet rouge_" of liberty in London streets in this agitated period, but after the Days of Terror in '92 he tore off the white cockade and never again donned the Cap of Liberty. But if his work was not to be in the political arena, he was in his own way hastening the coming of that better and more immaterial kingdom which these young liberators only half conceived.