writes Blake, suggesting the numerous cases of friction and cruel offence which must result from the education of the human soul in selfishness and vainglory. There is nothing in the series to equal the colossal daring of "I want, I want." Just a little cross-hatching, a little rough spluttering work with the burin, and we have this bit of marvellous irony. A group of tiny pigmies on a spit of land have reared an enormous ladder against the moon, and are about to start on their journey through star-bespread darkness to the pale crescent so far above them. Mr. Swinburne says that this was originally an ironical sketch satirizing the methods of Art study pursued by "amateurs and connoisseurs"--"scaling with ladders of logic the heaven of invention," and presuming to measure, reach and gauge the intangible ideal. But in this series Blake has expanded the meaning of the design into the passionate yearning and aching desire of man after things spiritual. Plate 10 is a study of the sea. A water-colour in washes of Indian ink of very similar composition is in existence, and was on exhibition at Ryder Street in 1904. The water-colour evidently suggested by this plate is the finer work, but it is a marvellous evidence of Blake's power, that the tiny plate of the "Gates of Paradise" (1-5/8 in. by 2 in. only in size) should be capable of representing so infinite a waste of stormy waters. One frantic arm reaches up to Heaven from out the foamy crest of the waves, a minute later to be submerged,--"In Time's ocean falling, drowned." That is its significance! No cries of "Help!" will be heard; Man _must_ be overwhelmed by Time. In the eleventh plate an old man in spectacles ruthlessly clips the wings of a bright boy who wrestles and struggles under the cruel hands. Thus does Age, full of worldly experience and material philosophy, clip the wings of the aspiring soul of Youth. Walled in by the divisions and materialisms into which Man has fallen through the creation of the generative nature, we see human souls despairing, and full of lassitude, enclosed in depths of icy dungeons, in the twelfth plate. This plate was afterwards taken as the basis of the design Blake made of Count Ugolino and his sons in the tower at Pisa in his Dante series. In Plate 13 comes the promise of life. A man stretched on his bed with his family watching beside him, suddenly has a vision of "The Immortal Man that cannot die." After that all is different, and in Plate 14 "the traveller hasteth in the evening" of life to his journey's end, serenely cheerful, even anxious to shake off mortality, that he may realize his glorious vision the sooner.