Immense changes were taking place in European literature and art. The new spirit and the old spirit were energetically at work side by side. At home, Jane Austen brought the novel as understood and treated by Fanny Burney to consummate perfection. Sir Walter Scott cast a magic glow of romance over the past. Wordsworth was piercing through the sacramental significance of nature. Coleridge was dreaming weird mystical dreams in the open daylight. Abroad, Goethe was exploring the riches of man's fallen nature. Beethoven, bursting away from Haydn, was introducing a world of passion into his music. Napoleon was a new kind of man. Did Blake read the signs of the times? And what did he think of them? We know that he admired Wordsworth, but feared lest nature should ensnare him. The rest is guess-work. Blake could hardly have known how to place himself among the great moderns. It is we, looking back over the lapse of a century, who can see his deep affinity with many that came after him. I would say more. He had anticipated much of the better side of Nietzsche's teaching, but had seen it still more clearly in the character and teaching of Christ. He is strictly the Evangelist to the modern world enamoured of art, strength, and spontaneity, to bring it back to Christ. Amidst these changes we can just discern a change in Blake's spiritual life which is common to all original geniuses. The Psalmist sang: "Instead of thy fathers thou shalt have children whom thou mayst make princes." Blake had hardly had a father, but he had had friends or brothers that were too apt to play the part of the heavy father. These were passing one by one, and their places were being taken by young men, sons who sat at the feet of the wise man and gave him the reverence that was his due. We cannot say that Blake had a genius for friendship. With none of his old friends had he been really intimate. He was always uncompromising on his convictions, and these were so peculiar that not even Swedenborgian Flaxman could always understand him. His feeling for Flaxman survived with difficulty. What might have grown to a close friendship for Hayley died the moment he saw him as he was. Stothard had refused his offered hand after their quarrel. There remained Fuseli, of whom he wrote: "The only man that e'er I knew Who did not make me almost spew Was Fuseli." Fuseli was a learned man who could scamper about the world's history with breathless speed. He lectured on the different ages of art with all the fluency of a Swiss polyglot waiter. Out of the copious flow of his eloquence one can, with long patience, fish up such fine things as this on Michael Angelo: "A beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty," or this on Rembrandt's Crucifixion: "Rembrandt concentrated the tremendous moment in one flash of pallid light. It breaks on the body of Christ, shivers down His limbs, and vanishes on the armour of a crucifix; the rest is gloom."