The first is covered with small writing, fresh proverbs of hell, which are the same in substance as the earlier proverbs, but less provocative. The _Laocoon_ perfectly expressed his own experience during years of obscure struggle. He found the same mighty conflict described from cover to cover of the Bible. Christians have been accustomed to see there the history of their sin, conviction, struggle, and victory. Blake had nothing to say against all this, but he named that which was striving for the victory the spirit of art, and all the things that accompany the conflict--prayer, praise, fasting--he explained in terms of art. Protestantism had made necessary such a vehement vindication of the beautiful. To-day, I suppose, we accept naturally Blake's aphorisms, but need to rediscover some of those other things that protestantism and catholicism alike have insisted on so uncompromisingly in the past. From _On Homer's Poetry_ I quote the following: "Unity and Morality are secondary considerations and belong to Philosophy and not to Poetry, to Exception and not to Rule, to Accident and not to Substance. The Ancients called it eating of the Tree of Good and Evil." In other words, poetry, like life and love and other instinctive things, goes deeper and before our fine-spun distinctions of number and morality. Philosophers have sprung up since Blake's day who are wonderfully agreed with him. This on the cause of European wars is striking: "The Classics! it is the Classics, and not Goths nor Monks, that desolate Europe with Wars." From _On Virgil_ I gather this, which needs no comment: "A warlike State never can produce Art. It will rob and plunder and accumulate into one place, and translate and copy and buy and sell and criticize, but not make." During Blake's last year in South Molton Street he executed seventeen woodcuts for Dr Thornton's _Pastorals of Virgil_. These are very simple and childlike or childish, according to our state when we look at Blake's work. They seem to me of very unequal merit; but the best of them are invaluable, for they show that Blake at the age of sixty-three had not lost that childlike innocence, the parody of which is all that most men attain to in their second childhood.