"The following sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year; since which time, his talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession, he has been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye. Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetical originality, which merited some respite from oblivion. These their opinions remain, however, to be now reproved or confirmed by a less partial public." It was hardly want of leisure that had prevented Blake from polishing his verses. Mr Mathew had argued with him on the necessity, and he had proved tiresomely obstinate, and, what is worse, remained of the same opinion eight years afterwards when he wrote in _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_: "Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius." Mr Mathew was but one of those Bunglers that "can never see perfection, but in the journeyman's labour." However, he saved his name for his generation and lost it for posterity. Blake's _Poetical Sketches_ were printed but not published. The copies were handed over to him to give or sell, but they brought him neither fame nor money. It is long since anyone doubted the worth of the _Poetical Sketches_. The twentieth century wholly endorses the glowing and just criticism that Swinburne wrote fifty years ago. It must have startled the stolid bookish people of the 'sixties to be told that the best of Blake's _Poetical Sketches_--_To Spring_, _To Memory_, _To the Muses_, _To the Evening Star_--were comparable to the world's best in any age. Swinburne frequently exaggerated in his excitement; but here was no exaggeration, and the poems which were once thought by a partial friend "to merit some respite from oblivion" are now reckoned among the chief pearls of great price in England's rich treasury of Songs. There remains little more for the critic to say, but the biographer turns to these _Sketches_ for any intimation of Blake's spiritual and mental growth.