Here it is necessary to review briefly Blake's works in engraving and design. We have seen that his instinct when a boy led him directly to the Masters of the Past who could guide him best until he came to himself. The greatest of these were Michael Angelo and Albert Dürer. He did not at first study these demigods and then adopt their principles. He formulated his principles from his immediate experience of Reality, and then rejoiced to find that the men he worshipped produced splendid examples of his principles. First among these was the value of outline. His spiritual eye being opened at a very early age, it was always self-evident to him that the outer world was a vegetable mirror of the inner, and corresponded with it even in the minutest details. If he saw in the outer colour and form, he immediately looked at the inner for the reality of both; and to his inexpressible joy he not only found what he sought, but also that they so far transcended the outer things that he who saw only the outer could have only the dimmest idea of the wondrous beauty and glory of the archetypes. Hence, with his eye on the eternal outline, he declared consistently all his life that the essence of a body is in its form, and that no man can be a great artist who does not build up his art on the foundation of good drawing. Oil as a medium blurred the outline, and therefore he preferred to work in water-colour. But engraving even better than water-colour, enabled him to apply his principle. It was simply incredible to him that any engraver could undervalue drawing. If engraving lost drawing, it lost all character and expression, and therefore his indignation was aroused with the Woolletts and Bartolozzis, who in this respect were mortal sinners. We can see that such a principle was a necessity for Blake with his peculiar mind, and was even a safeguard to its sanity; but we have a perfect right to observe that whatever obscures the outlines of things, as twilight, also removes the barriers that hinder our approach to the unseen, and therefore we may enunciate another principle, that one property of a body is its contribution to atmosphere, with its power to evoke our subjective selves. Holding this as a correlative to Blake's axiom, we can do full justice not only to Michael Angelo, Albert Dürer, Raphael, and Blake, but also to Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt, whom Blake despised. Unfortunately, Blake held to his principle so rigidly that it was apt to lead him into false admirations. We have seen how unduly he admired Macpherson, and here we have to note further that whomsoever of his contemporaries drew the human figure correctly he immediately extolled to the skies, and always with oblique reference of disdain to others whom we have come to think were intrinsically better artists. Hence he admired Mortimer, whom we just remember as the illustrator of Fanny Burney's _Evelina_, whose substantial immortality gives him vicarious and ghostly existence.