During Blake's stay at Felpham, Milton was continually present in the minds of both himself and Hayley. Hence he was for Blake an actual person in the Felpham drama, Mr and Mrs Blake and Hayley being with him the chief characters, and Skofield and his confederates the rabble. Then passing, as in _The French Revolution_, from actual persons and events to the unseen things of which they were the temporal manifestation, Blake saw each person in his eternal state, and as a symbol of that state, and he lost sight of the earthly puppets, as they were merged into their monstrous and eternal counterparts. The transition made, the poem is no longer intelligible to the corporeal understanding, and Hayley might read it a hundred times without suspecting that he was the villain of the piece. The characters are Los, Urizen, Palamabron and Rintrah, sons of Los, Satan, and Skofield, who keeps his own name. Satan for a time is Hayley, Palamabron by turns Blake and Wesley, Rintrah, Whitefield. This is a seemingly harsh judgment of poor Hayley, akin to Michael Angelo's treatment of Biagio da Cesena; but the harshness is humorously softened when Satan is discovered decked with half the graces. He is kind, meek, humble, and complains gently when his kindness fails to call forth gratitude. He is the personification of Hayley's virtues, which together make up (hypocritic) holiness. Blake had made the startling discovery, which Nietzsche has popularized in our time, that the graces in wrong places are vices. Nietzsche went on to make the absurd assertions that humility and pity are the virtues of the herd and are never right in any place. Blake believed that the graces coupled with insight and understanding took on a new quality which made them divine. To give examples: Blake, while submissive to Hayley, was humble, but at the risk of his birthright. Hayley, exerting himself to find rich neighbours to sit for Blake to paint in miniature, was kind, but he was suffocating his genius. To the scribes and Pharisees, Christ meek would have been Christ weak. Modesty in one who does not know that all things that live are holy is prudery. To pity oneself or another for the troubles that come through slackness is effeminacy. The true virtue here is to damn. Hence the right place for a man clothed from head to foot in hypocritic graces is hell, his right name is Satan. But when a man has stripped himself of his virtues, and annihilating himself goes down with Christ into death, then he rises again into newness of life and vision, and the graces of the new life, still called by their old names, but now in their right places, are flaming, beautiful, irresistible. Once Blake saw his man in his setting in eternity, he escaped from his initial resentment, and he could write calmly to Hayley and subscribe himself, "Your devoted Will Blake."