What must strike any impartial reader of the _Discourses_ is the extraordinary similarity of the aims of art there set forth with Blake's own cherished views. Both give the supreme place to Michael Angelo and extol Raphael. Both depreciate the Venetian and Flemish Schools. Both reckon good drawing the foundation of great art. The difference between them is mainly one of emphasis. Blake believed in impulse and instinct, and Sir Joshua in theoretical and reasoned deliberation. Yet the reasonable man writes: "If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion, before we act, life would be at a stand, and art would be impracticable." And again: "I mean to caution you against ... an unfounded distrust of the imagination and feeling in favour of narrow, partial, confined, argumentative theories." Both extol the grand style--with a difference. Reynolds's conception of the grand style is derived from the laborious study of the excellencies of many masters. When he attains to it, he is an epitome of those excellencies. He reaches by this means his ideal, his heaven, and its contrary immediately bounds into view, which he is too urbane to call hell, and contents himself to designate as the real. Blake's ideal came to him with overmastering force from his direct vision of the inward reality. Hence he had no need of the false antithesis of the ideal and the real. Reynolds extols Michael Angelo and degrades Hogarth. Blake loves both. In conclusion we say, with only the _Discourses_[5] before us, the differences between the two men are negligible in a world where two men can never quite see eye to eye. It is when we turn from the _Discourses_ to Sir Joshua's accomplished works that we begin to understand what was reasonable in Blake's furious resentment and attack. Sir Joshua preached one thing and practised another. He sang the praises of the Florentine, Roman, and Bolognese Schools, and painted for all the world as if Rembrandt were his chief master. "Instead of 'Michael Angelo' Read 'Rembrandt,' for it is fit To make mere common honesty In all that he has writ." Sir Joshua, after years of toil, painted Nelly O'Brien's petticoat, and we marvel at the consummate workmanship. Blake, in spite of his faulty technique and impatience of criticism, lifted the veil that hides the heavens, and inspires us. We thank those who make us wonder: we owe something deeper than thanks to those who inspire us. Blake was well aware that his art was of a loftier kind than that of the President of the Royal Academy. The one was reckoned the foremost painter of his age, the other was pitied as a madman. And Blake felt he did right to be angry. Let us return to Cromek.