he four quarters of London represented Blake's four great mythological
personages, the Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were
the foundation of all study of the philosophy of William Blake that
requires an exact knowledge for its pursuit and that traces the
connection between his system and that of Swedenborg or of Boehme. I
recognised certain attributions, from what is sometimes called the
Christian Cabbala, of which Ellis had never heard, and with this proof
that his interpretation was more than fantasy he and I began our four
years' work upon the Prophetic Books of William Blake. We took it as
almost a sign of Blake's personal help when we discovered that the spring
of 1889, when we first joined our knowledge, was one hundred years from
the publication of _The Book of Thel_, the first published of the
Prophetic Books, as though it were firmly established that the dead
delight in anniversaries. After months of discussion and reading we made a
concordance of all Blake's mystical terms, and there was much copying to
be done in the Museum and at Red Hill, where the descendants of Blake's
friend and patron, the landscape painter John Linnell, had many
manuscripts. The Linnells were narrow in their religious ideas and
doubtful of Blake's orthodoxy, whom they held, however, in great honour,
and I remember a timid old lady who had known Blake when a child saying,
"He had very wrong ideas, he did not believe in the historical Jesus." One
old man sat always beside us, ostensibly to sharpen our pencils but
perhaps really to see that we did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave
us very old port at lunch, and I have upon my dining-room walls their
present of Blake's Dante engravings. Going thither and returning Ellis
would entertain me by philosophical discussion varied with improvised
stories, at first folk-tales which he professed to have picked up in
Scotland, and, though I had read and collected many folk tales, I did not
see through the deceit. I have a partial memory of two more elaborate
tales, one of an Italian conspirator flying barefoot, from I forget what
adventure through I forget what Italian city, in the early morning.
Fearing to be recognised by his bare feet, he slipped past the sleepy
porter at an hotel, calling out "number so and so" as if he were some
belated guest. Then passing from bedroom door to door he tried on the
boots, and just as he got a pair to fit, a voice cried from the room: "W