infelicities of style;
yet we marvel that one with so clear an insight should ever, even in the
first glow of composition, have involved himself in sentences so
complicated and so obscure. The worst faults of Miss Sheppard's worst
style are reproduced here, joined to an unthriftiness in which she had
no part nor lot. Not unfrequently a sentence Is a conglomerate in which
the ideas to be conveyed are heaped together with no apparent attempt at
arrangement, unity, or completeness. Surely, it need be no presumptuous,
but only a tender and reverent hand that should have organized these
chaotic periods, completing the work which death left unfinished, and
sending it forth to the world in a garb not unworthy the labor of love
so untiringly bestowed upon it by the lamented author.

To show that our strictures are not undeserved, we transcribe a few
sentences, taken at random from the memoir:--

"Which decadence it was led this Pars to go into the juvenile
Art-Academy line, _vice_ Shipley retired."

"The unusual notes struck by William Blake, in any case appealing but to
one class and a small one, were fated to remain unheard, even by the
Student of Poetry, until the process of regeneration had run its course,
and, we may say, the Poetic Revival gone to seed again: seeing that the
virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began by bringing
once more into the foreground, are those least practised now."

"In after years of estrangement from Stothard, Blake used to complain of
this mechanical employment as engraver to a fellow-designer, who (he
asserted) first borrowed from one that, in his servile capacity, had
then to copy that comrade's version of his own inventions--as to motive
and composition his own, that is."

"And this imposing scroll of fervid truisms and hap-hazard generalities,
as often disputable as not, if often acute and striking, always
ingenuous and pleasant, was, like all his other writings, warmly
welcomed in this country."

Let us now go back a hundred years, to the time when William Blake was a
fair-haired, smooth-browed boy, wandering aimlessly, after the manner of
boys, about the streets of London. It might seem at first a matter of
regret that a soul full of all glowing and glorious fancies should have
been consigned to the damp and dismal dulness of that crowded city; but,
in truth, nothing could be more fit. To this affluent, creative mind
dinginess and dimness were not. Through the grayes