Blake's poems and paintings belonged to the
Eighteenth Century, chronologically, the spirit of his works, with its
extraordinary independence of contemporary fashions, make him a herald of
the poetic dawn of the Nineteenth Century. An engraver by profession and
training, Blake began while still very young to apply his technical
knowledge to his wholly original system of literary publication. As a poet
he was not only his own illustrator, but his own printer and publisher as
well. Beginning with the "Poetical Sketches" and his delightful "Songs of
Innocence," down to the fantastic "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," all of
Blake's books, with the exception of his "Jerusalem" and "Milton," were
issued during the Eighteenth Century. Blake's artistic faculties seemed to
strengthen with advancing life, but his literary powers waned. He produced
few more satisfying illustrations than those to the Book of Job, executed
late in life. His artistic work also was left comparatively untainted by
the morbid strain of mysticism that runs through his so-called "prophetic
writings." The charm of Blake's poetry, as well as of his drawings, was not
fully appreciated until late in the Nineteenth Century. Charles Lamb, to be
sure, declared, "I must look upon him as one of the extraordinary persons
of the age," but his full worth was not recognized until Swinburne and
Rossetti took up his cause. In America, Charles Eliot Norton, at Harvard,
was Blake's ablest expounder. Famous are James Thomson's lines on William
Blake:

He came to the desert of London town,
Gray miles long;
He wandered up and he wandered down,
Singing a quiet song.

He came to the desert of London town,
Mirk miles broad;
He wandered up and he wandered down,
Ever alone with God.

There were thousands and thousands of human kind,
In this desert of brick and stone;
But some were deaf and some were blind,
And he was there alone.

At length the good hour came; he died
As he had lived, alone;
He was not missed from the desert wide,
Perhaps he was found at the Throne.

[Sidenote: Richard Bright]

In this year Dr. Richard Bright of London published his famous "Reports of
medical cases with a view to illustrate the symptoms and cure of diseases
by a reference to morbid anatomy." A special feature of the book was a full
description of Bright's discoveries in the pathology of the peculiar
disease of the kidneys which bears his na