ose qualms about the dog and
cray-fish [1] melt before it. I am going to be happy and _vain_ again.

A hasty farewell,

C. LAMB.

[1] Lamb had confessed, in a previous letter to Barton, to having once
wantonly set a dog upon a cray-fish.

LXXXII.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

_May_ 15, 1824.

Dear B. B.,--I am oppressed with business all day, and company all
night. But I will snatch a quarter of an hour. Your recent acquisitions
of the picture and the letter are greatly to be congratulated. I too
have a picture of my father and the copy of his first love-verses; but
they have been mine long. Blake is a real name, I assure you, and a most
extraordinary man, if he is still living. He is the Robert [William]
Blake whose wild designs accompany a splendid folio edition of the
"Night Thoughts," which you may have seen, in one of which he pictures
the parting of soul and body by a solid mass of human form floating off,
God knows how, from a lumpish mass (fac-simile to itself) left behind on
the dying bed. He paints in water-colors marvellous strange pictures,
visions of his brain, which he asserts that he has seen; they have great
merit. He has _seen_ the old Welsh bards on Snowdon,--he has seen the
beautifullest, the strongest, and the ugliest man, left alone from the
massacre of the Britons by the Romans, and has painted them from memory
(I have seen his paintings), and asserts them to be as good as the
figures of Raphael and Angelo, but not better, as they had precisely the
same retro-visions and prophetic visions with themself [himself]. The
painters in oil (which he will have it that neither of them practised)
he affirms to have been the ruin of art, and affirms that all the while
he was engaged in his Welsh paintings, Titian was disturbing him,--
Titian the Ill Genius of Oil Painting. His pictures--one in particular,
the Canterbury Pilgrims, far above Stothard--have great merit, but hard,
dry, yet with grace. He has written a Catalogue of them, with a most
spirited criticism on Chaucer, but mystical and full of vision. His
poems have been sold hitherto only in manuscript. I never read them; but
a friend at my desire procured the "Sweep Song." There is one to a
tiger, which I have heard recited, beginning,--

"Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,
Thro' the deserts of the night,"

which is glorious, but, alas! I have not the book; for the man is flown,
whither I know not,--to Hades or a madhouse. But I must look on h