makes them as expressive mosaics of pattern as the hieroglyphics. I cannot but think that it was partly from what he had seen, in actual basalt, or in engravings after ancient monuments which must have been about him at Basire the engraver's, that Blake found the suggestion of his picturewriting in the Prophetic Books. He believed that all Greek art was but a pale copy of a lost art of Egypt, 'the greater works of the Asiatic Patriarchs,' 'Apotheoses of Persian, Hindu, and Egyptian antiquity.' In such pictures as 'The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth,' he professed to be but 'applying to modern heroes, on a smaller scale,' what he had seen in vision of these 'stupendous originals now lost, or perhaps buried till some happier age.' Is it not likely therefore that in his attempt to create the religious books of a new religion, 'the Everlasting Gospel' of the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord,' he should have turned to the then unintelligible forms in which the oldest of the religions had written itself down in a visible pictorial message?
But, whatever suggestions may have come
