Hayley on Blake, can be realised from a few passages in the letters. At first we read: 'Mr. Hayley acts like a prince.' Then: 'I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery of business, and intimations that, if I do not confine myself to this, I shall not live.' Last: 'Mr. H. is as much averse to my poetry as he is to a chapter in the Bible. He knows that I have writ it, for I have shown it to him' (this is apparently the Milton or the Jerusalem), 'and he has read part by his own desire, and has looked with sufficient contempt to enhance my opinion of it. . . . But Mr. H. approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I have been forced to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own self-will; for I am determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation. I know myself both poet and painter, and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness I have brought down his affected loftiness, and he begins to think that I have some genius: as if genius and assurance were the same thing! But
