return upon himself; and in one of his letters he says: 'One thing of real consequence I have accomplished by coming into the country, which is to me consolation enough, namely, I have recollected all my scattered thoughts on art, and resumed my primitive and original ways of execution in both painting and engraving, which in the confusion of London I had very much obliterated from my mind,' It is to this period, no doubt (a period mentally overcome in the quiet of Felpham, but awaiting, as we shall see, the electric spark of that visit to the Truchsessian Gallery in London), that Blake refers in the Descriptive Catalogue, when he speaks of the 'experiment pictures' which 'were the result of temptations and perturbations, labouring to destroy imaginative power, by means of that infernal machine, called Chiaro Oscuro, in the hands of Venetian and Flemish demons,' such as the 'outrageous demon,' Rubens, the 'soft and effeminate and cruel demon,' Correggio, and, above all, Titian. 'The spirit of Titian,' we are told, in what is really a confession of Blake's consciousness of the power of those painters whose in-
