We took it as almost a sign of
Blake's personal help when we discovered that the spring of 1889,
when we first joined our knowledge, was one hundred years from the
publication of 'The Book of Thel,' the first published of the
Prophetic Books, as though it were firmly established that the dead
delight in anniversaries. After months of discussion and reading, we
made a concordance of all Blake's mystical terms, and there was much
copying to be done in the Museum & at Red Hill, where the
descendants of Blake's friend and patron, the landscape painter,
John Linnell, had many manuscripts. The Linnellswere narrow in
their religious ideas & doubtful of Blake's orthodoxy, whom they
held, however, in great honour, and I remember a timid old lady who
had known Blake when a child saying: 'He had very wrong ideas, he
did not believe in the historical Jesus.' One old man sat always
beside us ostensibly to sharpen our pencils, but perhaps really to
see that we did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave us very old
port at lunch and I have upon my dining room walls their present of
Blake's Dante engravings.
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