In other words, poetry, like life and love and other instinctive things, goes deeper and before our fine-spun distinctions of number and morality. Philosophers have sprung up since Blake's day who are wonderfully agreed with him.
This on the cause of European wars is striking: "The Classics! it is the Classics, and not Goths nor Monks, that desolate Europe with Wars."
From _On Virgil_ I gather this, which needs no comment: "A warlike State never can produce Art. It will rob and plunder and accumulate into one place, and translate and copy and buy and sell and criticize, but not make."
During Blake's last year in South Molton Street he executed seventeen woodcuts for Dr Thornton's _Pastorals of Virgil_. These are very simple and childlike or childish, according to our state when we look at Blake's work. They seem to me of very unequal merit; but the best of them are invaluable, for they show that Blake at the age of sixty-three had not lost that childlike innocence, the parody of which is all that most men attain to in their second childhood.
In 1821 Blake removed to 3 Fountain Court, Strand, where he had the plainest of neutral rooms, not without value as a background for his visions. Here relief was at hand, but he knew it not. Harassed by poverty, he must raise money somehow. His collection of engravings, which had steadily grown since the day that he had endowed his bride with it as his sole treasure, was marketable, and with as little fuss as need be he sold it to Messrs Colnaghi and Company. It was the final self-stripping. Humbled and disciplined by the inexorable years, having surrendered himself and his last precious possession, he was ready to bring forth the rich fruit of his mature genius. His old friend and patron Butts gave him a commission to paint twenty-one water-colour designs illustrating the Book of Job. He was allowed to show them, and they drew forth from his friend Linnell a further commission to execute and engrave a duplicate set, with the written agreement that he should receive £100 for the designs and copyright and another £100 out of the profits. There were no profits forthcoming; but Linnell paid him in instalments £50 besides the first £100. We may note here that the Royal Academy in 1822 made him a grant of £25. And so, at last, Blake had sufficient means to enable him to devote himself to his joyous work without the gnawing distraction of poverty and want.