64 A FAIRY'S FUNERAL CHAP. self, who had a special knack of mortuary verse, is this on a Felpham blacksmith: My sledge and hammer lie reclined; My coal is spent, my iron gone; The nails are driven-my work is done. The last verses that Hayley wrote have more charm and delicacy than perhaps anything else among his works: Ye gentle birds that perch aloof, Ere winter's angry threats commence ; May God, by whom is seen and heard And guide us to the land unknown. But it is not Hayley that gives its glory to Felpham. The glory of Felpham is that William Blake was happy there for nearly three years. It was at Felpham that he saw the fairy's funeral. "Did you ever see a fairy's funeral, ma'am?" he asked a visitor. "Never, sir!" "I have! . . . I was walking alone in my garden; there was great stillness among the branches and flowers, and more than common sweetness in the air; I heard a low and pleasant sound, and I knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures, of the size and colour of green and grey grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose-leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared. It was a fairy's funeral!" Blake settled at Felpham to be near Hayley, for whom he had a number of commissions to execute. He engraved VI THE PROPHETS AT FELPHAM 65 illustrations to Hayley's works, and painted eighteen heads for Hayley's library-among them, Shakespeare, Homer, and Hayley himself; but all have vanished, the present owner knows not where. In some verses which Blake addressed to Anna Flaxman, the wife of the sculptor, in September, 1800, a few days before moving from London to the Sussex coast, he says:— This song to the flower of Flaxman's joy ; Away to sweet Felpham, for Heaven is there; Through the village then winds, at my cot it does end. Blake's house still stands, a retired, thatched cottage, facing the sea, but some distance from it. In a letter to Flaxman a little later, he says, "Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides its golden gates; the windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, their forms more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses." Beside the sea Blake communed with the spirits of Dante and Homer, Milton and the Hebrew Prophets. Blake's sojourn at Felpham ended in 1803. A grotesque and annoying incident marred its close, the story of which, as told by the poet in a letter to Mr. Butler, certainly belongs to the history of Sussex. It should, however, first be stated that an ex-soldier in the Royal Dragoons, named John Scholfield, had accused Blake of uttering seditious words. The letter runs — "His enmity arises from my having turned him out of my garden, into which he was invited as an assistant by a gardener at work therein, without my knowledge that he was so invited. I desired him, as politely as possible, to go out of the garden; F 66 ture. WILLIAM BLAKE, TRAITOR CHAP. he made me an impertinent answer. I insisted on his leaving the garden; he refused. I still persisted in desiring his depar He then threatened to knock out my eyes, with many abominable imprecations, and with some contempt for my person; it affronted my foolish pride. I therefore took him by the elbows, and pushed him before me until I had got him out. There I intended to have left him; but he, turning about, put himself into a posture of defiance, threatening and swearing at me. I, perhaps foolishly and perhaps not, stepped out at the gate, and, putting aside his blows, took him again by the elbows, and, keeping his back to me, pushed him forward down the road about fifty yards-he all the while endeavouring to turn round and strike me, and raging and cursing, which drew out several neighbours. At length when I had got him. to where he was quartered, which was very quickly done, we were met at the gate by the master of the house-the Fox Inn -(who is the proprietor of my cottage) and his wife and daughter, and the man's comrade, and several other people. My landlord compelled the soldiers to go indoors, after many abusive threats against me and my wife from the two soldiers; but not one word of threat on account of sedition was uttered at that time." As a result, Blake was haled before the magistrates and committed for trial. The trial was held in the Guildhall at Chichester, on January 11th, 1804. Hayley, in spite of having been thrown from his horse on a flint with, says Gilchrist, Blake's biographer, "more than usual violence" was in attendance to swear to the poet's character, and Cowper's friend Rose, a clever barrister, had been retained. According to the report in the County paper, "William Blake, an engraver at Felpham, was tried on a charge exhibited against him by two soldiers for having uttered seditious and treasonable expressions, such as 'd—n the king, d―n all his subjects, d―n his soldiers, they are all slaves; when Buonaparte comes, it will be cutthroat for cut-throat, and the weakest must go to the wall; I VI BLAKE'S FLASHING EYE 67 will help him; &c., &c.'" Blake electrified the court by calling out "False!" in the midst of the military evidence, the invented character of which was, however, so obvious that an acquittal resulted. "In defiance of all decency," the spectators cheered, and Hayley carried off the sturdy Republican (as he was at heart) to supper at Mid Lavant, at Mrs. Poole's. Mr. Gilchrist found an old fellow who had been present at the trial, drawn thither by the promise of seeing the great man of the neighbourhood, Mr. Hayley. All that he could remember of the day was Blake's flashing eye. The Fox Inn, by the way, is still as it was, but the custom, I fancy, goes more to the Thatched House, which adds to the charms of refreshment a museum containing such treasures as a petrified cocoanut, the skeleton of a lobster twenty-eight years old, and a representation of Moses in the bulrushes. A third and fourth great man, of a different type both from Hayley and Blake, met at Felpham in 1819. One was Cyril Jackson, Dean of Christ Church, who, lying on his death-bed in the Manor House, was visited by the other his old pupil, the First Gentleman in Europe. ARUNDEL AND NEIGHBOURHOOD A feudal town-Castles ruined and habitable-The old religion and the new-Bevis of Southampton-Lord Thurlow lays an egg-A noble parkA song in praise of Sussex-The father of cricket. SEEN from the river or from the east side of the Arun valley, Arundel is the most imposing town in Sussex. Many are larger, many are equally old, or older; but none wears so unusual and interesting an air, not even Lewes among her Downs. Arundel clings to the side of a shaggy hill above the Arun. Castle, cathedral, church-these are Arundel; the town itself is secondary, subordinate, feudal. The castle is what one likes a castle to be-a mass of battlemented stone, with a keep, a gateway, and a history, and yet more habitable than ever. So many of the rich make no effort to live in their ancestral halls; and what might be a home, carrying on the tradition of |