out, "Strike-strike-there's no fear: Nolly never was known to bleed."

Fuseli could not argue soundly, but illustrated everything by brilliant repartee; Horne Tooke was the only man who was an overmatch for him. He said of him: "Tooke is the greatest chatterer I ever sat down with; one cannot, in his company, put in a word edgewise."

In his temper Fuseli was irritable and violent, but appeased in an instant. In his person small, with a face of independent, unregulated fire; Leslie says: his front face had very much the character of a lion. Haydon heard he was handsome when young, and with women (when gratified by their attentions) no man could be more gentle.

Fuseli frequently invented the subjects of his pictures without the aid of poet or historian. On one occasion, he was much amused by the following inquiry of Lord Byron :"I have been looking in vain, Mr. Fuseli, for some months, in the poets and historians of Italy, for the subject of your picture of Ezzelin; pray, where is it to be found?" “Only in my brain, my Lord," was the answer; "for I invented it."

One evening, Fuseli said to Bonnycastle: "Pray, Bonnycastle, what do you consider the reason that I am not popular as a painter, in a country which has produced Shakspeare and Milton?" Bonnycastle answered: "Because the public like familiar subjects, in which there may be individual beauty with fine colouring." "Is that their taste?" said Fuseli, hastily: "then, if I am not their painter, they are not my critics."

CHARACTER OF FUSELI AS AN ARTIST.

Mr. William Young Ottley, (to whom the history of Art owes so much,) wrote, a short time previously to the death of Fuseli, a judicious and elegant paper upon his character as an artist, from which we quote a few passages.

"In the highest department of painting, which not improperly may be termed poetic or epic painting, we had no artist of eminence till, in the year 1779, Mr. Fuseli, after a stay of eight years in Italy, came and settled among us. An intimate acquaintance with the learned languages, had early enabled him to fill his mind from the rich storehouses of ancient poesy; he was all energy and imagination. But in

his youth, not then intending to practise painting professionally, he had not subjected himself, as an artist, to the restraints of an academic education. To curb his genius afterwards was impossible; and to this circumstance we must attribute much of that fine wildness of character which distinguishes his performances; not unmixed, it is true, with a certain amount of exaggeration of manner in the drawing and action of the figures, but which, still, no person of fancy would consent to exchange for the regulated but cold manner too often learned in schools. Had it been the intention of Mr. Fuseli to devote his pencil to the representation of subjects of real, sober history, the every-day occurrences of life, this peculiarity in his style, often amounting to extravagance, would have been inapplicable. But it has ever been his aim, especially in his larger works, to soar in the sublime regions of Poetry; and what, it may be asked, is Poetry, if entirely divested of amplification?"

Mr. Ottley then adduces certain examples to show that the greatest artists have not thought that a style of drawing strictly imitative of common nature, was well adapted to ideal subjects; and that Mr. Fuseli's style of design is of the most elevated kind, and consequently best suited to subjects of a very elevated character.

"In respect of invention, composition, clair-obscure, the works of Mr. Fuseli generally merit unmixed praise; and although, in the more technical parts of colouring, they have not equal pretensions, still in this also they deserve commendation; being commonly painted in that solemn tone of colouring which we admire in the works of the greatest fresco-painters, and which Sir Joshua Reynolds observes to be so well adapted to the higher kind of pictorial representation. As an inventor, he equals the greatest painters that have lived since the restoration of the art. No one was ever more fully gifted with the rare faculty of at once discovering, in the writer he is perusing, the point of the story, and the moment of time best calculated to produce a forcible effect in painting. The loftier his subject, the more easily he reaches it; and when he undertakes that at which another artist would tremble, he is the most sure of success." Mr. Ottley then refers to Fuseli's exhibition of the Milton Gallery, the subjects mostly taken from the Paradise Lost; and adds: "the magnificent imagery of this poem, the beautiful, the sublime, or the terrific character of the personages represented

in it, and of the action described, all combined to fit it for the display of the artist's surprising genius in its fullest force; besides which, the style of Mr. Fuseli was here exactly suited to his subject. But although the series, as a whole, was one of the greatest works of painting ever produced, (certainly in its kind the most perfect) elevating the painter to the same rank as the poet, it failed, as the poem itself had originally done, to insure to its author that immediate share of public favour which was his due, and which is sure to be attendant upon successful endeavours in those inferior branches of the art which are more within the range of public capacity.

"But the fashion or opinion of the day, in matters of taste, is not always the judgment of posterity; and it cannot be too much regretted that the principal pictures of the series, at least, have not been kept together for the future advantage of our artists, and the gratification of those whose studies might hereafter qualify them to appreciate their excellence. For be it remembered, by such persons as might otherwise be too readily induced to undervalue that which they do not understand, that Sir Joshua Reynolds became, in the latter part of his life, 'clearly of opinion that a relish for the higher excellencies of the art is an acquired taste, which no man ever possessed without long cultivation, great labour, and attention.""

POETICAL TRIBUTES.

To Mr. Fuseli some Verses were addressed by Mr. Roscoe, on his Pictures from Milton. Henry Kirke White penned an Ode "on seeing Engravings from his Designs ;" and "A Vision," by a Lady, is printed with the above, in the Appendix to Knowles's Life of Fuseli.

LESLIE'S ACCOUNT OF FUSELI'S PICTURES.

In 1816 Mr. Leslie went to see Fuseli's Pictures at the Academy.* He received Leslie very politely, and took him into his painting-room. He was about a picture of Perseus flying off with the Head of Medusa. The figure of Medusa was very happily conceived, and he had contrived to hide all

*Fuseli's paintings at Somerset House appear to have been for several years one of the Picture Exhibitions of the metropolis: we find it in the Picture of London, 1806 and 1810.

the disgusting part-the stump of the neck and the bloodvery judiciously. Mr. Leslie also saw here the picture of the Lazar House, from the Milton Gallery. He describes it as one of the most tremendous exhibitions of appalling sights he had ever beheld. The figures glare across the picture like a horrible dream. Fuseli has certainly never been equalled in the visionary, and there it is he shines as a genius; but whenever he attempts commonplace, he is contemptible.

Mr. Leslie adds: "Fuseli, I believe, has never painted from nature, and consequently, does not know what it is. His illustrations of Cowper are ridiculous in the extreme. He is a great master of light, and shadow, and colour, as far as it can be made an engine of the terrific. His paintings are very coarse, and have an uncertain kind of execution which is very fine in ghosts and witches, but very bad in ladies and gentlemen."

Elsewhere Leslie says: "With no artist of powers so great as those of Fuseli were those powers confined within so narrow a circle; but within that circle he has expressed the terror and the evanescence of the world of phantoms, with a power unequalled by any painter that ever lived. Perhaps, the finest of all his works is the Sin and Death; and in this he has done that which, had he not done it, we might have thought impossible-he has embodied Milton's words:

"What seemed his head, the likeness of a kingly crown had on."

"In the Satan of Sir Thomas Lawrence, (the worst portrait he ever painted,) all is so material as to be wholly unnatural with reference to the subject. The body and limbs of the fiend are as solid as the shaft of the spear he holds; and the helmet, sword, and shield, seem borrowed from the propertyroom of a theatre. In the Sin and Death of Fuseli there are a ponderous key (the key of the gates of Hell,) and a chain. But they are forged by no earthly smith, and are not otherwise thought of by the spectator than as parts of a terrible vision.

"Fuseli was profoundly acquainted with all in nature that could help his conceptions of the visionary. He was a perfect master of chiaro-scuro and of the evanescence of colour; and he possessed such a competent knowledge of the anatomical structure of the human figure, as to be able to give ideal probability to attitudes in which it was impossible he could be helped by living models. Hence, he could also give to his

ghosts that general and uncertain look that belongs to shadowy beings, without the omission of the leading characteristics of form; and his breadth, to borrow an expression of his own, is never emptiness.' Fuseli, therefore, was as much indebted to the knowledge of nature for his power in the visionary as to his imagination; and it was in a great measure the want of such knowledge that rendered the art of Blake abortive. Everybody can laugh at the extravagance that so often disfigures the works of Fuseli. But it would require eloqence equal to his own to do justice to his finest things; and in spite of his great faults, I cannot but look on him as a great genius, a genius of whom the age in which he lived was unworthy."-Leslie's Handbook, p. 138.

Opie, after he came to London, soon enlarged his percep tions from seeing the works of Fuseli, the evanescent negative colour of whose best pictures he greatly admired; and the influence of Fuseli told on his later practice.

THE HERONS IN RAPHAEL'S CARTOON.

Fuseli objects to the introduction of the herons in "The Miraculous Draught of Fishes"; they were painted by Giovanni d'Udine. "But," says Leslie, "when it is remembered that these birds were and are held sacred in the East, being considered emblematic of piety, their presence is certainly not out of place, and their tameness in approaching so close to the figures is accounted for. One of them elevates its head in the act of drinking, an action noticed by Bunyan in domestic fowls as expressive of giving thanks to Heaven; and it may not, perhaps, be an over-refinement to suppose that such a thought occurred also to Raphael."

Fuseli said of the Aurora of Guido, that the goddess "deserves to precede Hours less clumsy."

CHARACTER OF FUSELI BY LAVATER.

This early and attached friend of Fuseli has left the following character of him-personal and mental, in which physiognomy, as might be expected, takes the lead. "The curve which describes the profile in whole is obviously one of the most remarkable: it indicates an energetic character which spurns at the idea of trammels. The forehead, by its contours and position, is more suited to the poet than the thinker. I