preting the Dreams of Pharaoh's chief Baker and Butler." I have been unable to learn how this work was executed or received; there was probably no contention for it among the patrons of art, since Johnson, the bookseller, became the purchaser. It hung in his house till it became cracked and faded, when Fuseli took it home to lay what he called “the villanous clutch of restoration upon it." The attempt was probably never made, and the picture was lost or destroyed. He had now lived eight years in England, and was in the thirtieth year of his age; his enthusiasm was unbounded, his learning great, his imagination of a high order, and much was expected from his zeal and talents, on whatever field he might ultimately fix them.

At this period his literary compositions were wonderfully free from the peculiarities which mark the writings of foreigners. They have much the air of being written with the scrupulous fastidiousness of one conscious of the sins most likely to beset him, and anxiously avoiding the enthusiasm as well as the idioms of the German style. Perhaps those for whom he wrote such desultory communications, had shown him with a wet pen how to sober down the poetic aspirations of his vein, and finding resistance unprofitable, he submitted the full-blown flowers of his fancy to the editorial scythe with composure. But when eminence in art brought him into notice, he resumed the original license of his pen, and hazarded freer thoughts and took bolder liberties with language. His German nature prevailed a little against his English education-and it cannot be denied that

it infused a dash of poetic fervour into his lectures and critical compositions.

His wit, and learning, and talent in art, gained him early admission to the company of the wealthy and the distinguished, and such was the varied power of his conversation that he never met a stranger without impressing him with a respect for his genius and a dread of his ridicule. His poetic talents were of no ordinary kind, and his poems, written in his native language, are deficient, I have heard, neither in force nor in fire-though occasionally deformed by bad taste. His attempts in English verse are rude and unmelodious-distinguished by harsh rugged vigour.

The sketches and drawings of Fuseli were of a higher order than the works of his pen, and as art speaks an universal language, they were free from those deformities which are so visible in his writings. They exhibited a deep poetic feeling, acquaintance with the poets and historians of old, and a perfect sense of the heroic action and sentiment which the noblest line of art requires. Armstrong, the poet, his friend and counsellor, was not insensible of their excellence, when he joined in persuading him to woo the muse of painting alone. He no sooner formed this resolution than he determined to visit Rome. Armstrong accompanied him, and both used to relate that whilst they were descanting on the glories of the Eternal City and the splendour of ancient sculpture and modern poetry, their reveries were interrupted by the sudden grounding of the vessel. This happened near Genoa, they took to their boats, landed in safety--quarrelled on the road to Rome, and sepa-.

rated in no good mood at Florence. The poet went his own way, and Fuseli hastened to the capital of art.

He had from his boyhood admired Michael Angelo in engravings, and he adored him now in his full and undiminished majesty. It was a story which he loved to repeat, how he lay on his back day after day, and week succeeding week, with upturned and wondering eyes, musing on the splendid ceiling of the Sistine Chapel-on the unattainable grandeur of the Florentine. He sometimes, indeed, added, that such a posture of repose was necessary for a body fatigued like his with the pleasant gratifications of a luxurious city. He imagined, at all events, that he drank in as he lay the spirit of the sublime Michael, and that by studying in the Sistine, he had the full advantage of the mantle of inspiration suspended visibly above him. The flighty imagination of Fuseli required a soberer master; the wings of his fancy were a little too strong sometimes for his judgment, and brought upon him the reproach of extravagance— an error so rare in British art that it almost becomes a virtue. He was no idle votary, for he strove to imitate; he was no ignorant admirer, for he thus praises his great master.

Sublimity of conception, grandeur of form, and breadth of manner, are the elements of Michael Angelo's style. By these principles he selected or rejected the objects of imitation. As painter as sculptor, as architect, he attempted-and, above any other man, succeeded-to unite magnificence of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts with the utmost simplicity and breadth. His line

is uniformly grand; character and beauty were admitted only so far as they could be made subservient to grandeur; the child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man; his men are a race of giants. This is the "Terribil via" hinted at by Agostino Caracci, though perhaps as little understood by the Bolognese as by the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. He is the inventor of epic painting in that sublime circle of the Sistine Chapel which exhibits the origin, progress, and final dispensation of Theocracy. He has personified motion in the groups of the Cartoon of Pisa; embodied sentiment in the monuments of St. Lorenzo; unravelled the features of meditation in the prophets and sybils of the Chapel of Sixtus; and in the Last Judgment, with every attitude that varies the human body, traced the master trait of every passion that sways the human heart. Though as sculptor he expresses the character of flesh more perfectly than all who came before or after him, yet he never submitted to copy an individual, Julio the Second only excepted, and in him he represented the reigning passion rather than the man. In painting, he contented himself with negative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected all meretricious ornament. The fabric of St. Peter, scattered into infinity of jarring parts by Bramanti and his uccessors, he concentrated, suspended the

cupola, and to the most complex gave the air of the most simple of edifices."

This character carries the image of the author's mind; the style, however, is clearer, and the expression less complicated or obscure than was common with Fuseli. No unimaginative dauber ever hid his ignorance of anatomy under a redundancy of drapery, more effectually than this remarkable man could veil ordinary thoughts under colossal words. The reader will thank me for transcribing also the following portrait of Leonardi da Vinci.

"Leonardi da Vinci broke forth with a splendour which distanced former excellence; made up of all the elements which constitute the essence of genius; favoured by education and circumstances; all ear, all eye, all grasp; painter, poet, sculptor, anatomist, architect, engineer, chemist, mechanist, musician, man of science, and sometimes empiric, he laid hold of every beauty in the enchanted circle-but without exclusive attachment to one, dismissed, in her turn, each. Fitter to scatter hints than teach by example, he wasted life insatiate in experiment. To a capacity which at once penetrated the principle and real aim of art, he joined an inequality of fancy that at one moment lent him wings for the pursuit of beauty, and the next flung him on the ground to crawl after deformity: we owe him chiaro-scuro with all its magic; we owe him caricature with all its incongruities. His notions of the most elaborate finish and his want of perseverance were at least equal. Want of perseverance alone could make him abandon his Cartoon, destired for the great council chamber at Florence, of which the