drank, and slept and waked upon Michael Angelo By a wiser course of study he might have schooled down his imagination; but he shunned the calmer company of Correggio and Raphael to quaff wine from the cup of the Polyphemus of modern art. He lived in a species of intoxication-affected the dress and mimicked the manners of Michael-assumed the historic shoe, and would have preferred the sandal. In drawing and in sketching he tried to imitate his master's dashing energy and extravagance of breadth, which induced Piranesi to exclaim, "Fuseli-this is not designing, but building a man!" When time had mellowed his taste, and in his turn he had become an instructer, he continued to prefer that broad rough freedom of hand, and held in derision all that was cautiously neat or timidly graceful. He would seize the chalks of the students, stamp with his tiny foot till they stared or smiled-cry "See!" and delineate a man in half the time and with a bolder stroke than a tailor uses in chalking out a garment.

Of his studies in the numerous galleries of Italy he has left a minute account. He refused to follow the common method of laboriously copying the chief pictures of the great masters, with the hope of carrying away their spirit as well as the image of their works. He sought to animate his own compositions by contemplating rather than transcribing theirs. To his sketches he added observations with his pen; they are rapturous about all that is lofty, nor are they deficient either in the shrewdness which penetrates, or the wisdom which weighs. He loved to dream along the road-to follow the phantasies of an unbridled imagination -to pen sarcastic remarks-sketch colossal groups, and would call out ever and anon, when some strange thought struck him, "Michael Angelo!" His company was eagerly courted by all who wished to be thought wise or witty; and with the

English gentry, who then, as now, swarmed in Rome, he formed friendships which were useful in after-life.

How Fuseli supported himself abroad during eight years of study, he has not told us; his family were respectable, not opulent; his attempts with the pen had enabled him to live, without making his purse overflow, and as his paintings were few, it has been supposed that the income arising from his own exertions was but little. It is now ascertained that such was his winning way in conversation, and such even then the acknowledged powers of his pencil, that from English travellers alone he had at one time commissions to the amount of £1500. Some of his letters from Rome have a laconic brevity which amuses those whom they fail to inform; others breathe of a sadness of heart and depression of spirit, such as the sons of genius are commonly heirs to. In 1774, he sent to the British Exhibition a drawing of the Death of Cardinal Beaufort, and three years after, a Scene from Macbeth; both marked by much boldness and originality. His mind loved to range with Shakspeare and Miltonthe Satan of the latter, majestic even in ruin, was a favourite study, and he imagined no one save himself could body him forth in all his terror and glory; the Tempest and the Midsummer Night's Dream contained images no less congenial, and he had already filled his portfolio with designs worthy of the wand of Prospero or the spells of Puck. His imagination, though he seemed not aware of it, was essentially Gothic; his mind dwelt with the poetry and the superstitions of Christendom; he talked about, but seldom drew, the gods and goddesses of Olympus.

In the year 1778 Fuseli left Italy. He paid a visit to his native Zurich, and lived six months with his father, whom he loved tenderly. His elder brother, Rodolph, had settled in Vienna, and become librarian

to the emperor, and his brother Caspar died in the prime of life, after having distinguished himself - by several skilful compositions on entomology. Early in 1779 he left Zurich, to which he never returned, and came back to London with his mind strengthened in knowledge, and his hand improved in its cunning. With the reputation of an eight years' residence in Rome upon him, he commenced his professional career, and the beginning was au spicious.

Thus stood art at that time in England. Reynolds excelled all men in portraiture and wrought unrivalled and alone. Wilson and Gainsborough sufficed for the moderate measure of public demand in landscape. Barry and West shared between them the wide empire of religious and historic composition, and there was nothing left for Fuseli save the poetical. Nature had endowed him eminently for this field, and the nation showed symptoms of an awakening regard for it. No preceding painter had possessed himself of the high places of British verse. The enthusiasm for Milton, and especially for Shakspeare, was warmer and also more intelligent than at any former time; and Fuseli was considered by himself and by many friends as destined to turn this state of feeling to excellent account.

The first work which proved that an original mind had appeared in England, was the "Nightmare," exhibited in 1782. "The extraordinary and peculiar genius which it displayed," says one of his biographers, "was universally felt, and perhaps no single picture ever made a greater impression in this country.. A very fine mezzotinto engraving of it was scraped by Raphael Smith, and so popular did the print become, that, although Mr. Fuseli received only twenty guineas for the picture, the publisher made five hundred by his speculation." This was a subject suitable to the unbridled fancy of the painter, and perhaps to no other imagination has the Fiend

which murders our sleep ever appeared in a more poetical shape.

His rising fame-his poetic feeling-his great knowledge-and his greater confidence-now induced Fuseli to commence an undertaking worthy of the highest genius-The Shakspeare Gallery. An accidental conversation at the table of the nephew of Alderman Boydell, started, it is said, the idea; and West, and Romney, and Hayley, and Fuseli shared in the honour. To the mind of the latter, indeed, such a scheme had been long present; it dawned on his fancy in Rome, even as he lay on his back marvelling in the Sistine, and he saw in imagination a long and shadowy succession of pictures. Boydell supported the plan anxiously and effectually; on receiving £500 Reynolds entered, though with reluctance, into a scheme which consumed time and required much thought: but Fuseli had no rich commissions in the way—his heart was with the subject-in his own fancy he had already commenced the work, and the enthusiastic alderman found a more enthusiastic painter, who made no preliminary stipulations, but prepared his palette and began.

Shakspeare presented a whole world to the eye of art; and to imbody the whole or any considerable portion of his visions, would demand a combination of powers not to be hoped for. As might have been expected, Fuseli grappled with the wildest passages of the most imaginative plays; and he handled them with a kind of happy and vigorous extravagance, which startled common beholders.

The Tempest, the Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, and Hamlet suggested the best of the eight Shakspearian pictures which he painted, and of these, that from Hamlet is certainly the noblest. It is, indeed, strangely wild and superhuman-if ever a spirit visited earth, it must have appeared to

Fuseli. The majesty of buried Denmark is no vulgar ghost such as scares the belated rustic, but a sad and majestic shape with the port of a god: to imagine this required poetry, and in that our artist was never deficient. He had fine taste in matters of high import; he drew the boundary line between the terrible and the horrible, and he never passed it; the former he knew was allied to grandeur, the latter to deformity and disgust. An eminent metaphysician visited the gallery before the public exhibition; he saw the Hamlet's Ghost of Fuseli, and exclaimed, like Burn's rustic in Halloween, "Lord, preserve me!" He declared that it haunted him 1ound the room.

The paintings which composed the Shakspeare Gallery were supplied by various hands; the plan was new, and novelty seldom fails to attract the multitude; but the multitude cannot be supposed to have much sympathy with works of a purely poetic order. There must be a strong infusion of the grosser realities of life to secure extensive popularity: any rustic can feel the merits of John Gilpin, but what can such a person comprehend of the Penseroso? Much as the Shakspeare Gallery was praised, its excellence therefore was not felt by the people at large. The superiority of Fuseli in poetic conception over all his compeers was however appreciated by the few, on whose approbation alone he placed any value.

Those pictures were followed by others, all of a poetic order-Dante's Inferno suggested the Fransesca and Paolo-Virgil supplied him with Dido, and from Sophocles he took (Edipus devoting his son and Edipus with his daughters. They were all marked by poetic freedom of thought and by more than poetic extravagance of action. They astonished many whom they could not please, and the name of Fuseli was spread over the island and heard of in foreign lands. He was elected an Asso