once mentioning some strange inconsistencies of our modern poets; and on coming to one that exceeded the rest, he descended the steps of the ladder one by one, laid his pallet and brushes deliberately on the ground, and coming up to me, said—‘You don’t say so, it’s the very thing I should have supposed of them: yet these are the men that speak against Pope and Dryden.’ Never any sarcasms were so fine, so cutting, so careless as his. The grossest things from his lips seem an essence of refinement: the most refined became more so than ever. Hear him talk of Pope’s Epistle to Jervas, and repeat the lines— ‘Yet should the Graces all thy figures place, And breathe an air divine on every face; Yet should the Muses bid my numbers roll Strong as their charms, and gentle as their soul, With Zeuxis’ Helen thy Bridgewater vie, And these be sung till Granville’s Myra die: Alas! how little from the grave we claim; Thou but preserv’st a face, and I a name.’ Or let him speak of Boccacio and his story of Isabella and her pot of basil, in which she kept her lover’s head and watered it with her tears, ‘and how it grew, and it grew, and it grew,’ and you see his own eyes glisten, and the leaves of the basil-tree tremble to his faltering accents! Mr. Fuseli’s conversation is more striking and extravagant, but less pleasing and natural than Mr. Northcote’s. He deals in paradoxes and caricatures. He talks allegories and personifications, as he paints them. You are sensible of effort without any repose—no careless pleasantry—no traits of character or touches from nature—every thing is laboured or overdone. His ideas are gnarled, hard, and distorted, like his features—his theories stalking and straddle-legged, like his gait—his projects aspiring and gigantic, like his gestures—his performance uncouth and dwarfish, like his person. His pictures are also like himself, with eye-balls of stone stuck in rims of tin, and muscles twisted together like ropes or wires. Yet Fuseli is undoubtedly a man of genius, and capable of the most wild and grotesque combinations of fancy. It is a pity that he ever applied himself to painting, which must always be reduced to the test of the senses. He is a little like Dante or Ariosto, perhaps; but no more like Michael Angelo, Raphael, or Correggio, than I am. Nature, he complains, puts him out. Yet he can laugh at artists who ‘paint ladies with iron lap-dogs;’ and he describes the great masters of old in words or lines full of truth, and glancing from a pen or tongue of fire. I conceive any person would be more struck with Mr. Fuseli at first sight, but would wish to visit Mr. Northcote oftener. There is a bold and startling outline in his style of talking, but not the delicate finishing or bland tone that there is in that of the latter. Whatever there is harsh or repulsive about him is, however,