It has been shewn throughout this memoir, that the Fine Arts was the ruling passion of Fuseli, but that his father took more than ordinary pains to prevent his becoming an artist, and even checked his wishes to practise in the Fine Arts as an amusement; hence, the benefits which are considered to arise from that early education which artists usually receive, were altogether withheld from him. His style of drawing in early life was formed from those prints, which he could only consult by stealth, in his father's collection, and these were chiefly from the German school. From this circumstance, his early works have figures short in stature, with muscular, but clumsy limbs. But in the invention of the subject, even in his youth, he took the most striking moment, and impressed it with novelty and grandeur; hence some of his early productions tell the stories which they are intended to represent, with a wonderful felicity, and, in this respect, are little inferior to his later works; a circumstance which he himself was not backward to acknowledge. Fuseli always aimed to arrive at the highest point of excellence, particularly in design, and constantly avowed it. When young, he wrote in the Album of a friend, "I do not wish to build a cottage, but to erect a pyramid;" and to this precept he adhered during life, scorning to be less than the greatest. Until he was twenty-five years of age, he had never used oil colours; and he was so inattentive to these materials, that during life he took no pains in their choice or manipulation. To set a palette, as artists usually do, was with him out of the question; he used many of his colours in a dry, powdered state, and rubbed them up with his pencil only, sometimes in oil alone, which he used largely, at others, with an addition of a little spirit of turpentine, and not unfrequently in gold size; regardless of the quantity of either, or their general smoothness when laid on, and depending, as it would appear to a spectator, more on accident for the effect which they were intended to produce, than on any nice distinction of tints in the admixture or application of the materials. It appears doubtful whether this deficiency in his early education, and his neglect also of mechanical means, will be detrimental to his fame as an artist, particularly in the minds of those who can penetrate beyond the surface; for if he had been subjected to the trammels of a school, his genius would have been fettered; and it is then probable that we should have lost those daring inventions, that boldness and grandeur of drawing, (incorrect, certainly, sometimes in anatomical precision,) so fitting to his subjects, and that mystic _chiar' oscuro_, which create our wonder and raise him to the first rank as an artist. He was always proud of having it believed that, in the Fine Arts in particular, in some of the languages, and in many branches of literature, he had arrived at