In invention, which is not within the rules of art, and therefore may be considered the highest quality of a poet or a painter; no man has gone beyond him, and perhaps he possessed this quality in a higher degree than any other artist, since the restoration of the Fine Arts in Europe. The _portfolios_ of drawings which he left, fully establish his claim, in this respect, to his being considered a genius of the first class, and as such place him in the highest rank of artists, Michael Angelo and Raphael not excepted. These drawings were made with wonderful felicity and facility; and a spectator would be astonished to see with what ease and power he invented and executed them. In telling the story of the subject, he was never deficient; and the designs made by him would be enough to occupy the lives of many painters to put them upon canvass; for there was no very striking incident in the poets in particular, or in the historians, from Hesiod down to our own times, which, at some period of his long life, had not been the subject of his pencil. On his drawings, he usually put the time when, and place where made; but I know of no instance of his having placed either his name or a monogram upon a picture. No artist had a more vivid fancy than Fuseli, or was more happy in pourtraying superhuman and ideal beings: thus, the visions of Dante and Spenser, and the poetic flights of Shakspeare and Milton, were stamped even with originality by his pencil; and those scenes which, from their difficulty to be represented on paper or on canvass, would deter most artists from attempting them, were his favourite subjects; and in his delineation of them, he may generally be placed on a par with, and he occasionally soars above, the poet. Perhaps to no man can the following lines be more aptly applied than to Fuseli:-- "The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the painter's brush Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation, and a name."