Although he was happy in delineating playful scenes, yet those which create terror or sympathy in the mind, were his general and favourite subjects, and these he treated with great power; yet, in carrying the terrible to its utmost limits, I know of no subject from his pencil calculated to create horror or disgust. He invented and composed his pictures with great rapidity, and if he thought of a subject, and had not a canvass of a convenient size, it was frequently his practice to rub in the new idea upon a finished picture; hence some of his ablest productions are lost. As his mind was ever intent upon something new, it cost him an effort to finish a picture; which disposition, it appears, he inherited; for, in speaking of an ancestor, Matthias Füessli, who died at Zurich in the year 1665, he thus expresses himself:--"His extensive talent was checked by the freaks of an ungovernable fancy, which seldom suffered him to finish his work. His subjects, in general, were battles, towns pillaged, conflagrations, storms."[72] In painting his pictures, Fuseli used indiscriminately the right hand or the left; but as the latter was more steady, if he were executing subjects on a small scale, which required more than ordinary neatness of touch, they were usually performed with the left. And although some of his small pictures were highly finished, and touched with great neatness, yet he excelled in those where the figures were of or above the size of nature. The subjects of his pencil were never very popular; because they were generally drawn from poetic imagery, or from classical authors, which require a poetic eye and mind in the spectator, or a deep knowledge in the classics, to appreciate properly. He gloried in never having made his pencil a pander to the public taste, and that he had lived by painting what pleased himself, and was content to trust to time for a correct appreciation of his merits. "For when," as he said, "envy shall no longer hold the balance, the next century will become just, and the master impede no more the fame of his works." In going home with him one evening, in a coach, to Somerset House, after having left Mr. Johnson's house, Bonnycastle being present, Fuseli put to him the following question:--"Pray, Bonnycastle, what do you consider the reason that I am not popular as a painter, in a country which has produced Shakspeare and Milton?" Bonnycastle answered, "Because the public like familiar subjects, in which there may be individual beauty with fine colouring." "Is that their taste?" said Fuseli hastily: "then, if I am not their painter, they are not my critics."