Bonnycastle. Now
and then, Godwin was present: oftener Mr. Kinnaird the magistrate, a
great lover of Horace.

Fuseli was a small man, with energetic features, and a white head of
hair. Our host's daughter, then a little girl, used to call him the
white-headed lion. He combed his hair up from the forehead; and, as his
whiskers were large, his face was set in a kind of hairy frame, which,
in addition to the fierceness of his look, really gave him an aspect of
that sort. Otherwise, his features were rather sharp than round. He
would have looked much like an old military officer, if his face,
besides its real energy, had not affected more. There was the same
defect in it as in his pictures. Conscious of not having all the
strength he wished, he endeavored to make out for it by violence and
pretension. He carried this so far, as to look fiercer than usual when
he sat for his picture. His friend and engraver, Mr. Houghton, drew an
admirable likeness of him in this state of dignified extravagance. He is
sitting back in his chair, leaning on his hand, but looking ready to
pounce withal. His notion of repose was like that of Pistol:

"Now, Pistol, lay thy head in Furies' lap."

Agreeably to this over-wrought manner, he was reckoned, I believe, not
quite so bold as he might have been. He painted horrible pictures, as
children tell horrible stories; and was frightened at his own
lay-figures. Yet he would hardly have talked as he did about his
terrors, had he been as timid as some supposed him. With the affected,
impression is the main thing, let it be produced how it may. A student
of the Academy told me, that Mr. Fuseli coming in one night, when a
solitary candle had been put on the floor in a corner of the room, to
produce some effect or other, he said it looked "like a damned soul."
This was by way of being Dantesque, as Michael Angelo was. Fuseli was an
ingenious caricaturist of that master, making great bodily displays of
mental energy, and being ostentatious with his limbs and muscles, in
proportion as he could not draw them. A leg or an arm was to be thrust
down one's throat, because he knew we should dispute the truth of it. In
the indulgence of this willfulness of purpose, generated partly by
impatience of study, partly by want of sufficient genius, and, no doubt,
also by a sense of superiority to artists who could do nothing but draw
correctly, he cared for no time, place, or circumstance, in his
pictures. A set o