ex, but that she
scorned to suppose that she could feel a struggle in conforming to
the laws she should lay down to her conduct.

"... There is no reason to doubt that if Mr. Fuseli had been
disengaged at the period of their acquaintance, he would have been
the man of her choice.

"... One of her principal inducements to this step, [her visit to
France] related, I believe, to Mr. Fuseli. She had at first
considered it as reasonable and judicious to cultivate what I may
be permitted to call a platonic affection for him; but she did not,
in the sequel, find all the satisfaction in this plan which she had
originally expected from it. It was in vain that she enjoyed much
pleasure in his society, and that she enjoyed it frequently. Her
ardent imagination was continually conjuring up pictures of the
happiness she should have found if fortune had favored their more
intimate union. She felt herself formed for domestic affection, and
all those tender charities which men of sensibility have constantly
treated as the dearest bond of human society. General conversation
and society could not satisfy her. She felt herself alone, as it
were, in the great mass of her species, and she repined when she
reflected that the best years of her life were spent in this
comfortless solitude. These ideas made the cordial intercourse of
Mr. Fuseli, which had at first been one of her greatest pleasures,
a source of perpetual torment to her. She conceived it necessary to
snap the chain of this association in her mind; and, for that
purpose, determined to seek a new climate, and mingle in different
scenes."

Knowles, on the other hand, represents her as importunate with her love
as a Phaedra, as consumed with passion as a Faustina. He states as a fact
that it was for Fuseli's sake that she changed her mode of life and
adopted a new elegance in dress and manners. He declares that when the
latter made no return to her advances, she pursued him so persistently
that on receiving her letters, he thrust them unopened out of sight, so
sure was he that they contained nothing but protestations of regard and
complaints of neglect; that, finally, she became so ill and miserable and
unfitted for work that, despite Fuseli's arguments against such a step,
she went boldly to Mrs. Fuseli and asked to be admitted into her house as
a mem