robability is added to the conjecture by the indisputable transition
of the Greek egg and arrow moulding into the floral cornices of Saxon
and other twelfth century cathedrals in Central France. These and
other such transitions and exaltations I will give you the materials
to study at your leisure, after illustrating in my next lecture the
forces of religious imagination by which all that was most beautiful
in them was inspired.

LECTURE IV.

(_NOV. 8, 1884._)

THE PLEASURES OF FANCY.

_COEUR DE LION TO ELIZABETH_

(1189 TO 1558).

In using the word "Fancy," for the mental faculties of which I am to
speak to-day, I trust you, at your leisure, to read the Introductory
Note to the second volume of 'Modern Painters' in the small new
edition, which gives sufficient reason for practically including
under the single term Fancy, or Fantasy, all the energies of the
Imagination,--in the terms of the last sentence of that preface,--"the
healthy, voluntary, and necessary,[22] action of the highest powers
of the human mind, on subjects properly demanding and justifying their
exertion."

[Footnote 22: Meaning that all healthy minds possess imagination, and
use it at will, under fixed laws of truthful perception and memory.]

I must farther ask you to read, in the same volume, the close of the
chapter 'Of Imagination Penetrative,' pp. 120 to 130, of which the
gist, which I must give as the first principle from which we start in
our to-day's inquiry, is that "Imagination, rightly so called, has no
food, no delight, no care, no perception, except of truth; it is for
ever looking under masks, and burning up mists; no fairness of form,
no majesty of seeming, will satisfy it; the first condition of its
existence is incapability of being deceived."[23] In that sentence,
which is a part, and a very valuable part, of the original book, I
still adopted and used unnecessarily the ordinary distinction between
Fancy and Imagination--Fancy concerned with lighter things, creating
fairies or centaurs, and Imagination creating men; and I was in
the habit always of implying by the meaner word Fancy, a voluntary
Fallacy, as Wordsworth does in those lines to his wife, making of her
a mere lay figure for the drapery of his fancy--

Such if thou wert, in all men's view
An universal show,
What would my Fancy have to do,
My feelings to bestow.

But you will at once understand the higher and more universal power
which I n