much thought; but Fuseli had no rich commissions in the way--his heart
was with the subject--in his own fancy he had already commenced the
work, and the enthusiastic alderman found a more enthusiastic painter,
who made no preliminary stipulations, but prepared his palette and
began.

FUSELI'S "HAMLET'S GHOST."

This wonderful work, engraved for Boydell's Shakspeare Gallery, is
esteemed among the best of Fuseli's works. It is, indeed, strangely wild
and superhuman--if ever a Spirit visited earth, it must have appeared to
Fuseli. The "majesty of buried Denmark" is no vulgar ghost such as
scares the belated rustic, but a sad and majestic shape with the port of
a god; to imagine this, required poetry, and in that our artist was
never deficient. He had fine taste in matters of high import; he drew
the boundary line between the terrible and the horrible, and he never
passed it; the former he knew was allied to grandeur, the latter to
deformity and disgust. An eminent metaphysician visited the gallery
before the public exhibition; he saw the Hamlet's Ghost of Fuseli, and
exclaimed, like Burns' rustic in Halloween, "Lord, preserve me!" He
declared that it haunted him round the room.

FUSELI'S "TITANIA."

His Titania (also engraved in the Shakspeare Gallery), overflows with
elvish fun and imaginative drollery. It professes to embody that portion
of the first scene in the fourth act where the spell-blinded queen
caresses Bottom the weaver, on whose shoulders Oberon's transforming
wand has placed an ass' head. Titania, a gay and alluring being,
attended by her troop of fairies, is endeavoring to seem as lovely as
possible in the sight of her lover, who holds down his head and assumes
the air of the most stupid of all creatures. One almost imagines that
her ripe round lips are uttering the well-known words,--

"Come sit thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy."

The rout and revelry which the fancy of the painter has poured around
this spell-bound pair, baffles all description. All is mirthful,
tricksy, and fantastic. Sprites of all looks and all hues--of all
"dimensions, shapes, and mettles,"--the dwarfish elf and the elegant
fay--Cobweb commissioned to kill a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a
thistle, that Bottom might have the honey-bag--Pease-Blossom, who had
the less agreeable emplo