For Gray, however, he had a high admiration; and when his opinion was asked by one who imagined that he held him cheap, he said, "How! do you think I condemn myself so much as not to admire Gray? Although he has written but little, that little is done well."
When Addison was mentioned, he exclaimed, "Addison translated the fourth Georgic of Virgil, except the story of Aristæus; you may thence know what his taste was. How can you ask me about a man who could translate that Georgic, and omit the most beautiful part?"
Of the more modern poets, Lord Byron was his favourite; and he always read his writings as soon as they were published, with great avidity. When pressed to read the works of those writers in verse who are admired merely for the beauty of language and smoothness of versification, he exclaimed, "I cannot find time, for I do not yet know every word in Shakspeare and Milton."
He was well versed also in the works of foreign poets; but of these, Dante was his favourite, for his imagery made the deepest impression on his mind, and afforded many subjects for his daring pencil. "There was but one instance," he said, "in which Dante betrayed a failure in moral feeling. It is when Frate Alberigo, lying in misery in Antenora, implores him to remove the ice from his face. Dante promises to do so, on this condition—that the sinner shall first inform him who he is, and for what crime he is punished. But after Alberigo has fulfilled the conditions, the poet refuses to render him the service he had promised. That is bad, you know; faith should be kept, even with a poor devil in Antenora." After a pause, he burst out with Dante's description of the Hypocrite's Punishment—
"O in eterno faticoso manto!"
"How well this is! I feel the weight, though I'm no hypocrite."
He did not accord with the feelings of Rousseau, in an epithet bestowed on Metastasio, "Le bouillant Metastasio!"—"I do not know where he discovered this fire; I am sure Metastasio never burnt my fingers, yet he is sometimes beautiful." Fuseli continued, "I tuoi strali terror de' mortali, &c. (the Coro in the Olimpiade.) These are grand lines."
His knowledge of history and its attendant chronology, was accurate and extensive, and few men understood and remembered better the heathen mythology, and ancient and modern geography.
He was not ignorant of natural history; but that branch which was cultivated by him with the greatest ardour, was entomology, in which he was deeply informed, particularly in the classes lepidoptera and coleoptera, but in the former he took the greatest delight; and in acquiring a knowledge of the habits of insects, he was naturally led into the consideration of their food; hence he was not unlearned in botany. By skill and care, he sometimes reared in his house some of the rarer English insects, among them, the Sphinx atropos, Sphinx uphorbiæ, and others. His great love for entomology induced him occasionally to introduce moths into his pictures, which he painted with great care and fidelity, and when much taken with the subject, he made them frequently incongruous. Thus, in a picture of Lycidas, from the passage in Milton,
"Under the opening eye-lids of the morn,
What time the grey-fly winds his sultry horn,"