“Well, then, I do not recollect where it is,” admitted the speaker. To which Fuseli added, “Perhaps you do not know, but it is in Otello, saar,” much to the diversion of the assembled guests.
NOISY STUDENTS.
Hearing a violent noise in the studio, and inquiring the cause, he was answered by one of the porters, “It’s only those fellows, the students, sir.” “Fellows!” exclaimed Fuseli; “I would have you to know, sir, those fellows may one day become Academicians.” The noise increasing, he opened the door with, “You are a den of wild beasts.” Munro, who was one of the students, bowed, and said, “And Fuseli is our keeper.”
THE YORKSHIREMAN.
Discoursing one day upon the merits of Phocion, the Athenian, a gentleman gravely put the question, “Pray, sir, who was Mr. Phocion?” Fuseli as gravely answered, “From your dialect, sir, I presume you are from Yorkshire; and, if so, I wonder you do not recollect Mr. Phocion’s name, as he was Member for your county in the Long Parliament!”
RICHARDSON’S NOVELS.
A gentleman speaking one day in the presence of Fuseli, of books, remarked, “No one now reads the works of Richardson.” “Do they not?” said the painter, “then by G— they ought. If people are tired of old novels, I should be glad to know your criterion of books. If Richardson is old, Homer is obsolete. Clarissa to me is pathetic; I never read it without crying like a child.”
CLASSICAL ATTAINMENTS.
Haydon, in his lectures on painting, observes: “In general literature, what is called polite literature, Fuseli was highly accomplished. He perhaps knew as much of Homer as any man; but he was not a deep classic; he could puzzle Dr. Burney by a question, but he was more puzzled if Dr. Burney questioned him. Porson spoke lightly of his knowledge of Greek, but in comparison with Porson, a man might know little and yet know a great deal; a friend once asked him to construe a difficult passage in the chorus in the Agamemnon of Æschylus—he cursed all choruses, and said he never read them! But his power of acquiring, idiomatically, a living language was certainly extraordinary; six weeks, he said, was enough for him to speak any language; yet though his tendency to literature gave him in society the power of being very amusing, I think it my duty to caution the young men present; he, for an artist, allowed literature to take too predominant a part in his practice, and sunk too much the painter in the critic.”
