"With all your learning now, you cannot tell me who wrote that."
The Professor, "much renowned in Greek," confessed his ignorance, and said, "I don't know him."
"How the devil should you know him?" chuckled Fuseli, "I made them this moment."
FUSELI'S METHOD OF GIVING VENT TO HIS PASSION.
When thwarted in the Academy (which happened not unfrequently), his wrath aired itself in a polyglott. "It is a pleasant thing, and an advantageous," said the painter, on one of these occasions, "to be learned. I can speak Greek, Latin, French, English, German, Danish, Dutch, and Spanish, and so let my folly or my fury get vent through eight different avenues."
FUSELI'S LOVE FOR TERRIFIC SUBJECTS.
Fuseli knew not well how to begin with quiet beauty and serene grace: the hurrying measures, the crowding epithets, and startling imagery of the northern poetry suited his intoxicated fancy. His "Thor battering the Serpent" was such a favorite that he presented it to the Academy as his admission gift. Such was his love of terrific subjects, that he was known among his brethren by the name of Painter in ordinary to the Devil, and he smiled when some one officiously told him this, and said, "Aye! he has sat to me many times." Once, at Johnson the bookseller's table, one of the guests said, "Mr. Fuseli, I have purchased a picture of yours." "Have you, sir; what is the subject?" "Subject? really I don't know." "That's odd; you must be a strange fellow to buy a picture without knowing the subject." "I bought it, sir, that's enough—I don't know what the devil it is." "Perhaps it is the devil," replied Fuseli, "I have often painted him." Upon this, one of the company, to arrest a conversation which was growing warm, said, "Fuseli, there is a member of your Academy who has strange looks—and he chooses as strange subjects as you do." "Sir," exclaimed the Professor, "he paints nothing but thieves and murderers, and when he wants a model, he looks in the glass."