ABSTRACT
At the table of Johnson, the bookseller, Fuseli was a frequent guest, and in all conversations that passed there was lord of the ascendant. There he met his friend Armstrong, who praised him in the journals, Wolcot, whom he hated, and Mary Wolstonecraft, who at the first interview conferred upon him the honour of her love. Mary Wolstonecraft cast bold eyes upon the Shakespeare of canvas. And he, instead of repelling, as they deserved, those ridiculous advances, forthwith, it seems, imagined himself possest with the pure spirit of Platonic love. The coquetting of a married man of fifty with a tender female philosopher of thirty-one can never be an agreeable subject of contemplation; but it is probable that Fuseli felt no disposition to abandon his wife and his duty, however culpable he may have been in permitting the commencement of a flirtation.
