LECTURE IV.
THE PLEASURES OF FANCY.
CŒUR DE LION TO ELIZABETH.
IN using the word "Fancy," for the mental faculties of which I am to speak to-day, I trust you, at your leisure, to read the Introductory Note to the second volume of 'Modern Painters' in the small new edition, which gives sufficient reason for practically including under the single term Fancy, or Fantasy, all the energies of the Imagination,—in the terms of the last sentence of that preface,—"the healthy, voluntary, and necessary,[1] action of the highest powers of the human mind, on subjects properly demanding and justifying their exertion."
I must farther ask you to read, in the same volume, the close of the chapter 'Of Imagination Penetrative,' pp. 120 to 130, of which the gist, which I must give as the first principle from which we start in our to-day's inquiry, is that "Imagination, rightly so called, has no
- ↑ Meaning that all healthy minds possess imagination, and use it at will, under fixed laws of truthful perception and memory.
