Fancy and Imagination. 369 
but those which administer to our perceptions of the grand, 
the beautiful and the sublime. We nevertheless think, that 
we shall be enabled to show that poets are not the only 
portion of mankind who feast on the pleasures of fancy ; 
but that in all our idle amusements as well as in all our 
business occupations, imagination occupies by no means, 
an unimportant position, but on the contrary, that in the 
greater part of those pursuits to which our attention is de- 
voted, whilst we would be thought by the world to be 
anxiously engaged in our several spheres of business, we 
are really pursuing something which is ideal to all but our- 
selves. 
It will be readily admitted that the members of that. 
body among us who have most leisure and inclination for 
gaiety and pleasure, are the greatest slaves of imagination. 
It matters not whether their taste for pleasure soars to the 
region of the playhouse, the concert room, and the ball 
room, or to the ratting match and prize fight, the pleasure 
which they actually realize compared to that which they 
anticipate, shows them to be under the influence of a lively 
imagination. Whatsoever be the anticipated gratification, 
it may be taken as a rule, that the disappointment that 
follows may be justly estimated by the guantum of such 
anticipated gratification. But the effects of Fancy are not 
confined to those whose lives are exclusively devoted to 
pleasure. On considering the different departments of 
human pursuit,—business, ambition, avarice, and vanity, 
which, although they may appear contradictory are not un- 
frequently trades carried on by the same person, we shall 
discover a fancy continually at work to improve shadows 
into substances, to enlarge small things to matters of 
moment, and to represent some great good as accessible, 
although never attained. As regards avarice—can poet or 
any other man be pronounced more acreature of imagina- 
tion, or be supposed to soar higher in flight of fancy than 
the miser, who hoards up money with no other view than 
to say it is in his possession ; who desires no higher reward 
than to look at it, or greater talents than to be able to 
count it; whose sole object of life is to know that after his 
death it will be reported that he died rich ? 
Is the ambition of those whom nature and education 
have resolved to keep down less fanciful? Who can be 
said to possess a larger amount of imagination than the 
tradesman or artizan who having acquired wealth by some 
means, considers himself on a level with those of superior 
