The aim of this paper is to investigate illustrations for editions of James Thomson's The Seasons [first compiled edition in 1730] published between 1770s and 1810s. This is because I believe that those illustrations reveal artists' interpretations of The Seasons in the age of Romanticism when the poem was widely accepted. We especially deal with illustrations engraved for the episode of Lavinia in 'Autumn'. She is a lovely woman gleaning in the field of a merciful farmer, Palemon. There are four major types of the illustrations of Lavinia. (1) Lavinia kneeling beside Palemon: They are in the field of Palemon who is asking her origin. (2) Lavinia standing beside Palemon: They are in the field of Palemon who is declaring his love for her. Lavinia is holding gleanings sometimes on her apron and lowering her eyes in embarrassment. (3) Lavinia standing beside her widow mother in front of a hovel: Lavinia is informing her mother about her engagement to Palemon. (4) Lavinia standing alone in the field: She is holding gleanings under her arm or putting them on her head. She sometimes has a scythe or a jug. An important fact about Lavinia's illustrations is that each type derives its visual source from the iconography of Ruth in the Book of Ruth. Ruth is also a female gleaner living with her widow mother. In the end she accepts the merciful marriage proposal of Boaz the farmer. The iconography of Ruth had been repeatedly pictorialized since the thirteenth century and distributed in large quantities especially through the media of prints. Not only did artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries adopt the iconography but they also introduced the merciful story of the Book of Ruth into their illustrations of Thomson's episode. In this respect, artists of the age of Romanticism associated the lines of The Seasons with the biblical story of mercy.

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This essay aims to examine the relationship between erroneous judgments and the function of sensibility observed in the medical discourse of the late eighteenth century, and to see how it affected Jane Austen's ideas about "pride" and "self-complacency" in her Pride and Prejudice (1813). The novel can be read as a moralistic tale about a young woman who, in gaining new experience in the world, comes to see the virtue and vice of other characters, but it can also be interpreted as a philosophical inquiry into the human mind. Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine, is endowed with a keen perception and acute sensibility which allow her to detect the slightest feelings and intent of others, but the novel also exposes the vulnerability of a feeling woman. Her emotional reaction (such as anger) to events that take place around her frequently blinds her to the truth, and consequently gives rise to erroneous judgments. According to Coleridge, "a man whose moral feelings, reason, understanding, and sense are perfectly sane and vigorous, may yet have been mad." Perhaps sharing the same concern about the unstable and unpredictable nature of the mind, Austen explores the possibility of a "perfectly sane" person having delusions or errors of "fancy" in an ordinary setting. Mrs Bennet's ridiculous remarks about other characters best exemplify this theory. Thomas Arnold's theory of notional insanity and his concept of "fancy" in Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness (1782) is relevant in understanding Mrs Bennet's self-complacency and Jane Bennet's "error of fancy." While Arnold's theory about insanity is based on the Lockean theories of "idea" and "notion" which are more conceptual than corporeal, Alexander Crichton's theory of mind introduced in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement (1798) has a more corporeal basis which is also shared by the contemporary medical men such as Lavatar, Gall and Spurzheim. The new development of brain science and nerve theory suggested an embodied approach to human subjectivity. It is clear from Austen's frequent mention of "nerves" and "feelings" that she was under the influence of these medical discourses. In these medical texts, bodily sensibility increasingly takes over the functions of reason such as making judgment about the situations s/he encounters or perceiving truths.

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Benjamin Robert Haydon's historical paintings have drawn surprisingly little attention in relation to Keats's 'Hyperion' project. Haydon shaped himself in an epic poet's fashion; his masterpiece Christ's Triumphant Entry into Jerusalem was an epic project in many ways. The first signs indicating that this aspect of his character and art had an effect on Keats can be seen particularly in 'Sleep and Poetry', and in a sonnet addressed to Haydon: the epic painter encouraged Keats to envisage his career in terms of a grand task, offering the image of his ideal self. The painter's demythologising of Napoleon also brought relief to Keats's early struggle with Endymion. These interactions with Haydon appear to have prompted the poet's subsequent notions of a degree of parallelism between their epic projects. Haydon's manner of depicting the sacred scene of Christianity is of an egotistical nature in that, as noted in the exhibition catalogue, it admits anachronism and reflects the painter's own feelings about the characters represented. Moreover, for the painter, a self-stylised hero who came to the rescue of English art, the Saviour on the ass seems to have become an object of identification, as had the abdicated Emperor of France. An analysis of the character of Apollo in 'Hyperion' suggests that the god, a poet's idol, was shaped, like Haydon's Christ, through negotiation between his original attributes and the author's desires, including one for a poetic martyrdom intended to meet the demands of the time and thus defend his profession, the equivalent of Haydon's wish for his art to be used as an altarpiece in church. It seems that in career and work Keats did not identify himself with the dedicated Haydon without incurring self-doubt, due to an effort of the sympathetic imagination involved. Yet his newborn preference for obscurity and silence, as seen in his notion of fame, became a factor in the redirection of his epic voice towards posterity.

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Hyperion constitutes Keats's ambition to adopt the high style of epic poetry, a challenging presence for English poets versed in Virgil and Homer, and for whom Milton's Paradise Lost remained the form's most formidable English legacy. Undeniably, Hyperion sustains the characteristic Miltonic qualities of diction, versification, the sublime, and moral absolutes. However, when Keats gave up completing the Hyperion poems, he explained to J. H. Reynolds in a letter of 21 September 1819, his abandonment of the Hyperion project by lamenting: "I have given up Hyperion-there were too many Miltonic inversions in it-Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist's humour" (Letters 2. 167). Certainly, Keats's adoption of Miltonic verse distanced him from his own epic venture, and instead liberated him in an ambivalent but positive engagement with Miltonic style. The serious attempt to appropriate Milton's authoritative text allowed Keats the possibility to generate his own modern epic, transcending the limits of vision as prescribed by conventional literary criteria. Celebrating Milton's sublime imagery, Keats embraced both the passion and intensity of the sensuous imagery of Paradise Lost. As Keats proclaims in the "Marginalia": "Milton in every instance pursues his imagination to the utmost" (344). It was the Miltonic imagination that Keats was to qualify in his own pursuit and speculations, and which was eventually to attain the intensity of the pictorial and corporeal imagery of Hyperion. In the refinement of Milton's epic, speculation becomes a vital Keatsian term, as in the Miltonic physicality of the Titans and Apollo, and the envisaging of their sublime agony. The great pathos of the visual and corporeal imagery surrounding the Titans witnesses Keats's celebration and subversion of the Miltonic legacy.

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