Surely these few pages, written with the sole purpose of explaining my father's part in the affair, will not degenerate into anything so pitifully fanciful as the story of a man who tried his best to be a bad example because he could not be a good one.

That an ex-president (Sir Humphry Davy) of the Royal Society should write a book on field sports may at first sight appear rather unphilosophical; although it is not more fanciful than Bishop Berkeley's volume on tar water, Bishop Watson's improvement in the manufacture of gunpowder, Sir Walter Scott writing a sermon, or a Scotch minister inventing a safety gun, and, as we are told, presenting the same to the King in person.

Yet this is the man, of whom Burke, when his just horror of every thing fanciful in politics was at its height, has passed the noblest eulogium that one modern has ever made on another, and which the reader will pardon me if in my veneration for a great name I place here as an antidote to the detraction of Johnson.

Nature, when left to her own freaks in the forest, is grotesque and fanciful to the verge of license, and beyond it.

In Barrow's sermon on the "the least credulous or fanciful of men.

But it requires a finer genius than most epic poets have possessed, to keep supernatural machinery just sufficiently fanciful without missing its function.

But here the likeness, too fanciful for reality, ceases altogether.

Edgar A. Poe entered the realm of the fanciful after Hoffman, and how is it that the initiator is less dangerous than his disciple?