THE 
 
 LITERARY CHARACTER, 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 THE HISTORY 
 
 or 
 
 01? QRNITJS, 
 
 BRAWN FROM THEIR OWN FEELINGS AND CO 
 
 SY THE AUTKOR OF " CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE. 
 
 ki Poi che veder voi stessi rion potete, 
 Vedete in altri almen quel che voi sete." 
 
 Cino da Pisloia, addressed to the Eyes of his Mistress' 
 
 NEW-FORK: 
 
 PUBLISHED BY JAMES EASTBITRN AND CO* 
 
 AT THE LITERARY ROOMS, BROADWAY^ 
 
 CORNER OF PINE-STREET* 
 
 1818, 
 
^ WX WX WWWWVWX WV WX 
 
 J. & J. Harper, Printers. 
 
 < VVVWVW\WWWWV'W\'WX 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 I 
 
 I PUBLISHED, in 1795, " an Essay on the 
 Literary Character;" to my own habitual 
 and inherent defects, were superadded 
 those of rny youth; the crude production 
 was, however, not ill received, for the 
 Edition disappeared ; and the subject 
 was found to be more interesting than 
 the writer. 
 
 During the long interval which has 
 elapsed since the first publication, the 
 little volume was often recalled to my 
 recollection, by several, and by some who 
 have since obtained celebrity ; they ima- 
 gined that their attachment to literary 
 pursuits had been strengthened even by 
 so weak an effort. An extraordinary cir- 
 cumstance has concurred with these opin- 
 
/ 
 
 4 PREFACE. 
 
 ions; a copy which has accidentally fallen 
 into my hands formerly belonged to the 
 great poetical genius of our times ; and 
 the singular fact that it was twice read by 
 him in two subsequent years, at Athens, 
 in 1810 and 1811, instantly convinced me 
 that the volume deserved my attention. 
 I tell this fact assuredly, not from any little 
 vanity which it may appear to betray, for 
 the truth is, were I not as liberal and as 
 candid in respect to my own productions, 
 as I hope I am to others, I could not have 
 been gratified by the present circum- 
 stance ; for the marginal notes of the 
 noble writer convey no flattery but 
 amidst their pungency and sometimes 
 their truth, the circumstance that a man 
 of genius could, and did read, this slight 
 effusion at two different periods of his life, 
 was a sufficient authority, at least for an 
 author, to return it once more to the anvil ; 
 more knowledge, and more maturity of 
 thought, I may hope, will now fill up the 
 rude sketch of my youth ; its radical de- 
 fects, those which are inherent in every 
 
PREFACE, 5 
 
 author, it were unwise for me to hope to 
 remove by suspending the work to a more 
 remote period. 
 
 It may be thought that men of genius 
 only should write on men of genius ; as if 
 it were necessary that the physician 
 should be infected with the disease of his 
 patient. He is only an observer, like Sy- 
 denham who confined himself to vigilant 
 observation, and the continued experience 
 of tracing the progress of actual cases 
 (and in his department, but not in mine) 
 in the operation of actual remedies. He 
 beautifully says " Whoever describes a 
 violet exactly as to its colour, taste, smell, 
 form, and other properties, will find the 
 description agree in most particulars with 
 all the violets in the universe." 
 
 Nor do I presume to be any thing more 
 than the historian of genius; whose humble 
 office is only to tell the virtues and the 
 infirmities of his heroes. It is the fash- 
 ion of the present day to raise up daz- 
 
 A 2 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 zling theories of genius ; to reason a pri- 
 ori ; to promulgate abstract paradoxes; 
 to treat with levity the man of genius, 
 because he is only a man of genius. I have 
 sought for facts, and have often drawn 
 results unsuspected by myself. I have 
 looked into literary history for the litera- 
 ry character. I have always had in my 
 mind an observation of Lord Bolingbroke 
 " Abstract, or general propositions, 
 though never so true, appear obscure or 
 doubtful to us very often till they are ex- 
 plained by examples ; when examples are 
 pointed out to us, c there is a kind of ap- 
 peal, With which we are flattered, made 
 to our senses, as well as to our understand- 
 ings. The instruction comes then from 
 our authority; we yield to fact when we 
 resist speculation." This will be truth 
 long after the encyclopedic geniuses of 
 the present age, who write on all subjects, 
 and with most spirit on those they know 
 least about, shall have passed away ; and 
 Time shall extricate Truth from the dead- 
 ly embrace of Sophistry. 
 
ON THE 
 
 LITERARY CHARACTER, 
 
 be. ^c. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 
 
 SINCE the discovery of that art which multiplies 
 at will the productions of the human intellect, 
 and spreads them over the universe in the conse- 
 quent formation of libraries, a class or order of 
 men has arisen, who appear throughout Europe 
 to have derived a generic title in that of literary 
 characters ; a denomination which, however 
 vague, defines the pursuits of the individual, 
 and serves, at times, to separate him from other 
 professions. 
 
 Formed by the same habits, and influenced by 
 the same motives, notwithstanding the difference 
 of talents and tempers, the opposition of times 
 
8 ON LITERARY CHARACTERS, 
 
 and places, they have always preserved amon 
 themselves the most striking family resemblance. 
 The literary character, from the objects in which 
 it concerns itself, is of a more independent and 
 permanent nature than those which are perpetu- 
 ally modified by the change of manners, and are 
 more distinctly national. Could we describe the 
 medical, the commercial, or the legal character 
 of other ages, this portrait of antiquity would be 
 like a perished picture : the subject itself would 
 have altered its position in the revolutions of 
 society. It is not so with the literary character. 
 The passion for study ; the delight in books ; the 
 desire of solitude and celebrity ; the obstructions 
 of life ; the nature of their habits and pursuits \ 
 the triumphs and the disappointments of literary 
 glory ; all these are as truly described by Cicero 
 and the younger Pliny, as by Petrarch and Eras- 
 mus, and as they have been by Hume and Gibbon. 
 The passion for collecting together the treasures 
 of literature and the miracles of art, was as insa- 
 tiable a thirst in Atticus as in the French Peiresc, 
 and in our Cracherodes and Townleys. We 
 trace the feelings of our literary contemporaries 
 in all ages, and every people who have deserved 
 to rank among polished nations. Such were 
 those literary characters who have stamped the 
 images of their minds OB their works, and that 
 
ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 9 
 
 other race, who preserve the circulation of this 
 intellectual coinage ; 
 
 of the Dead, 
 
 Which Time does still disperse, but not devour. 
 
 D'Jlvenant's Gondibert, c. v. s. 38. 
 
 These literary characters now constitute an 
 important body, diffused over enlightened Eu- 
 rope, connected by the secret links of congenial 
 pursuits, and combining often insensibly to them- 
 selves in the same common labours. At London, 
 at Paris, and even at Madrid, these men feel the 
 same thirst, which is allayed at the same foun- 
 tains ; the same authors are read, and the same 
 opinions are formed. 
 
 Contemporains de tous les hommes, 
 Et citoyens de tous les lieux. 
 
 De la Mothe. 
 
 Thus an invisible brotherhood is existing 
 among us, and those who stand connected with it 
 are not always sensible of this kindred alliance. 
 Once the world was made uneasy by rumours of 
 the existence of a society, founded by that extra- 
 ordinary German Rosicrucius, designed for the 
 search of truth and the reformation of the sci- 
 ences. Its statutes were yet but partially pro- 
 
10 ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 
 
 mulgated ; but many a great principle in morals, 
 many a result of science in the concentrated 
 form of an axiom ; and every excellent work 
 which suited the views of the author to preserve 
 anonymous, were mysteriously traced to the pre- 
 sident of the Rosicrucians, and not only the 
 society became celebrated, but abused. Des- 
 cartes, when in Germany, gave himself much 
 trouble to track out the society, that he might 
 consult the great searcher after Truth, but in 
 vain ! It did not occur to the young reformer 
 of science in this visionary pursuit, that every 
 philosophical inquirer was a brother, and that 
 the extraordinary and mysterious personage, was 
 indeed himself ! for a genius of the first order is 
 always the founder of a society, and, wherever 
 he may be, the brotherhood will delight to ac- 
 knowledge their master. 
 
 These Literary Characters are partially de- 
 scribed by Johnson, not without a melancholy 
 colouring. " To talk in private, to think in soli- 
 tude, to inquire or to answer inquiries, is the bu- 
 siness of a scholar. He wanders about the world 
 without pomp or terror, and is neither known nor 
 valued, but by men like himself." But eminent 
 Genius accomplishes a more ample design. He 
 belongs to the world as much as to a nation ; even 
 
ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 11 
 
 the great writer himself, at that moment, was not 
 conscious that he was devoting his days to cast the 
 minds of his own contemporaries, and of the next 
 age, in the mighty mould of his own, for he was 
 of that order of men whose individual genius of- 
 ten becomes that of a people. A prouder con- 
 ception rose in the majestic mind of Milton, of 
 " that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise, which 
 God and good men have consented shall be the 
 reward of those whose PUBLISHED LABOURS ad- 
 vance the good of mankind." 
 
 Literature has, in all ages, encountered adver- 
 saries from causes sufficiently obvious ; but other 
 pursuits have been rarely liable to discover ene- 
 mies among their own votaries. Yet many litera- 
 ry men openly, or insidiously, would lower the 
 Literary Character, are eager to confuse the ranks 
 in the republic of letters, wanting the virtue which 
 knows to pay its tribute to Caesar ; while they 
 maliciously confer the character of author on that 
 " Ten Thousand," whose recent list is not so 
 much a muster-roll of heroes, as a table of pop- 
 ulation.* 
 
 We may allow the political (Economist to sup- 
 pose that an author is the manufacturer of a 
 
 * See ft recent biographical account of ten thousand authors. 
 
12 ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 
 
 certain ware for " a very paltry recompense," as 
 their seer Adam Smith has calculated. It is use- 
 less to talk to people who have nothing but mill- 
 ions in their imagination, and whose choicest works 
 of art are spinning jennies ; whose principle of 
 " labour" would have all men alike die in harness ; 
 or, in their carpentry of human nature, would con- 
 vert them into wheels and screws, to work the 
 perplexed movements of that ideal machinery 
 called " capital" these may reasonably doubt of 
 " the utility" of this " unproductive" race. Their 
 heated heads and temperate hearts ma^ satisfy 
 themselves that " that unprosperous race of men, 
 called men of letters," in a system of political 
 oeconomy, must necessarily occupy their present 
 state in society, much as formerly when " a scholar 
 and a beggar seem to have been terms very nearly 
 synonimous."* But whenever the political (econ- 
 omists shall feel, a calculation of time which 
 who would dare to furnish them with ? that the 
 happiness and prosperity of a people include 
 something more permanent and more evident 
 than " the wealth of a nation," they may form 
 another notion of the literary character. 
 
 A more formidable class of ingenious men who 
 derived their reputation and even their fortune in 
 
 * Wealth of Nations> v. i. p, 182, 
 
ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 13 
 
 hie from their literary character, yet are cold and 
 heartless to the interests of literature men who 
 have reached their summit and reject the ladder : 
 for those who have once placed themselves high, 
 feel a sudden abhorrence of climbing. These 
 have risen through the gradations of politics into 
 office, and in that busy world view everything in a 
 cloud of passions and politics ; they who once 
 commanded us by their eloquence would now 
 drive us by the single force of despotism ; like 
 Adrian VI. who obtaining the Pontificate as the 
 reward of his studies, yet possessed of the Tiara, 
 persecuted students ; he dreaded, say the Italians, 
 lest his brothers might shake the Pontificate it- 
 self. It fares worse with authors when minds of 
 tbis cast become the arbiters of the public opin- 
 ion ; when the literary character is first systemat- 
 ically degraded and then sported with, as ele- 
 phants are made to dance on hot iron ; or the 
 bird plucked of its living feathers is exhibited as 
 a new sort of creature to invite the passengers ! 
 whatever such critics may plead to mortify the 
 vanity of authors, at least it requires as much 
 to give effect to their own polished effrontery. 
 Lower the high self-reverence, the lofty concep- 
 tion of Genius, and you deprive it of the con- 
 sciousness of its powers with the delightfulness 
 
]4 ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 
 
 of its character ; in the blow you give the musical 
 instrument, the invisible soul of its tone is for 
 ever lost. 
 
 A lighter class reduce literature to a mere 
 curious amusement ; a great work is likened to- a 
 skilful game of billiards, or a piece of music 
 finely executed and curious researches, to char- 
 ade making and Chinese puzzles. An author 
 with them ns an idler who will not be idle, amu- 
 sing, or fatiguing others, who are completely so. 
 We have been told that a great genius should 
 not therefore " ever allow himself to be sensible 
 to his own celebrity, nor deem his pursuits of 
 much consequence however important or suc- 
 cessful." Catholic doctrine to mortify an author 
 into a saint; Lent all the year, and self-flagel- 
 lation every day ! This new principle, which no 
 man in his senses would contend with, had been 
 useful to Buflbn and Gibbon, to Voltaire and 
 Pope, who assuredly were too " sensible to 
 their celebrity, and deemed their pursuits of 
 much consequence," particularly when " im- 
 portant and successful." But this point may 
 be adjusted when we come to examine the im- 
 portance of an author, and the privilege he may 
 possess of a little anticipating the public, in his 
 self-praise. 
 
ON* LITERARY CHARACTERS. 15 
 
 Such are the domestic treasons of the literary 
 character against literature" et tu, Brute i" 
 but a hero of literature falls not though struck 
 at; he outlives his assassins and might address 
 them in that language of poetry and tenderness 
 with which a Mexican king reproached his trai- 
 torous counsellors : " You were the feathers of 
 my wings, and the eyelids of my eyes." 
 
 Every class of men in society have their pecu- 
 liar sorrows and enjoyments, as they have their 
 habits and their characteristics. In the history 
 of men of genius, we may often open the secret 
 story of their minds; they have, above others* 
 the privilege of communicating their own feel- 
 ings, and it is their talent to interest us, whether 
 with their pen they talk of themselves, or paint 
 others. 
 
 In the history of men of genius let us not 
 neglect thpse who have devoted themselves to 
 the cultivation of the fine arts ; with them genius 
 is alike insulated in their studies ; they pass 
 through the same permanent discipline. The his- 
 tories of literature and art have parallel epochs ; 
 and certain artists resemble certain authors. 
 Hence Milton, Michael Angelo, and Handel! 
 One principle unites the intellectual arts, for 
 
 
15 ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 
 
 in one principle they originate, and thus it has 
 happened that the same habits and feelings, and 
 the same fortunes have accompanied men who 
 have sometimes, unhappily, imagined that their 
 pursuits were not analogous. In the " world of 
 ear^nd eye," the poet, the painter, and the musi- 
 cian are kindled by the same inspiration. Thus 
 all is Art and all are artists ! This approxima- 
 tion of men apparently of opposite pursuits is 
 so natural, that when Gesner, in his inspiring 
 letter on landscape-painting, recommends to the 
 young painter a constant study of poetry and 
 literature, the impatient artist is made to ex- 
 claim, " Must we combine with so many other 
 studies those which belong to literary men? 
 Must we read as well as paint ?" " It is useless 
 to reply to this question," says Gesner, " for some 
 important truths must be instinctively felt, per- 
 haps the fundamental ones in the arts." A truly 
 imaginative artist, whose enthusiasm was never 
 absent when he meditated on the art he loved, 
 Barry, thus vehemently broke forth " Go home 
 from the Academy, light up your lamps, and 
 exercise yourselves in the creative part of your 
 art, with Homer, with Livy; and all the great 
 characters, ancient and modern, for your com- 
 panions and counsellors." 
 
ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 17 
 
 Every life of a man of genius, composed by 
 himself, presents us with the experimental phi- 
 losophy of the mind. By living with their bro- 
 thers, and contemplating on their masters, they 
 will judge from consciousness less erroneously 
 than from discussion ; and in forming compara- 
 tive views and parallel situations, they will dis- 
 cover certain habits and feelings, and "find these 
 reflected in themselves. 
 
\ 
 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 GTENIUS, that creative part of art which indivi- 
 dualises the artist, belonging to him and to no 
 other, is it an inherent faculty in the constitu- 
 tional dispositions of the individual, or can it be 
 formed by the patient acquisitions of art ? 
 
 Many sources of genius have indeed been laid 
 open to us, but if these may sometimes call it 
 forth, have they ever supplied its want ? Could 
 Spenser have struck out a poet in Cowley, 
 Richardson a painter in Reynolds, and Descartes 
 a metaphysician in Mallebranche, had they not 
 borne that vital germ of nature, which, when 
 endowed with its force, is always developing 
 itself to a particular character of genius ? The 
 accidents related of these men have occurred to 
 a thousand, who have run the same career; but 
 how does it happen, that the multitude remain a 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS. 19 
 
 multitude, and the man of genius arrives alone 
 at the goal ? 
 
 The equality of minds in their native state 
 is as monstrous a paradox, or a term as equivocal 
 in metaphysics, as the equality of men in the 
 political state. Both come from the French 
 school in evil times; and ought, therefore, as 
 Job said, " to be eschewed." Nor can we trust 
 to Johnson's definition of genius, " as a mind of 
 general powers accidentally determined by some 
 particular direction," as this rejects any native 
 aptitude, while we must infer on this principle 
 that the reasoning Locke, without an ear of 
 an eye, could have been the musical and fairy 
 Spenser. 
 
 The automatic theory of Reynolds stirs the 
 puppet artist by the wires of pertinacious labour. 
 But industry without genius is tethered ; it has 
 stimulated many drudges in art, while it has left 
 us without a Corregio or a Raphael. 
 
 Akenside in that fine poem which is itself a 
 history of genius, in tracing its source, first 
 sang, 
 
 From heaven my strains begin, from heaven descends 
 The flame of genius to the human breast. 
 
20 YOUTH OF GEMUS. 
 
 but in the final revision of that poem he left 
 many years after, the bard has vindicated the 
 solitary and independent origin of genius by the 
 mysterious epithet the chosen breast. The vete- 
 ran poet was perhaps lessoned by the vicissitudes 
 of his own poetical life, and those of some of his 
 brothers. 
 
 But while genius remains still wrapt up in its 
 mysterious bud, may we not trace its history in 
 its votaries ? Let us compare although we may 
 not always decide. If nature in some of her 
 great operations has kept her last secrets, and 
 even Newton, in the result of his reasonings, 
 has religiously abstained from penetrating into 
 her occult connections, is it nothing to be her 
 historian, although we cannnot be her legislator ? 
 
 Can we trace in the faint lines of childhood, 
 an unsteady outline of the man ? In the tem A 
 perament of genius may we not reasonably look 
 for certain indications, or prognostics announcing 
 the permanent character ? Will not great sensibil- 
 ity be born with its susceptible organization ; the 
 deep retired character cling to its musings ; and 
 the unalterable being of intrepidity and fortitude, 
 full of confidence, be commanding even in his 
 sports, a daring leader among his equals ? 
 
YQUTH OF GENIUS. 21 
 
 The virtuous and contemplative Boyle imagin- 
 ed that he had discovered in childhood that dis- 
 position of mind which indicated an instinctive 
 ingenuousness; an incident which he relates, 
 evinced as he thought, that even then he pre- 
 ferred aggravating his fault, rather than consent 
 to suppress any part of the truth, an effort which 
 had been unnatural to his mind. His fanciful, 
 yet striking illustration may open our inquiry. 
 " This trivial passage" the little story alluded 
 to " I have mentioned now, not that I think 
 that in itself it deserves a relation, but because 
 as the sun is seen best at his rising and his set- 
 ting, so men's native dispositions are clearliest 
 perceived whilst they are children, and when 
 they are dying. These little sudden actions are 
 the greatest discoverers of men's true humours.'* 
 That the dispositions of genius in early life pre- 
 sage its future character, was long the feeling of 
 antiquity. Isocrates, after much previous obser- 
 vation of' those who attended his lectures, would 
 advise one to engage in political studies, exhort- 
 ed another to compose history, elected some to 
 be poets, and some to adopt his own profession. 
 He thought that nature had some concern in 
 forming a man of genius ; and he tried to guess 
 at her secret by detecting the first energetic 
 
22 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 inclination of the mind. This principle guided 
 the Jesuits. 
 
 In the old romance of King Arthur, when a 
 cowherd comes to the king to request he would 
 make his son a knight " It is a great thing thou 
 askest," said Arthur, who inquired whether this 
 entreaty proceeded from him or his son . ? The 
 old man's answer is remarkable " Of my son, 
 not of me ; for I have thirteen sons, and all 
 these will fall to that labour I put them ; but this 
 child will not labour for me, for any thing that 
 I and my wife will do ; but always he will be 
 shooting and casting darts, and glad for to see 
 battles, and to behold knights, and always day 
 and night he desireth of me to be made a knight." 
 The king commanded the cowherd to fetch all 
 his sons; they w r ere all shapen much like the 
 poor man ; but Tor was not like none of them in 
 shape and in countenance, for he was much more 
 than any of them. And so Arthur knighted him." 
 This simple tale is the history of genius the 
 cowherd's twelve sons were like himself, but the 
 unhappy genius in the family who perplexed and 
 plagued the cowherd and his wife and his twelve 
 brothers, was the youth averse to labour, but ac- 
 tive enough in performing knightly exercises; 
 and dreaming on chivalry amidst a herd of cows. 
 
YOUTH OP GENIUS. 23 
 
 A man of genius is thus dropt among the peo- 
 ple, and has first to encounter the difficulties of 
 ordinary men deprived of that feeble ductility 
 which adapts itself to the common destination. 
 Parents are too often the victims of the decided 
 propensity of a son to a Virgil or an Euclid ; and 
 the first step into life of a man of genius is diso- 
 bedience and grief. Lilly, pur famous astrologer, 
 has described the frequent situation of such a 
 youth, like the cowherd's son who would be a 
 knight. Lilly proposed to his father that he 
 should try his fortune in the metropolis, where 
 he expected 'that his learning and his talents 
 would prove serviceable to him ; the father, quite 
 incapable of discovering the latent genius of his 
 son in his studious dispositions, very willingly 
 consented to get rid of him, for, as Lilly proceeds, 
 " 1 could not work, drive the plough, or endure 
 any country labour ; my father' oft would say I 
 was good for nothing" words which the fathers 
 of so many men of genius have repeated. 
 
 In reading the memoirs of a man of genius we 
 often reprobate the domestic persecutions of those 
 who opposed his inclinations. No poet but is 
 moved with indignation at the recollection of 
 the Port Royal Society thrice burning the ro- 
 mance which Racine at length got by heart ; no 
 
24 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 geometrician but bitterly inveighs against the 
 father of Pascal for not suffering him to study 
 Euclid, which he at length understood without 
 studying. The father of Petrarch in a babarous 
 rage burnt the poetical library of his son amidst 
 the shrieks, the groans, and the tears of the 
 youth. Yet this neither converted Petrarch into 
 a sober lawyer, nor deprived him of the Roman 
 laurel. The uncle of Alfieri for more than 
 twenty years suppressed the poetical character of 
 this noble bard ; he was a poet without knowing 
 to write a verse, and Nature, like a hard creditor, 
 exacted with redoubled interest, all the genius 
 which the uncle had so long kept from her. Such 
 are the men whose inherent impulse no human 
 opposition, and even no adverse education, can 
 deter from being great men. 
 
 Let us, however, be just to the parents of a 
 man of genius ; they have another association 
 of ideas concerning him than we ; we see a great 
 man, they a disobedient child ; we track him 
 through his glory, they are wearied by the 
 sullen resistance of his character. The career of 
 genius is rarely that of fortune or happiness; 
 and the fatber, who may himself be not insensi- 
 ble to glory, dreads lest his son be found among 
 that obscure multitude, that populace of mean 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 artists, who must expire at the barriers of medi- 
 ocrity. 
 
 The contemplative race, even in their first steps 
 towards nature, are receiving that secret instruc- 
 tion which no master can impart. The boy of 
 genius flies to some favourite haunt to whicl 
 his fancy has often given a name ; he populates 
 his solitude ; he takes all shapes in it, he finds 
 all places in it; he converses silently with all 
 about him he is a hermit, a lover, a hero. The 
 fragrance and blush of the morning; the stil 
 hush of the evening ; the mountain, the valley, 
 and the stream ; all nature opening to 
 he sits brooding over his first dim images, in that 
 train of thought we call reverie, with a restless- 
 ness of delight, for he is only the being of sens 
 tion, and has not yet learnt to think ; then comes 
 that tenderness of spirit, that first shade of thought, 
 colouring every scene, and deepening every feel- 
 ing ; this temperament has been often mistaken 
 for melancholy. One, truly inspired, unfolds the 
 secret story 
 
 " Indowed with all that nature can bestow* 
 The child of fancy oft in silence bends 
 O'er the mixt treasures of his pregnant breast 
 Withconscious pride. From them he oft resolve* 
 To frame he knows not what excelling thing?, 
 
26 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 And win he knows not what sublime reward 
 Of praise and wonder" 
 
 This delight in reverie has been finely described 
 by Boyle : " When the intermission of my stu- 
 dies allowed me leisure for recreation," says 
 Boyle, " I would very often steal away from all 
 company, and spend four or five hours alone in 
 the fields and think at random, making my delight- 
 ed imagination the busy scene where some ro- 
 mance or other was daily acted." This circum- 
 stance alarmed his friends, who imagined that he 
 was overcome with melancholy.^ 
 
 * An unhappy young man who recently forfeited his life to 
 the laws for forgery appears to have given promises of genius. 
 He had thrown himself for two years into the studious re- 
 tirement of a foreign university. Before his execution he 
 sketched an imperfect auto-biography, and the following pas- 
 sage is descriptive of young genius : 
 
 " About this time I became uncommonly reserved, with- 
 drawing by degrees from the pastimes of my associates, and 
 was frequently observed to retire to some solitary place alone. 
 Ruined castles, bearing the vestiges of ancient broils, and the 
 impairing hand of time, cascades thundering through the 
 echoing groves, rocks and precipices, the beautiful as well 
 as the sublime traits of nature formed a spacious field for 
 contemplation many a happy hour. From these inspiring ob- 
 jects, contemplation would lead me to the great Author of 
 nature. Often have 1 dropped on my knees, and poured out 
 the ecstasies of my soul to the God who inspired them." 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS, -37 
 
 It is remarkable that this love of repose and 
 musing is retained throughout life. A man of 
 fine genius is rarely enamoured of common 
 amusements or of robust exercises; and he is 
 usually unadroit where dexterity of hand or eye, 
 or trivial elegancies, are required. This charac- 
 teristic of genius was discovered by Horace in 
 that Ode which school-boys often versify.* 
 Beattie has expressly told us of his Minstrel 
 
 '* The exploit of strength, dexterity, or speed 
 To him nor vanity, nor joy could bring." 
 
 Alfieri said he could never be taught by a French 
 dancing-master, whose Art made him at once 
 shudder and laugh. If we reflect that as it is 
 now practised it seems the art of giving affec- 
 tation to a puppet, and that this puppet is a man 
 we can enter into this mixed sensation of degra- 
 dation and ridicule. Horace, by his own confes- 
 sion, was a very awkward rider; and the poetical 
 rider could not always secure a seat on his mule ; 
 Metastasio humorously complains of his gun ;the 
 poetical sportsman could only frighten the hares 
 and partridges ; the truth was, as an elder poet 
 sings, 
 
 " Instead of hounds that make the wooded hills 
 Talk in ahunded voices to the rills, 
 
 * Hor. Od. Lib. iv. 0. 3. 
 
2S *; YOUTH OP GENIUS. 
 
 I like the pleasiug cadence of a line 
 Struck by the concert of the sacred Nine." 
 
 Browne's Brit. Past. B. ii. Song 4, 
 
 And we discover the true " humour" of the 
 indolent contemplative race in their great repre- 
 sentatives Virgil and Horace. When they ac- 
 companied Mecaenas into the country, while the 
 minister amused himself at tennis, the two bards 
 reposed on a vernal bank amidst the freshness of 
 the shade. The younger Pliny, who was so per- 
 fect a literary character, was charmed by the 
 Roman mode of hunting, or rather fowling by 
 nets, which admitted him to sit a whole day with 
 bis tablets and stylus, that, says he, " should I re- 
 turn with empty nets my tablets may at least be 
 full." Thomson was the hero of his own Castle 
 of Indolence. 
 
 The youth of genius will be apt to retire from 
 the active sports of his mates. Beattie paints 
 himself in his own Minstrel, 
 
 " Concourse and noise, and toil he ever fled, 
 
 Nor cared to mingle in the clamorous fray 
 Of squabbling imps; but to the forest sped." 
 
 BOSSUET would not join his young companions, 
 and flew to his solitary task, while the classical 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS. 3 29 
 
 boys avenged his flight by applying to him from 
 Virgil the bos suetus aratro, the ox daily toil- 
 ing in the plough. The young painters, to ridi- 
 cule the persevering labours of DOMENICHINO in 
 his youth, honoured him by the same title of 
 " the great ox ;" and Passeri, in his delightful 
 biography of his own contemporary artists, has 
 happily expressed the still labours of his conceal- 
 ed genius, sua taciturna leniezza, his silent slow- 
 ness. The learned HUET has given an amusing 
 detail of the inventive persecutions of his school- 
 mates, to divert him from his obstinate love of 
 study. " At length," says he, " in order to indulge 
 my own taste, I would rise with the sun, while 
 they were buried in sleep, and hide myself in the 
 woods that I might read and study in quiet," but 
 they beat the bushes and started in his burrow, 
 the future man of erudition. Sir WILLIAM JONES 
 was rarely a partaker in the active sports of Har- 
 row; it was said of GRAY that he was never a 
 boy, and the unhappy Chatter/ton and Burns were 
 remarkably serious boys. MILTON has preserved 
 for us, in solemn numbers, his school-life 
 
 11 When I was yet a child, no childish play 
 To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set 
 Serious to learn and know, and thericg to do 
 What might be public good, myself I thought 
 c 2 
 
 
30 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 Born to that end, born to promote all truth, 
 All righteous things 
 
 Par. Reg, 
 
 If the youth of genius is apt to retire from the 
 ordinary sports of his mates, he often substitutes 
 others, the reflections of those favourite studies 
 which are haunting his young imagination ; the 
 amusements of such an idler have often been 
 fanciful. ARIOSTO, while yet a school-boy, 
 composed a sort of tragedy from the story of 
 Pyramus and Thisbe, and had it represented 
 by his brothers and sisters. POPE seems to 
 have indicated his passion for Homer in those 
 rough scenes which he drew up from Ogilby's 
 version ; and when Sir WILLIAM JONES at Har- 
 row divided the fields according to a map of 
 Greece, and portioned out to each school-fellow 
 a dominion, and further, when wanting a copy of 
 the Tempest to act from, he supplied it from his 
 memory, we must confess that the boy JONES was 
 reflecting in his amusements the cast of mind he 
 displayed in his after-life, and that felicity of 
 memory and taste so prevalent in his literary 
 character. FLORIAN'S earliest years were passed 
 in shooting birds all day and reading every even- 
 ing an old translation of the Iliad ; whenever he 
 got a bird remarkable for its size or its plumage, 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS. 31 
 
 he personified it by one of the names of his he- 
 roes, and raising a funeral pyre consumed the 
 body ; collecting the ashes in an urn, he present- 
 ed them to his grandfather, with a narrative of 
 his Patroclus or Sarpedon. We seem here to 
 detect, reflected in his boyish sports, the pleasing 
 genius of the author of Numa Pompilius, Gon~ 
 salvo of Cordova and William Tell. 
 
 It is perhaps a criterion of talent when a youth 
 is distinguished by his equals; at that moment of 
 life with no flattery on the one side, and no arti- 
 fice on the other, all emotion and no reflection, 
 the boy who has obtained a predominance has 
 acquired this merely by native powers. The 
 boyhood of NELSON was characterized by events 
 congenial to those of his after-days; and his 
 father understood his character when he declared 
 that " in whatever station he might be placed, 
 he would climb, if possible, to the top of the 
 tree." Some puerile anecdotes which Frank- 
 lin remembered of himself, in association with 
 his after-life, betray the invention, and the 
 firm intrepidity, of his character ; and even per- 
 haps the carelessness of the means to obtain his 
 purpose. In boyhood he was a sort of adven- 
 turer; and since his father would not consent 
 to a sea-life, he made the river near him repre- 
 
32 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 sent the ocean ; he lived on the water, and was 
 the daring Columbus of a school-boy's boat. 
 A part where he and his mates stood to angle, 
 in time became a quagmire. In the course 
 of one day the infant projector thought of a 
 wharf for them to stand on, and raised with a 
 heap of stones deposited there for the building 
 of a house. But he preferred his wharf to 
 another's house; his contrivances to aid his 
 puny labourers, with his resolution not to quit 
 the great work till it was effected, seem to 
 strike out to us the decision and invention of 
 his future character. But the qualities which 
 attract the companions of a school-boy may 
 not be those which are essential to fine genius. 
 The captain or leader of his school-mates has 
 a claim on our attention, but it is the sequestered 
 boy who may chance to be the artist, or the 
 literary character. 
 
 Is there then a period in youth which yields 
 decisive marks ol the character of genius? The 
 natures of men are as various as their fortunes. 
 Some, like diamonds, must wait to receive their 
 splendour from the slow touches of the polisher, 
 while others, resembling pearls, appear at once 
 born with their beautiful lustre. 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS. 33 
 
 Among the inauspicious circumstances is the 
 feebleness of the first attempts ; and we must not 
 decide on the talents of a young man by his first 
 works. Dryden and Swift might have been de- 
 terred from authorship, had their earliest pieces 
 decided their fate. Racine's earliest composition, 
 which we know of by some fragments his son 
 has preserved, to show their remarkable contrast 
 with his writings, abound with those points and 
 conceits which afterwards he abhorred ; the 
 tender author of Andromache could not have 
 been discovered while exhausting himself in his 
 wanderings from nature, in running after con- 
 ceits as absurd and surprizing as the worst parts 
 of Cowley. Gibbon betrayed none of the force 
 and magnitude of his powers in his " Essay on 
 Literature," or his attempted History of Switzer- 
 land. Johnson's cadenced prose is not recog- 
 nizable in the humble simplicity of his earliest 
 years. Many authors have begun unsuccessfully 
 the walk they afterwards excelled in. Raphael, 
 when he first drew his meagre forms under Peru- 
 gino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal 
 beauty, which one day he of all men could alone 
 execute. 
 
 Even the manhood of genius may pass by un- 
 observed by his companions, and may, like -/Eneas, 
 
34 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 be hidden in a cloud amidst his associates. The 
 celebrated Fabius Maximus in his boyhood was 
 called in derision " the little sheep," from the 
 meekness and gravity of his disposition. His se- 
 dateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juve- 
 nile amusements, his slowness and difficulty in 
 learning, and his ready submission to his equals, 
 induced them to consider him as one irrecover- 
 ably stupid. That greatness of mind, unalterable 
 courage, and invincible character Fabius after- 
 wards displayed, they then imagined had lain con- 
 cealed in the apparent contrary qualities. The 
 boy of genius may indeed seem slow and dull 
 even to the phlegmatic, for thoughtful and ob- 
 serving dispositions conceal themselves in timor- 
 ous silent characters, who have not yet learnt 
 their strength ; nor can that assiduous love, which 
 cannot tear itself away from the secret instruction 
 it is perpetually imbibing, be easily distinguished 
 from that pertinacity which goes on with the mere 
 plodder. We often hear from the early compan- 
 ions of a man of genius that at school, he had ap- 
 peared heavy and unpromising. Rousseau ima- 
 gined that the childhood of some men is accom- 
 panied by that seeming and deceitful dullness, 
 which is the sign of a profound genius ; and 
 Roger Ascham has placed among " the best na- 
 tures for learning, the sad-natured and hard-wit- 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS. 35 
 
 ted child," that is, the thoughtful or the melan- 
 cholic, and the slow. Domenichino was at first 
 heavy and unpromising, and Passed expresses his 
 surprize at the accounts he received of the early 
 life of this great artist. " It is difficult to be- 
 lieve," he says, " what many assert, that from the 
 beginning this great painter had a ruggedness 
 about him, which entirely incapacitated him from 
 learning his profession, and they have heard from 
 himself that he quite despaired of success. Yet 
 I cannot comprehend how such vivacious talents, 
 with a mind so finely organised, and accompanied 
 with such favourable dispositions for the art, 
 would show such signs of utter incapacity ; I ra- 
 ther think that it is a mistake in the proper know- 
 ledge of genius, which some imagine indicates 
 itself most decisively by its sudden vehemence, 
 showing itself like lightning, and like lightning 
 passing away." A parallel case we find in Gold- 
 smith, who passed through an unpromising youth ; 
 he declared that he was never attached to the 
 belles lettres till he was thirty, that poetry had no 
 peculiar charms for him till that age, and indeed 
 to his latest hour he was surprizing his friends by 
 productions which they had imagined he was in- 
 capable of composing. Hume was considered, 
 for his sobriety and assiduity, as competent to be- 
 come a steady merchant ; of Johnson it was said 
 
36 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 that he would never offend in conversation, as of 
 Boileau that he had no great understanding, but 
 would speak ill of no one. Farquhar at college 
 was a heavy companion, and afterwards, com- 
 bined, with great knowledge of the world, a light 
 airy talent. Even a discerning parent or master 
 has entirely failed to develope the genius of the 
 youth, who has afterwards ranked among eminent 
 men ; and we ought as little to infer from early 
 unfavourable appearances as from inequality of 
 talent. The great Isaac Barrow's father used to 
 say, that if it pleased God to take from him any 
 of his children he hoped it might be Isaac, as the 
 least promising ; and during the three years Bar- 
 row passed at the Charter-house, he was remark- 
 able only for the utter negligence of his studies 
 and his person. The mother of Sheridan, her- 
 self a literary female, pronounced early, that he 
 was the dullest and most hopeless of her sons. 
 Bodrner, at the head of the literary class in 
 Switzerland, who had so frequently discovered 
 and animated the literary youths of his country, 
 rould never detect the latent genius of Gesner ; 
 after a repeated examination of the young man, 
 he put his parents in despair with the hopeless 
 award that a mind of so ordinary a cast must con- 
 fine itself to mere writing and aeeompts. 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS. 37 
 
 Thus it happens that the first years of life do 
 not always include those of genius, and the edu- 
 cation of the youth may not be the education of 
 his genius. In all these cases nature had dropt 
 the seeds in the soil, but even a happy disposition 
 must be concealed amidst adverse circumstances. 
 It has happened to some men of genius during a 
 long period of their lives, that an unsettled im- . 
 pulse, without having discovered the object of its 
 aptitude, a thirst and fever in the temperament of 
 too sentient a being which cannot find the occu- 
 pation to which it can only attach itself, has sunk 
 into a melancholy and querulous spirit, weary 
 with the burthen of existence ; but the instant the 
 latent talent had declared itself, his first work, the 
 eager offspring of desire and love, has astonished 
 the world at once with the birth and the maturity 
 of genius. 
 
 Abundant facts exhibit genius unequivocally 
 discovering itself in the juvenile age, connecting 
 these facts with the subsequent life and in ge- 
 neral, perhaps a master-mind exhibits precocity. 
 " Whatever a young man at first applies himself 
 to, is commonly his delight afterwards." This 
 remark was made by Hartley, who has related an 
 anecdote of the infancy of his genius, which in- 
 dicated the man. He declared to his daughter 
 
gg YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 that the intention of writing a book upon the na- 
 ture of man was conceived in his mind when he 
 was a very little boy when swinging backwards 
 and forwards upon a gate, not more than nine 
 or ten years old ; he was then meditating upon 
 the nature of his own mind, how man was made, 
 and for what future end such was the true ori- 
 gin, in a boy of ten years old, of his celebrated 
 book on the " frame, the duty and the expectation 
 of man." The constitutional propensity has de- 
 clared itself in painters and poets, who were such 
 before they understood the nature of colours and 
 the arts of verse. The vehement passion of 
 Peiresc for knowledge, according to accounts 
 Gassendi had received from old men who had 
 known him a child, broke out as soon as he had 
 been taught his alphabet ; his delight was to be 
 handling books and papers, and his perpetual in- 
 quiries after their contents obliged them to invent 
 something to quiet the child's insatiable curiosity, 
 who was offended if told he had not the capacity 
 to understand them. He did not study like ordi- 
 nary scholars, and would read neither Justin nor 
 Ovid without a perpetual consultation of other 
 authors, such was his early love of research ! At 
 ten years of age his taste for the studies of anti- 
 quity was kindled at the sight of some ancient 
 .soins dug up in his neighbourhood ; and then that 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS. 39 
 
 passion for knowledge " began to burn like fire in 
 a forest," as Gassendi most happily describes the 
 fervour and the amplitude of his mind. We have 
 Boccaccio's own words for a proof of his early 
 natural tendency to tale- writing, in a passage of 
 his genealogy of the Gods : " Before seven years 
 of age, when as yet I had met with no stories, 
 was without a master and hardly knew my letters, 
 I had a natural Hent for fiction, and produced 
 some little tales." Thus the Decamerone was 
 appearing much earlier than we suppose. So 
 Ariosto, as soon as he obtained some knowledge 
 of languages, delighted himself in translating 
 French and Spanish romances ; was he not sow- 
 ing plentifully the seeds of his Orlando Furioso ? 
 Lope de Vega declares that he was a poet from 
 the cradle, beginning to make verses before he 
 could write them, for he bribed his school-mates 
 with a morsel of his breakfast to write down the 
 lines he composed in the early morning. Des- 
 cartes, while yet a boy, was so marked out by 
 habits of deep meditation, that he went among 
 his companions by the title of the philosopher, 
 always questioning, and settling cause and effect. 
 It happened that he was twenty-five years of age 
 before he left the army, but the propensity for 
 meditation had been early formed, and the noble 
 enterprize of reforming philosophy never ceased 
 
40 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 to inspire his solitary thoughts. Descartes was a 
 man born only for meditation and he has himself 
 given a very interesting account of the pursuits 
 which occupied his youth, and of the progress of 
 his genius ; of that secret struggle he so long held 
 with himself, wandering in concealment over the 
 world, for more than twenty years, and, as he 
 says of himself, like the statuary, labouring to 
 draw out a Minerva from the marble block. Mi- 
 chael Angelo, as yet a child, wherever he went, 
 busied himself in drawing ; and when his noble 
 parents, hurt that a man o r genius was disturbing 
 the line of their ancestry, forced him to relinquish 
 the pencil, the infant artist flew to the chissel : 
 art was in his soul and his hands. Velasquez, the 
 Spanish painter, at his school-tasks, filled them 
 with sketches and drawings, and as some write 
 their names on their books, his were known by 
 the specimens of his genius. The painter Lan- 
 franco was originally the page of a marquis, who 
 observing that he was perpetually scrawling figures 
 on cards, or with charcoal on the walls, asked the 
 boy whether he would apply to the art he seemed 
 to love ? The boy trembled, fearing to have in- 
 curred his master's anger ; but when encouraged 
 to decide, he did not hesitate : placed under one 
 of the Carraccios, his rapid progress in the art 
 testified how much Lanfranco had suffered by sup- 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS, 41 
 
 pressing his natural aptitude. When we find the 
 boy Nanteuil, his parents being averse to their 
 son's practising drawing, hiding himself in a tree 
 to pursue the delightful exercise of his pencil ; 
 that Handel, intended for a doctor of the civil 
 laws, and whom no parental discouragement could 
 deprive of his enthusiasm for the musical science, 
 for ever touching harpsichords, and having se- 
 cretly conveyed a musical instrument to a retired 
 apartment, sitting through the night awakening 
 his harmonious spirit ; and when we view Fergu- 
 son, the child of a peasant, acquiring the art of 
 reading without any one suspecting it, by listening 
 to his father teaching his brother ; making a 
 wooden watch without the slightest knowledge of 
 mechanism, and while a shepherd, like an ancient 
 Chaldean, studying the phenomena of the hea- 
 vens and making a celestial globe, as he had 
 made a wooden watch, can we hesitate to believe 
 that in such minds, there was a resistless and mys- 
 terious propensity, growing up with the tempera- 
 ment of these artists ? Ferguson was a shepherd- 
 lad on a plain, placed entirely out of the chance 
 of imitation ; or of the influence of casual excite- 
 ment ; or any other of those sources of genius so 
 frequently assigned for its production. The case 
 of Opie is similar. 
 
42 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 Yet these cases are not more striking than one 
 related of the AJbbg La Caille, who ranked among 
 the first astronomers of the age. La Caille was 
 the son of the parish clerk of a village ; at the 
 age of ten years his father sent him every even- 
 ing to ring the church bell, but the boy always 
 returned home late. His father was angry and 
 beat him, and still the boy returned an hour after 
 he had rung the bell. The father, suspecting 
 something mysterious in his conduct, one evening 
 watched him. He saw his son ascend the steeple, 
 ring the bell as usual, and remain there during an 
 hour. When the unlucky boy descended, he 
 trembled like one caught in the fact, and on his 
 knees confessed that the pleasure he took in 
 watching the stars from the steeple was the real 
 cause of detaining him from home. As the fa- 
 ther was not born to be an astronomer, like the 
 son, he flogged the boy severely. The youth 
 was found weeping in the streets, by a man of 
 science, who. when he discovered in a boy of ten 
 years of age, a passion for contemplating the 
 stars at night, and who had discovered an obser- 
 vatory in a steeple, in spite of such ill-treatment, 
 he decided that the seal of nature had impressed 
 itself on the genius of that boy. Relieving the 
 parent from the son and the son from the parent, 
 Ue assisted the young La Caille in his passionate 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS. 43 
 
 pursuit, and the event completely justified the 
 prediction. Let others tell us why children feel 
 a predisposition for the studies of astronomy, or 
 natural history, or any similar pursuit. We 
 know that youths have found themselves in par- 
 allel situations with Ferguson and La Caille, with- 
 out experiencing their energies. 
 
 The case of Clairon, the great French tragic 
 actress, deserves attention : she seems to have 
 been an actress before she saw a theatre. This 
 female, destined to be a sublime actress, was of 
 the lowest extraction ; the daughter of a violent 
 and illiterate woman, who with blows and me- 
 naces was driving about the child all day to 
 manual labour. " I know not," says Clairon, 
 " whence I derived my disgust, but I could not 
 bear the idea to be a mere workman, or to 
 remain inactive in a corner." In her eleventh 
 year, being locked up in a room, as a punish- 
 ment, with the windows fastened, she climbed 
 upon a chair to look about her. A new object in- 
 stantly absorbed her attention ; in the house oppo- 
 site she observed a celebrated actress amidst her 
 family, her daughter was performing her dancing 
 lesson; the girl Clairon, the future Melpomene, 
 was struck by the influence of this graceful and 
 affectionate scene. " All my little being collect- 
 
44 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 ed itself into my eyes ; I lost not a single motion ; 
 as soon as the lesson ended all the family applaud- 
 ed and the mother embraced the daughter. 
 That difference of her fate and mine filled me 
 with profound grief, my tears hindered me from 
 seeing any longer, and when the palpitations of 
 my heart allowed me to reascend the chair, all 
 had disappeared." This was a discovery ; from 
 that moment she knew no rest; she rejoiced 
 when she could get her mother to confine her 
 in that room. The happy girl was a divinity to 
 the unhappy one, whose susceptible genius imita- 
 ted her in every gesture and motion ; and Cla- 
 iron soon showed the effect of her ardent stu- 
 dies, for she betrayed all the graces she had taught 
 herself, in the common intercourse of life; she 
 charmed her friends and even softened her bar- 
 barous mother; in a word, she was an actress 
 without knowing what an actress was. 
 
 In this case of the youth of genius, are we to 
 conclude that the accidental view of a young 
 actress practising her studies, imparted the char- 
 acter of the great tragic actress Clairon ? Could a 
 mere chance occurrence have given birth to those 
 faculties which produced a sublime tragedian? In 
 all arts there are talents which may be acquired 
 by imitation, and reflection; and thus far may 
 
YOUTH OF GENIUS. 45 
 
 genius be educated, but there are others which 
 are entirely the result of native sensibility, which 
 often secretly torment the possessor, and which 
 may even be lost from the want of development ; 
 a state of languor from which many have not re- 
 covered. Clairon, before she saw the young ac- 
 tress, and having yet no conception of a theatre, 
 never having entered one, had in her soul that 
 latent faculty which creates a genius of her cast. 
 " Had I not felt like Dido," she once exclaimed, 
 " I could not have thus personified her !" 
 
 Some of these facts, we conceive, afford deci- 
 sive evidence of that instinct in genius, that 
 constitutional propensity in the mind, sometimes 
 called organization, which has inflamed such a 
 war of words by its equivocal term and the 
 ambiguity of its nature ; it exists independent of 
 education, and where it is wanting, education can 
 never confer it. Of its mysterious influence we 
 may be ignorant; the effect s mor apparent 
 than the cause. It is, however, always working 
 in the character of the chosen mind. In the his- 
 tory of genius, there #re unquestionably many 
 secondary causes of considerable influence in 
 developing or even crushing the germ these 
 have been of late often detected, and sometimes 
 
46 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 
 
 carried even to a ridiculous extreme ; but among 
 them none seem more remarkable than the first 
 studies and the first habits. 
 
(47 ) 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 THE first studies form an epoch in the history 
 of genius, and unquestionably have sensibly in- 
 fluenced its productions. Often have the first 
 impressions stamped a character on the mind 
 adapted to receive one, as often the first step 
 into life has determined its walk. To our- 
 selves, this is a distant period lost in the horizon 
 of our own recollection, and so unobserved by 
 others, that it passes away in neglect. 
 
 Many of those peculiarities of men of genius 
 which are not fortunate, and some which have 
 hardened the character in its mould, may be 
 traced to this period. Physicians tell us that 
 there is a certain point in youth at which the 
 constitution is formed, and on which the sanity 
 of life revolves ; the character of genius expe- 
 riences a similar dangerous period. Early bad 
 
48 THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 tastes, early particular habits, early defective 
 instructions, all the egotistical pride of an un- 
 tamed intellect, are those evil spirits which will 
 dog genius, to its grave. An early attachment 
 to the works of Sir Thomas Browne produced 
 in Johnson an excessive admiration of that lati- 
 nised English, which violated the native graces 
 of the language. The first studies of Rem- 
 brandt affected his after-labours ; that pecu- 
 liarity of shadow which marks all his pictures 
 originated in the circumstance of his father's 
 mill receiving light from an aperture at the top, 
 which habituated that artist afterwards to view 
 all objects as if seen in that magical light. When 
 Pope was a child he found in his mother's closet 
 a small library of mystical devotion; but it was 
 not suspected till the fact was discovered, that 
 the effusions of love and religion poured forth 
 in his Eloisa were derived from the seraphic 
 raptures of those erotic mystics, who to the 
 last retained a place in his library among the 
 classical bards of antiquity. The accidental pe- 
 rusal of Quintus Curtius first made Boyle "in 
 love with other than pedantic books, and con- 
 jured up in him," as he expresses it, " an un- 
 satisfied appetite of knowledge ; so that he 
 thought he owed more to Quintus Gurtius than 
 did Alexander." From the perusal of Rycaut's 
 
THE FIRST STUDIES. 49 
 
 folio of Turkish history in childhood, the noble 
 and impassioned bard of our times retained 
 those indelible impressions, which gave life and 
 motion to the " Giaour," the " Corsair," and 
 " Alp." A voyage to the country produced the 
 scenery. Rycaut only communicated the im- 
 pulse to a mind susceptible of the poetical char- 
 acter ; and without this Turkish history we should 
 still have had our poet. 
 
 The influence of first studies, in the formation 
 of the character of genius, is a moral pheno- 
 menon, which has not sufficiently attracted our 
 notice. Dr. Franklin acquaints us that when 
 young and wanting books, he accidentally found 
 De Foe's "Essay on Projects," from which 
 work impressions were derived which afterwards 
 influenced some of the principal events of his 
 life. Rousseau, in early youth, full of his 
 Plutarch, while he was also devouring the trash 
 of romances, could only conceive human nature 
 in the colossal forms, or be affected by the infirm 
 sensibility, of an imagination mastering all his 
 faculties ; thinking like a Roman, and feeling like 
 a Sybarite. The same circumstance happened 
 to Catharine Macauley, who herself has told us 
 how she owed the bent of her character to the 
 early reading of the Roman historians: but 
 
50 THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 combining Roman admiration with English fac- 
 tion, she violated truth in her English charac- 
 ters, and exaggerated romance in the Roman. 
 But the permanent effect of a solitary bias in 
 the youth of genius, impelling the whole current 
 of his after-life, is strikingly displayed in the 
 remarkable character of Archdeacon Blackburne, 
 the author of the famous " Confessional," and 
 the curious " Memoirs of Hollis," written with 
 such a republican fierceness. 
 
 I had long considered the character of our 
 archdeacon as a lusus politico et theologico. 
 Having subscribed to the Articles and enjoying 
 the archdeaconry, he was writing against sub- 
 scription and the whole hierarchy, with a spirit 
 so irascible and caustic, as if, like Prynne and 
 Bastwick, the archdeacon had already lost both 
 his ears ; while his antipathy to monarchy might 
 have done honour to a Roundhead of the Rota 
 Club. The secret of these volcanic explosions 
 was only revealed in a letter accidentally pre- 
 served. In the youth of our spirited archdeacon, 
 when fox-hunting was his deepest study, it hap- 
 pened at the house of a relation, that on some 
 rainy day, among other garret lumber, he fell 
 jon some worm eaten volumes which had once 
 been the careful collections of his greatgrand- 
 
THE FIRST STUDIES. 51 
 
 father, an Oliverian justice. " These," says he, 
 "I conveyed to my lodging-room, and there 
 became acquainted with the manners and prin- 
 ciples of many excellent old puritans, and then 
 laid the foundation of my own." Thus is the 
 enigma solved! Archdeacon Blackburne, in his 
 seclusion in Yorkshire amidst the Oliverian 
 justice's library, shows that we are in want of 
 a Cervantes, but not of a Quixote, and York- 
 shire might yet be as renowned a county as 
 La Mancha ; for political romances, it is presum- 
 ed, may be as fertile of ridicule as any of the 
 folios of chivalry. 
 
 Such is the influence through life of those first 
 unobserved impressions on the character of geni- 
 us, which every author has not recorded. 
 
 Education, however indispensible in a culti- 
 vated age, produces nothing on the side of geni- 
 us, and where education ends often genius begins. 
 Gray was asked if he recollected when he first 
 felt the strong predilection to poetry ; he replied, 
 that " he believed it was when he began to read 
 Virgil for his own amusement, and not in school 
 hours as a task." Such is the force of self-edu- 
 cation in genius, that the celebrated physiologist, 
 John Hunter, who was entirely self-educated, 
 
$2 THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 evinced such penetration in his anatomical dis- 
 coveries, that his sensible biographer observes, 
 " he has brought into notice passages from writers 
 he was unable to read, and which had been over- 
 looked by profound scholars."* 
 
 That the education of genius must be its own 
 work, we may appeal to every one of the family ; 
 it is not always fortunate, for many die amidst 
 a waste of talents and the wrecks of their mind. 
 
 Many a soul sublime 
 Has felt the influence of malignant star. 
 
 Seattle. 
 
 An unfavourable position in society is an usual 
 obstruction in the course of this self-education ; 
 and a man of genius, through half his life, has 
 held a contest with a bad, or with no education. 
 There is a race of the late-taught, who, with a 
 capacity of leading in the first rank, are mortified 
 to discover themselves only on a level with their 
 contemporaries. Winkelman, who passed his 
 youth in obscure misery, as a village schoolmaster, 
 paints feelings which strikingly contrast with his 
 
 * Life of John Hunter, by Dr. Adams, p. 59, where the case 
 is curiously illustrated. 
 
THE FIRST STUDIES, 53 
 
 avocations, " I formerly filled the office of a 
 schoolmaster with the greatest punctuality, and I 
 taught the A, B, C, to children with filthy heads; 
 at the moment, I was aspiring after the knowledge 
 of the beautiful, and meditating, low to myself, 
 on the similes of Homer ; then I said to my- 
 self, as I still say, c Peace, my soul, thy strength 
 shall surmount thy cares." 3 The obstructions 
 of so unhappy a self-education essentially inju- 
 red his ardent genius ; and his secret sorrow was 
 long, at this want of early patronage and these dis- 
 cordant habits of life. " I am unfortunately one of 
 those whom the Greeks named aw/^*^'; sero 
 sapientes, the late-learned, for I have appeared 
 too late in the world and in Italy. To have done 
 something, it was necessary that I should 
 have had an education analogous to my pur- 
 suits, and this at your age." This class of the 
 late-learned, which Winkelman notices, is a useful 
 distinction ; it is so with a sister-art : one of the 
 greatest musicians of our country assures me, 
 that the ear is as latent with many ; there are 
 the late-learned even in the musical world. Su- 
 danis declared he was both " self-taught and late- 
 taught." 
 
 The self-educated are marked by strong pecu- 
 liarities. If their minds are rich in acquisition^ 
 E 2 
 
54 THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 they often want taste, and the art of communica- 
 tion ; their knowledge, like corn heaped in a 
 granary, for want of ventilation and stirring, per- 
 ishes in its own masses. They may abound with 
 talent in all shapes, but rarely in its place, and 
 they have to dread a plethora of genius, and a 
 delirium of wit. They sometimes improve amaz- 
 ingly ; their source, turbid and obscure, works it- 
 self clear at last, and the stream runs and even 
 sparkles. These men at first were pushed on by 
 their native energy ; at length, they obtain the 
 secret to conduct their genius, which before had 
 conducted them. Sometimes the greater portion 
 of their lives is passed before they can throw 
 themselves out of that world of mediocrity to 
 which they had been confined ; their first work 
 has not announced genius, ?nd their last is stamp- 
 ed with it. Men are long judged by their first 
 work : it takes a long while after they have sur- 
 passed themselves before it is discovered. This 
 race of the self-educated are apt to consider some 
 of their own insulated feelings those of all ; their 
 prejudices are often invincible, and their tastes 
 unsure and capricious ; glorying in their strength, 
 while they are betraying their weaknesses, yet 
 mighty even in that enthusiasm which is only dis- 
 ciplined by its own fierce habits. Bunyan is the 
 
THE FIRST STUDIES? 55 
 
 Spenser of the people. The fire burned towards 
 heaven, although the altar was rude and rustic. 
 
 Barry, the painter, has left behind him works 
 not to be turned over by the connoisseur by rote, 
 nor the artist who dares, not be just and will not 
 suffer even the infirmities of genius to be buried 
 in its grave. That enthusiast, with a temper of 
 mind resembling Rousseau's, the same creature 
 of imagination, consumed by the same passions, 
 with the same fine intellect disordered, and the 
 same fortitude of soul, found his self-taught pen, 
 like his pencil, betray his genius. A vehement 
 enthusiasm breaks through his ill-composed works, 
 throwing the sparks of his bold and rich concep- 
 tions, so philosophical and magnificent, into the 
 soul of the youth of genius. When in his char- 
 acter of professor, he delivered his lectures at 
 the academy, he never ceased speaking but his 
 auditors rose in a tumult, while their hands return- 
 ed to him the proud feelings he adored. The 
 self-educated and gifted man, once listening to 
 the children of genius, whom he had created 
 about him, exclaimed, " Go it, go it, my boys ! they 
 did so at Athens." Thus high could he throw 
 up his native mud into the very heaven of his in- 
 vention ! 
 
56 THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 But even the pages of Barry are the aliment 
 of young genius : before we can discern the beau- 
 tiful, must we not be endowed with the suscepti- 
 bility of love ? Must not the disposition be form- 
 ed before even the object appears ? The unedu- 
 cated Barry is the higher priest of enthusiasm 
 than the educated Reynolds. I have witnessed 
 the young artist of genius glow and start over the 
 reveries of Barry, but pause and meditate, and 
 inquire over the mature elegance of Reynolds ; 
 in the one, he caught the passion for beauty, and 
 in the other, he discovered the beautiful ; with 
 the one he was warm and restless, and with the 
 other calm and satisfied. 
 
 Of the difficulties overcome in the self-educa- 
 tion of genius, we have a remarkable instance in 
 the character of Moses Mendelsohn, on whom 
 literary Germany has bestowed the honourable 
 title of the Jewish Socrates.* Such were the ap- 
 
 * I composed the life of Mendelsohn so far back as in 17 , 
 for a periodical publication, whence our late biographers have 
 drawn their notices ; a juvenile production, which happened to 
 excite the attention of the late BARRY, then not personally 
 known to me, and he has given all the immortality his poeti- 
 cal pencil could bestow on this man of genius, by immediate- 
 ly placing in his elysium of genius, Moses Mendelsohn shak- 
 ing hands with ADDISON, who wrote on the truth of the Chris- 
 tian religion, and near LOCKE, the English master of Mendel- 
 sohn's mind. 
 
fHE FIRST STUDIES. 57 
 
 parent invincible obstructions which barred out 
 Mendelsohn from the world of literature and phi- 
 losophy, that, in the history of men of genius, it 
 is something like taking in the history of man, 
 the savage of Aveyron from his woods, who, 
 destitute of a human language, should at length 
 create a model of eloquence ; without a faculty 
 of conceiving a figure, should be capable to add 
 to the demonstrations of Euclid ; and without a 
 complex idea and with few sensations, should at 
 length, in the sublimest strain of metaphysics, 
 open to the world a new view of the immortality 
 of the soul ! 
 
 Mendelsohn, the son of a poor rabbin, in a 
 village in Germany, received an education com- 
 pletely rabbinical, and its nature must be compre- 
 hended, or the term of education would be mis- 
 understood. The Israelites in Poland and Ger- 
 many live, with all the restrictions of their cere- 
 monial law, in an insulated state, and are not al- 
 ways instructed in the language of the country of 
 their birth. They employ for their common in- 
 tercourse a barbarous or patois Hebrew, while 
 the sole studies of the young rabbins are strictly 
 confined to the Talmud,, of which the fundamen- 
 tal principle, like the Sonna of the Turks, is a 
 pious rejection of every species of uninspired 
 
58 THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 learning. This ancient jealous spirit, which walls 
 in the understanding and the faith of man, was 
 shutting out what the imitative Catholics after" 
 wards called heresy. It is, then, these numerous 
 folios of the Talmud which the true Hebraic stu- 
 dent contemplates through all the seasons of life, 
 as the Patuecos in their low valley imagine their 
 surrounding mountains to be the confines of the 
 universe. 
 
 Of such a nature was the plan of MENDEL- 
 SOHN'S first studies ; but even in his boyhood this 
 conflict of study occasioned an agitation of his 
 spirits, which affected his life ever after ; reject- 
 ing the Talmudical dreamers he caught a nobler 
 spirit from the celebrated Maimonides ; and his 
 native sagacity was already clearing up the dark- 
 ness around. An enemy not less hostile to the 
 enlargement of mind than voluminous legends, 
 presented itself in the indigence of his father, 
 who was now compelled to send away the youth 
 on foot to Bfclm to find labour and bread. 
 
 At Berlin he becomes an amanuensis to another 
 poor rabbin, who could only still initiate him into 
 the theology, the jurisprudence and scholastic 
 philosophy of his people. Thus he was no far- 
 ther advanced in that philosophy of the mind in 
 
THE FIRST STUDIES. Q 
 
 which he was one day to be the rival of Plato and 
 Locke, nor in that knowledge of literature of 
 which he was to be among the first polished cri- 
 tics of Germany. 
 
 Some unexpected event occurs which gives the 
 first great impulse to the mind of genius. MEN- 
 DELSOHN received this from the first companion 
 of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial, 
 but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, ex- 
 pelled from the communion of the Orthodox, 
 and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, 
 with more sensibility than fortitude. But this 
 vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist 
 and a mathematician. MENDELSOHN, at a distant 
 day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown 
 together into the same situation, they approached 
 each other by the same sympathies, and commu- 
 nicating in the only language which MENDELSOHN 
 knew, the Polander voluntarily undertook his li- 
 Jerary education. 
 
 Then was seen 0n of the most extraordinary 
 spectacles in the history of modern literature. 
 Two houseless Hebrew youths might be discover- 
 ed, in the moonlight streets of Berlin, sitting in 
 retired corners, or on the steps of some porch, 
 the one instructing the other, with an Euclid in 
 his hand ; but what is more extraordinary, it was 
 
 i 
 
THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 a Hebrew version, composed by himself, for one 
 who knew no other language. Who could then 
 have imagined that the future Plato of Germany 
 was sitting on those steps ! 
 
 The Polander, whose deep melancholy had 
 settled on his heart, died yet he had not lived in 
 vain, since the electric spark that lighted up the 
 soul of MENDELSOHN had fallen from his own. 
 
 MENDELSOHN was now left alone ; his mind 
 teeming with its chaos, and stiil master of no other 
 language than that barren idiom which was inca- 
 pable of expressing the ideas he was meditating 
 on. He had scarcely made a step into the philo- 
 sophy of his age, and the genius of MENDELSOHN 
 had probably been lost to Germany had not the 
 singularity of his studies and the cast of his mind 
 been detected by the sagacity of Dr. Kisch. The 
 aid of this physician was momentous ; for he de- 
 voted several hours every day to the instruction of 
 a poor youth, whose strong capacity he had the 
 discernment to perceive, and the generous tem- 
 per to aid. MENDELSOHN was soon enabled to 
 read Locke in a Latin version, but with such ex- 
 treme pain, that, compelled to search for every 
 word, and to arrange their Latin order, and at 
 the same time to combine metaphysical ideas, it 
 
THE FIRST STUDIES. 51 
 
 was observed that he did not so much translate, 
 as guess by the force of meditation. 
 
 This prodigious effort of his intellect retarded 
 his progress, but invigorated his habit, as the 
 racer, by running against the hill, at length courses 
 with facility. 
 
 A succeeding effort was to master the living 
 languages, and chiefly the English, that he might 
 read his favourite Locke in his own idiom. Thus 
 a great genius for metaphysics and languages was 
 forming itself by itself. 
 
 It is curious to detect, in the character of 
 genius, the effects of local and moral influences. 
 There resulted from MENDELSOHN'S early situa- 
 tion, certain defects in his intellectual character, 
 derived from his poverty, his Jewish education, 
 and his numerous impediments in literature. In- 
 heriting but one language, too obsolete and naked 
 to serve the purposes of modern philosophy, he 
 perhaps overvalued his new acquisitions, and in 
 his delight of knowing many languages, he with 
 difficulty escaped from remaining a mere philolo- 
 gist ; while in his philosophy, having adopted the 
 prevailing principles of Wolf and Baumgarten, 
 his genius was long without the courage or the 
 
6 2 THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 skill to emancipate itself from their rusty chains. 
 It was more than a step which had brought him 
 into their circle, but a step was yet wanted to es- 
 cape from it. 
 
 At length the mind of MENDELSOHN enlarg- 
 ed in literary intercourse : he became a great 
 and original thinker in many beautiful specula- 
 tions in moral and critical philosophy ; while 
 he had gradually been creating a style which the 
 critics of Germany have declared was their first 
 luminous model of precision and elegance. 
 Thus a Hebrew vagrant, first perplexed in the 
 voluminous labyrinth of Judaical learning, in his 
 middle age oppressed by indigence and malady, 
 and in his mature life wrestling with that com- 
 mercial station whence he derived his humble 
 independence, became one of the masterwriters 
 in the literature of his country. The history of 
 the mind of Mendelsohn is one of the noblest 
 pictures of the self-education of genius. 
 
 Friends, who are s& valuable in our youth, 
 are usually prejudicial in the youth of genius. 
 Peculiar and unfortunate is this state, which is 
 put in danger from what in every other it de- 
 rives security. The greater part of the multi- 
 tude of authors and artists originate in the ig- 
 norant admiration of their early friends; while 
 
THE FIRST STUDIES. 53 
 
 the real genius has often been disconcerted and 
 thrown into despair, by the ill judgments of his 
 domestic circle. The productions of taste are 
 more unfortunate than those whictf depend on a 
 chain of reasoning, or the detail of facts ; these 
 are more palpable to the common judgments of 
 men ; but taste is of such rarity, that a long life 
 may be passed by some without once obtaining 
 a familiar acquaintance with a mind so culti- 
 vated by knowledge, so tried by experience, 
 and so practised by converse with the literary 
 world that its prophetic feeling anticipates the 
 public opinion. When a young writer's first 
 essay is shown, some, through mere inability of 
 censure, see nothing but beauties ; others, with 
 equal imbecility, can see none ; and others, 
 out of pure malice, see nothing but faults. " I 
 was soon disgusted," says Gibbon, " with the 
 modest practice of reading the manuscript to my 
 friends. Of such friends some will praise for 
 politeness, and some will criticise for vanity." 
 Had several of our first writers set their fortunes 
 on the cast of their friends' opinions, we might 
 have lost some precious compositions. The 
 friends of Thomson discovered nothing but 
 faults in his early productions, one of which 
 happened to be his noblest, the " Winter;" they 
 just could discern that these abounded with 
 
64 THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 luxuriances, without being aware that they were 
 the luxuriances of a poet. He had created a 
 new school in art and appealed from his circle 
 to the public. From a manuscript letter of our 
 poet's, written when employed on his " Summer," 
 I transcribe his sentiments on his former literary 
 friends in Scotland he is writing to Mallet :* 
 " Far from defending these two lines, I damn 
 them to the lowest depth of the poetical Tophet, 
 prepared of old, for Mitchell, Morrice, Rook, 
 Cook, Beckingham, and a long &c. Where- 
 ever I have evidence, or think I have evidence, 
 which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as 
 all the mules in Persia." This poet, of warm 
 affections, so irritably felt the perverse criticisms 
 of his learned friends, that they were to share 
 alike, nothing less than a damnation to a poetical 
 hell. One of these " blasts" broke out in a vin- 
 dictive epigram on Mitchell, whom he describes 
 with a " blasted eye ;" but this critic having one 
 literally, the poet, to avoid a personal reflection, 
 could only consent to make the blemish more 
 active 
 
 " Why all not faults, injurious Mitchell ! why 
 Appears one beauty to thy blasting eye ?" 
 
 * In Mr. Murray's collection of autographical letters. 
 
THE FIRST STUDIES. 65 
 
 He again calls him " the planet-blasted Mit- 
 chell." Of another of these critical friends he 
 speaks with more sedateness, but with a strong 
 conviction that the critic, a very sensible man, 
 had no sympathy with his poet. " Aikman's 
 reflections on my writings are very good, but 
 he does not in them regard the turn of my genius 
 enough ; should I alter my way I would write 
 poorly. I must choose what appears to me the 
 most significant epithet, or I cannot, with any 
 heart, proceed." The " Mirror," when publish- 
 ed in Edinburgh, was " fastidiously" received, as 
 all " home-productions" are ; but London aveng- 
 ed the cause of the author. When Swift intro- 
 duced Parnel to Lord Bolingbroke, and to the 
 world, he observes, in his Journal " it is pleasant 
 to see one who hardly passed for any thing in 
 Ireland, make his way here with a little friendly 
 forwarding." There is nothing more trying to the 
 judgment of the friends of a young man of geni- 
 us, than the invention of a new manner ; without 
 a standard to appeal to, without bladders to swim, 
 the ordinary critic sinks into irretrievable distress ; 
 but usually pronounces against npvelty. When 
 Reynolds returned from Italy, warm with all the 
 excellence of his art, says Mr. Northcote, and 
 painted a portrait, his old master, Hudson, view- 
 ing it, and perceiving no trace of his own manner, 
 
6 THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 exclaimed that he did not paint so well as when 
 he left England ; while another, who conceived 
 no higher excellence than Kneller, treated 
 with signal contempt the future Raphael of 
 England. 
 
 If it be dangerous for a young writer to resign 
 himself to the opinions of his friends, he also 
 incurs some peril in passing them with inattention. 
 What an embarrassment ! He wants a Quintilian. 
 One great means to obtain such an invaluable 
 critic, is the cultivation of his own judgment, in a 
 round of meditation and reading ; let him at once 
 supply the marble and be himself the sculptor : let 
 the great authors of the world be his gospels, and 
 the best critics their expounders ; from the one 
 he will draw inspiration, and from the others he 
 will supply those tardy discoveries in art, which 
 he who solely depends on his own experience 
 may obtain too late in life. Those who do not 
 read criticism will not even merit to be criticised. 
 The more extensive an author's knowledge of 
 what has been done, the greater will be his pow- 
 ers in knowing what to do. Let him preserve 
 his juvenile compositions, whatever these may 
 be, they are the spontaneous growth, and, like 
 the plants of the Alps, not always found in other 
 soils ; they are his virgin fancies ; by contemplat- 
 
THE FIUST STUDIES. 37 
 
 ing them, he may detect some of his predomi- 
 nant habits, resume an old manner more hap- 
 pily, invent novelty from an old subject he 
 had so rudely designed, and often may steal 
 from himself something so fine that, when 
 thrown into his most finished compositions, it 
 may seem a happiness rather than art. A young 
 writer, in the progress of his studies, should 
 often recollect a fanciful simile of Dryden. 
 
 " As those who unripe veins in mines explore, 
 On the rich bed again the warm turf lay: 
 Till time digests the yet imperfect ore, 
 And know it will be Gold another day." 
 
 Ingenious youth ! if, in a constant perusal of 
 the master-writers, you see your own sentiments 
 anticipated, and in the tumult of your mind as it 
 comes in contact with theirs, new ones arise ; 
 if in meditating on the Confessions of Rousseau, 
 or on those of every man of genius, for they have 
 all their confessions, you recollect that you have 
 experienced the same sensations from the same 
 circumstances, and that you have encountered 
 the same difficulties and overcome them by 
 the same means, then let not your courage 
 be lost in your admiration, but listen to 
 that " still small voice" in your heart, which 
 
63 THE FIRST STUDIES. 
 
 cries with Corrcggio and with Montesquieu, 
 " Ed io anche son Pittore !"* 
 
 * This noble consciousness with which the Italian painter 
 gave utterance to his strong feelings on viewing a celebrated 
 picture by one of his rivals, is applied by Montesquieu to 
 himself at the close of tht preface to his great work. 
 
(69) 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 1 HE modes of life of a man of genius, often 
 tinctured by eccentricity and enthusiasm, are 
 in an eternal conflict with the monotonous and 
 imitative habits of society, as society is carried 
 on in a great metropolis, where men are neces- 
 sarily alike, and in perpetual intercourse, shaping 
 themselves to one another. 
 
 The occupations, the amusements, and the 
 ardour of the man of genius, are discordant 
 with the artificial habits of life ; in the vortexes 
 of business or the world of pleasure, crowds of 
 human beings are only treading in one another's 
 steps ; the pleasures and the sorrows of this active 
 multitude are not his, while his are not obvious to 
 them : Genius in society is therefore often in a 
 state of suffering. Professional characters, who 
 are themselves so often literary, yielding to their 
 
70 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 predominant interests, conform to that assumed 
 urbanity which levels them with ordinary minds; 
 but the man of genius cannot leave himself 
 behind in the cabinet he quits ; the train of his 
 thoughts is not stopt at will, and in the range of 
 conversation the habits of his mind will prevail ; 
 an excited imagination, a high toned feeling, 
 a wandering reverie, a restlessness of temper, are 
 perpetually carrying him out of the processional 
 line of the mere conversationists. He is, like 
 all solitary beings, much too sentient, and pre- 
 pares for defence even at a random touch. His 
 emotions are rapid, his generalizing views take 
 things only in masses, while he treats with levity 
 some useful prejudices ; he interrogates, he 
 doubts, he is caustic ; in a word, he thinks he 
 converses, while he is at his studies. Sometimes, 
 apparently a complacent listener, we are morti- 
 fied by detecting the absent man ; now he ap- 
 pears humbled and spiritless, ruminating over 
 some failure which probably may be only known 
 to himself, and now haughty and hardy for a 
 triumph he has obtained, which y*t remains as 
 secret to the world. He is sometimes insolent, 
 and sometimes querulous. He is stung by jeal- 
 ousy ; or he writhes in aversion ; his eyes kindle, 
 and his teeth gnash ; a fever shakes his spirit ; 
 a fever which has sometimes generated a disease, 
 
OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 71 
 
 and has even produced a slight perturbation of 
 the faculties.* 
 
 Once we were nearly receiving from the hand 
 of genius itself, the most curious sketches of the 
 temper, the irascible humours, the delicacy of 
 soul even to its shadowiness, from the warm sboz- 
 zos of Burns when he began a diary of the heart, 
 a narrative of characters and events, and a 
 chronology of his emotions. It was natural for 
 such a creature of sensation and passion to pro- 
 ject such a regular task ; but quite impossible to 
 get through it. The paper-book that he conceiv- 
 ed would have recorded all these things, there- 
 fore turns out but a very imperfect document. 
 Even that little it was not thought proper to give 
 entire. Yet there we view a warm original mind, 
 when he first stept into the polished circles of so- 
 ciety, discovering that he could no longer " pour 
 out his bosom, his every thought and floating 
 fancy, his very inmost soul, with unreserved 
 
 * I have given a history of Literary Quarrels from personal 
 motives, in Quarrels of Authors, vol. iii. p. 285. There we find 
 how many controversies, in which the public get involved, 
 have sprung from some sudden squabble, some neglect of petty 
 civility, some unlucky epithet, or some casual observation 
 dropped without much consideration, which mortified or en- 
 raged an author. See further symptoms of this disease, at 
 the close of the chapter on " Self-praise/' in the present wort. 
 
72 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENINS, 
 
 confidence to another, without hazard of losing 
 part of that respect which man deserves from 
 man ; or, from the unavoidable imperfections 
 attending human nature, of one day repenting 
 his confidence." This was the first lesson he 
 learnt at Edinburgh, and it was as a substitute 
 for such a human being, that he bought a paper- 
 book to keep under lock and key ; a security at 
 least equal, says he, "to the bosom of any 
 friend whatever." Let the man of genius pause 
 over the fragments of this " paper-book ;" it 
 will instruct as much as any open confession of 
 a criminal at the moment he is to suffer. No 
 man was more afflicted with that miserable 
 pride, the infirmity of men of imagination, 
 which exacts from its best friends a perpetual 
 reverence and acknowledgment of its powers. 
 Our Poet, with all his gratitude and veneration 
 for " the noble Glencairn," was " wounded to 
 the soul" because his Lordship showed " so 
 much attention, engrossing attention, to the only 
 blockhead at table ; the whole company con- 
 sisted of his Lordship, Dunderpate, and myself." 
 This Dunderpate, who dined with Lord Glen- 
 cairn, might have been of more importance to 
 the world than even a poet ; one of the best and 
 most useful men in it. Burns was equally of- 
 fended with another of his patrons, and a literary 
 
 
OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 73 
 
 brother, Dr. Blair. At the moment, he too ap- 
 peared to be neglecting the irritable Poet " for 
 the mere carcass of greatness or when his eye 
 measured the difference of their point of eleva- 
 tion ; I say to myself, with scarcely any emotion, 5 ' 
 (he might have added, except a good deal of 
 contempt,) " what do I care for him or his pomp 
 either ?" " Dr. Blair's vanity is proverbially 
 known among his acquaintance," adds Burns, at 
 the moment that the solitary haughtiness of his 
 own genius had entirely escaped his self-observa- 
 tion. Such are the chimeras of passion infesting 
 the distempered imagination of irritable genius ! 
 
 Such therefore are censured for great irritabil- 
 ity of disposition ; and that happy equality of 
 temper so prevalent among mere men of letters,* 
 and which is conveniently acquired by men of 
 the world, has been usually refused to great 
 mental powers, or to vivacious dispositions ; au- 
 thors or artists. The man of wit becomes petu- 
 lant, and the profound thinker, morose. 
 
 * The class of Literary Characters whom I would distin- 
 guish as MEN OF LETTERS, are described under that title in 
 this volume. 
 
74 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 When Rousseau once retired to a village, he 
 had to learn to endure its conversation ; for this 
 purpose he was compelled to invent an expedient 
 to get rid of his uneasy sensations. " Alone," 
 says Rousseau, " I have never known ennui, 
 even when perfectly unoccupied ; my imagina- 
 tion, filling the void, was sufficient to busy me. 
 It is only the inactive chit-chat of the room, 
 when every one is seated face to face, and only 
 moving their tongues, which I never could sup- 
 port. There to be a fixture, nailed with one 
 hand on the other, to settle the state of the 
 weather, or watch the flies about one, or what 
 is worse, to be bandying compliments, this to 
 me is not bearable." He hit on the expedient 
 of making lace-strings, carrying his working 
 cushion in his visits, to keep the peace with the 
 country gossips. 
 
 Is the occupation of making a great name 
 less anxious and precarious than that of making 
 a great fortune ? the progress of a man's capital 
 is unequivocal to him, but that of the fame of 
 an author, or an artist, is for the greater part of 
 their lives of an ambiguous nature. They find 
 it in one place, and they lose it in another. We 
 may often smile at the local gradations of geni- 
 us ; the esteem in which an author is held here, 
 
OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GEiNIUS. 75 
 
 and the contempt he encounters there ; here 
 the learned man is condemned as a heavy drone, 
 and there the man of wit annoys the unwitty list- 
 ener. 
 
 And are not the anxieties, of even the most 
 successful, renewed at every work ? often quitted 
 in despair, often returned to with rapture ; the 
 same agitation of the spirits, the same poignant 
 delight, the same weariness, the same dissatis- 
 faction, the same querulous languishment after 
 excellence. Is the man of genius a discoverer? 
 the discovery is contested, or it is not compre- 
 hended for ten years after, or during his whole 
 life ; even men of science are as children before 
 him. There is a curious letter in Sir Thomas 
 Bodiey's Remains to Lord Bacon, then Sir Fran- 
 cis, where he remonstrates with Bacon on his 
 new mode of philosophising. It seems the fate 
 of all originality of thinking to be immediately 
 opposed; no contemporary seems equal to its 
 comprehension. Bacon was not at all under- 
 stood at home in his own day ; his celebrity was 
 confined to his History of Henry VII. and to 
 his Essays. In some unpublished letters I find 
 Sir Edward Coke writing very miserable, but 
 very bitter verses, oft a copy of the Instauratio 
 presented to him by Bacon, and even James I. 
 
76 OP THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 declaring that, like God's power, " it passeth 
 beyond all understanding." When Kepler pub- 
 lished his work on Comets, the first rational 
 one, it was condemned even by the learned 
 themselves as extravagant. We see the learned 
 Selden signing his recantation ; and long after- 
 wards the propriety of his argument on Tithes 
 fully allowed; the aged Galileo on his knees, 
 with his hand on the Gospels, abjuring, as ab- 
 surdities, errors, and heresies, the philosophical 
 truths, he had ascertained. Harvey, in his eighti- 
 eth year, did not live to witness his great disco- 
 very established. Adam Smith was reproached 
 by the economists for having borrowed his sys- 
 tem from them, as if the mind of genius does 
 not borrow little parts to create its own vast 
 views. The great Sydenham, by the indepen- 
 dence and force of his genius, so highly pro- 
 voked the malignant emulation of his rivals, that 
 they conspired to have him banished out of the 
 College as " guilty of medicinal heresy." Such 
 is the fate of men of genius, who advance a cen- 
 tury beyond their contemporaries ! 
 
 Is our man of genius a learned author ? Erudi- 
 tion is a thirst which its fountains have never 
 satiated. What volumes remain to open ! What 
 manuscript but makes his heart palpitate ! There 
 
OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 77 
 
 is no measure, no term in researches, which every 
 new fact may alter, and a date may dissolve. 
 Truth ! thou fascinating, but severe mistress ! 
 thy adorers are often broken down in thy servi- 
 tude, performing a thousand unregarded task- 
 works ;* or now winding thee through thy laby- 
 
 * Look on a striking picture of these thousand task-works, 
 coloured by his literary pangs, of Le Grand D'Aussy, the lite- 
 rary antiquary, who could never finish his very curious work, 
 on " The History of the private life of the French." 
 
 " Endowed with a courage at all proofs, with health, which 
 till then was unaltered, and which excess of labour has greatly 
 changed, I devoted myself to write the lives of the learned, 
 of the sixteenth century. Renouncing all kinds of pleasure, 
 working ten to twelve hours a day, extracting, ceaselessly 
 copying ; after this sad life, I now r wished to draw breath, 
 turn over what I had amassed, and arrange it. I found myself 
 possessed of many thousands of bulletins, of which the longest 
 did not exceed many lines. At the sight of this frightful 
 chaos, from which I was to form a regular history. I must 
 confess that I shuddered ; I felt myself for some time in a 
 stupor and depression of spirits ; and now actually that I have 
 finished this work, I cannot endure the recollection of that 
 moment of alarm, without a feeling of involuntary terror. 
 What a business is this, good God, of a compiler ! in truth it 
 is too much condemned ; it merits some regard. At length I 
 regained courage, I returned to my researches : I have com- 
 pleted my plan, though every day I was forced to add, to cor- 
 rect, to change my facts as well as my ideas: six times has my 
 hand recopied my work, and however fatiguing this may be, 
 it certainly is not that portion of my task which has cost me 
 most." 
 
 G 2 
 
78 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 rinth, with a single thread often unravelling, 
 and now feeling their way in darkness, doubtful 
 if it be thyself they are touching. The man of 
 erudition, after his elaborate work, is exposed 
 to the fatal omissions of wearied vigilance, or 
 the accidental knowledge of some inferior mind, 
 and always to the taste, whatever it chance to be, 
 of the public. 
 
 The favourite work of Newton was his Chro- 
 nology, which he wrote over fifteen times ; but 
 desisted from its publication during his life-time, 
 from the ill usage he had received, of which he 
 gave several instances to Pearce, the Bishop of 
 Rochester. The same occurred to Sir John 
 Marsham, who found himself accused as not 
 being friendly to revelation. When the learned 
 Pocock published a specimen of his translation 
 of Abulpharagius, an Arabian historian , in 1649, 
 it excited great interest, but when he published 
 his complete version, in 1663, it met with no 
 encouragement ; in the course of those thirteen 
 years, the genius of the times had changed ; 
 oriental studies were no longer in request. 
 Thevenot then could not find a bookseller in 
 London or at Amsterdam to print his Abulfeda, 
 nor another, learned in Arabian lore, his history 
 of Saladine. 
 
OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 79 
 
 The reputation of a writer of taste is subjected 
 to more difficulties than any other. Every day 
 we observe, of a work of genius, that those parts 
 which have all the racineness of the soil, and as 
 such are most liked by its admirers, are the most 
 critised. Modest critics shelter themselves under 
 that general amnesty too freely granted, that 
 tastes are allowed to differ ; but we should ap- 
 proximate much nearer to the truth if we say 
 that but few of mankind are capable of relishing 
 the beautiful, with that enlarged taste, which com- 
 prehends all the forms of feeling which genius 
 may assume ; forms which may even at times be 
 associated with defects. Would our author de- 
 light with the style of taste, of imagination, of 
 passion ? a path opens strewed with roses, but his 
 feet bleed on their invisible thorns. A man of 
 genius composes in a state of intellectual emo- 
 tion, and the magic of his style consists of the 
 movements of the soul, but the art of conduct- 
 ing those movements is separate from the feeling 
 which inspires them. The idea in the mind is 
 not always to be found under the pen. The 
 artist's conception often breathes not in his 
 pencil. He toils, and repeatedly toils, to throw 
 into our minds that sympathy with which we 
 hang over the illusion of his pages, and become 
 himself. A great author is a great artist ; if the 
 
80 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 hand cannot leave the picture, how much beauty 
 will he undo ! yet still he is lingering, still 
 strengthening the weak, still subduing the daring, 
 still searching for that single idea which awakens 
 so many in others, while often, as it once happen- 
 ed, the dash of despair hangs the foam on the 
 horse's nostrils. The art of composition is of 
 such slow attainment, that a man of genius, late 
 in life, may discover how its secret conceals itself 
 in the habit. When Fox meditated on a history 
 which should last with the language, he met his 
 evil genius in this new province : the rapidity and 
 the fire of his elocution were extinguished by a 
 pen unconsecrated by long and previous study ; 
 he saw that he could not class with the great his- 
 torians of every great people; he complained, 
 while he mourned over the fragment of genius, 
 which, after such zealous preparation, he dared 
 not complete. Rousseau has glowingly described 
 the ceaseless inquietude by which he obtained 
 the seductive eloquence of his style, and has said 
 that with whatever talent a man may be born, the 
 art of writing is not easily obtained. His existing 
 manuscripts display more* erasures than Pope's, 
 and show his eagerness to set down his first 
 thoughts, and his art to raise them to the impas- 
 sioned style of his imagination. The memoir of 
 Gibbon was composed seven or nine times, and 
 
OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 81 
 
 after all, was left unfinished. Bum's anxiety in 
 finishing his poems was great ; "all my poetry," 
 says he, " is the effect of easy composition, but of 
 laborious correction." 
 
 Pope, when employed on the Iliad, found it 
 not only occupy his thoughts by day, but haunting 
 his dreams by night, and once wished himself 
 hanged, to get rid of Homer : and that he expe- 
 rienced often such literary agonies, witness his 
 description of the depressions and elevations of 
 geuius, 
 
 " Who pants for glory, finds but short repose, 
 A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows !" 
 
 Thus must the days of a great author be passed 
 in labours as unremitting and exhausting as those 
 of the artizan. The world are not always aware, 
 that to some, meditation, composition, and even 
 conversation, may inflict pains undetected by the 
 eye and the tenderness of friendship. Whenever 
 Rousseau passed a morning in company, he tells 
 us it was observed that in the evening he was dis- 
 satisfied and distressed; and John Hunter, in 
 a mixed company, found conversation fatigued, 
 instead of amusing him. Hawksworth, in the 
 second paper of the Adventurer, has composed, 
 from his own feelings, an eloquent comparative 
 
32 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 estimate of intellectual and corporeal labour ; it 
 may console the humble mechanic. 
 
 The anxious uncertainty of an author for his 
 compositions resembles that of a lover when he 
 has written to a mistress, not yet decided on his 
 claims ; he repents his labour, for he thinks he 
 has written too much, while he is mortified at 
 recollecting that he had omitted some things 
 which he imagines would have secured the object 
 of his wishes. Madame de Stael, who has often 
 entered into feelings familiar to a literary and 
 political family, in a parallel between ambition 
 with genius, has distinguished them in this, that 
 while " ambition perseveres in the desire of ac- 
 quiring power, genius flags of itself. Genius in 
 the midst of society is a pain, an internal fever 
 which would require to be treated as a real 
 disease, if the records of glory did not soften the 
 sufferings it produces." 
 
 These moments of anxiety often darken the 
 brightest hours of genius. Racine had extreme 
 sensibility; the pain inflicted by a severe criti- 
 cism outweighed all the applause he received. 
 He seems to have felt, what he was often re- 
 proached with, that his Greeks, his Jews, and 
 his Turks were all inmates of Versailles. He 
 
OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 33 
 
 had two critics, who, like our Dennis with Pope 
 and Addison, regularly dogged his pieces as 
 they appeared. Corneille's objections he would 
 attribute to jealousy at his burlesqued pieces 
 at the Italian theatre, he would smile outwardly, 
 though sick at heart, but his son informs us, 
 that a stroke of raillery from his witty friend 
 Chapelle, whose pleasantry scarcely concealed 
 its bitterness, sunk more deeply into his heart 
 than the burlesques at the Italian theatre, the 
 protest of Corneille, and tlie iteration of the 
 two Dennises. The life of Tasso abounds with 
 pictures of a complete exhaustion of this kind ; 
 liis contradictory critics had perplexed him with 
 the most intricate literary discussions, and pro- 
 bably occasioned a mental alienation. We find 
 in one of his letters that he repents the compo- 
 sition of his great poem v for although his own 
 taste approved of that marvellous, which still 
 forms the nobler part of its creation, yet he 
 confesses that his critics have decided, that the 
 history of his hero Godfrey required another 
 species of conduct. " Hence," cries the unhap- 
 ^py bard, " doubts vex me ; but for the past and 
 what is done, I know of no remedy ;" and he 
 longs to precipitate the publication that "he 
 may be delivered from misery and agony." He 
 solemnly swears that " did not the circumstances 
 
84 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 of my situation compel me, I would not print 
 it, even perhaps during my life, I so much 
 doubt of its success." Such was that painful 
 state of fear and doubt, experienced by the 
 author of the "Jerusalem Delivered" when he 
 gave it to the world; a state of suspense, among 
 the children of imagination, of which none 
 are more liable to participate in, than the too 
 sensitive artist. At Florence may still be viewed 
 the many works begun and abandoned by the 
 genius of Michael Angelo ; they are preserved 
 inviolate ; " so sacred is the terror of Michael 
 Angelo's genius !" exclaims Forsyth. Yet these 
 works are not always to be considered as failures 
 of the chissel; they appear rather to have been 
 rejected by coming short of the artist's first 
 conceptions. An interesting domestic story has 
 been preserved of Gesner, who so zealously 
 devoted his graver and his pencil to the arts, but 
 his sensibility was ever struggling after that ideal 
 excellence he could not attain; often he sunk 
 into fits of melancholy, and gentle as he was, 
 the tenderness of his wife and friends could not 
 sooth his distempered feelings ; it was necessary 
 to abandon him to his own thoughts, till after a 
 long abstinence from his neglected works, in a 
 lucid moment, some accident occasioned him to 
 return to them. In one of these hypochondria 
 
OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. g 
 
 ef genius, after a long interval of despair, one 
 morning at breakfast with his wife, his eye fixed 
 on one of his pictures ; it was a group of fauns 
 with young shepherds dancing at the entrance 
 of a cavern shaded with vines ; his eye appeared 
 at length to glisten ; and a sudden return to 
 good humour broke out in this lively apostro- 
 phe, " Ah ! see those playful children, they 
 always dance !" This was the moment of gaie- 
 ty and inspiration, and he flew to his forsaken 
 easel. 
 
 La Harpe, an author by profession, observes, 
 that as^ it has been shown, that there are some 
 maladies peculiar to artists, there are also sor- 
 rows which are peculiar to them, and which the 
 world can neither pity nor soften, because they 
 do not enter into their experience. The queru- 
 lous language of so many men of genius has 
 been sometimes attributed to causes very differ- 
 ent from the real ones, the most fortunate 
 live to see their talents contested and their best 
 works decried. An author with certain critics 
 seems much in the situation of Benedict, when 
 he exclaimed " Hang me in a bottle, like a 
 pat, and shoot at me ; and he that hits me, let 
 him be clapped on the shoulder, and called 
 Adam!" Assuredly many an author has sunk 
 H 
 
gg OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 into his grave without the consciousness of 
 having obtained that fame for which he had in 
 vain sacrificed an arduous life. The too feeling 
 Smollet has left this testimony to posterity. 
 " Had some of those, who are pleased to call 
 themselves my friends, been at any pains to 
 deserve the character, and told me ingenuously 
 what I had to expect in the capacity of an au- 
 thor, I should, in all probability, have spared 
 myself the incredible labour and chagrin 1 have 
 since undergone." And Smollet was a popular 
 writer ! Pope's solemn declaration in the pre- 
 face to his collected works comes by no means 
 hort of Smollet's avowal. Hume's philosophi- 
 cal indifference could often suppress that irri- 
 tability which Pope and Smollet fully indulged, 
 But were the feelings of Hume more obtuse, oy 
 did his temper, gentle as it was constitutionally, 
 bear, with a saintly patience, the mortifications 
 his literary life so long endured ? Alter recom- 
 posirig two of his works, which incurred the 
 same neglect in their altered form, he raised the 
 most sanguine hopes of his history, but he 
 telis us, " miserable was my disappointment !" 
 The reasoning Hume once proposed changing 
 his name and his country ! and although he never 
 deigned to reply to his opponents, yet hey haunt- 
 ed him ; and an eye-witness has thus described 
 the irritated author discovering in conversation 
 
OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 87 
 
 his suppressed resentment " His forcible mode 
 of expression, the brilliant quick movements 
 of his eyes, and the gestures of his body," 
 these betrayed the pangs of contempt, or of 
 aversion ! Erasmus once resolved to abandon for 
 ever his favourite literary pursuits ; " if this," 
 he exclaimed, alluding to his adversaries, " if 
 this be the fruits of all my youthful labours ! " 
 
 Parlies confederate against a man of genius, as 
 happened to Corneille, to D'Avenant* and Milton, 
 and a Pradon and a Settle carry away the meed 
 of a Racine and a Dryden. It was to support 
 the drooping spirit of his friend Racine on the 
 opposition raised against Phaedra, that Boileau 
 addressed to him an epistle on the utility to be 
 drawn from the jealousy of the envious. It 
 was more to the world than to his country, that 
 Lord Bacon appealed, by a frank and noble con- 
 ception in his will,: " For my name and memo- 
 ry, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and 
 to foreign nations, and the next age." The 
 calm dignity of the historian De Thou, amidst 
 the passions of his times, confidently expected 
 that justice from posterity which his own age 
 refused to his early and his late labour : that 
 
 * See Quarrels of Authors," vol. ii. on the confederacy 
 of several wits against D'Avenant, a great genius. 
 
88 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 great man was, however, compelled, by his 
 injured feelings, to compose a poem, under the 
 name of another, to serve as his apology against 
 the intolerant Court of Rome, and the factious 
 politicians of France ; it was a noble subterfuge 
 to which a great genius was forced. The ac- 
 quaintances of the poet Collins probably com- 
 plained of his wayward humours and irrita- 
 bility ; but how could they sympathize with the 
 secret mortification of the poet for having 
 failed in his Pastorals, imagining that they 
 were composed on wrong principles ; or with a 
 secret agony of soul, burning with his own hands 
 his unsold, but immortal Odes? Nor must we 
 forget here the dignified complaint of the Ram- 
 bler, with which he awfully closes his work, in ap- 
 pealing to posterity. 
 
 In its solitary occupations, genius contracts 
 its peculiarities, and in that sensibility which ac- 
 companies it, that loftiness of spirit, those quick 
 jealousies, those excessive affections and aver- 
 sions, which view every thing, as it passes in its 
 own ideal world, and rarely as it exists in the me- 
 diocrity of reality. This irritability of genius is 
 a malady which has raged even among philoso- 
 phers : we must not, therefore, be surprised at the 
 poetical temperament. They have abandoned 
 
OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 89 
 
 their country, they have changed their name, 
 they have punished themselves with exile in the 
 rage of their disorder. Descartes sought in vain, 
 even in his secreted life, a refuge for his renius ; 
 he thought himself persecuted in France, he 
 thought himself calumniated among strangers, 
 and he went and died in Sweden ; and little did 
 that man of genius think, that his countrymen 
 would beg to have his ashes restored to them. 
 Hume once proposed to change his name and his 
 country, and I believe did. The great poetical 
 genius of our times has openly alienated him- 
 self from the land of his brothers; he becomes 
 immortal in the language of a people whom he 
 would contemn; he accepts with ingratitude 
 the fame he loves more than life, and he is only 
 truly great on that spot of earth, whose genius, 
 when he is no more, will contemplate on his 
 shade in anger and in sorrow. 
 
 Thus, the state of authorship is not friendly 
 to equality of temper; and in those various 
 humours incidental to it, when authors are often 
 affected deeply, while the cause escapes all per- 
 ception of sympathy, at those moments the light- 
 est injury to the feelings, which at another time 
 would make no impression, may produce even 
 fury in the warm temper, or the corroding 
 H 2 
 
90 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 
 
 chagrin of a self-wounded spirit. These are 
 moments which claim the tenderness of friend- 
 ship, animated by a high esteem for the in- 
 tellectual excellence of this man of genius, 
 not the general intercourse of society, not the 
 insensibility of the dull, nor the levity of the 
 volatile. 
 
 Men of genius are often reverenced only 
 where they are known by their writings; in- 
 tellectual beings in the romance of life, in its 
 history, they are men ! Erasmus compared them 
 to the great figures in tapestry-work, which lose 
 their effect when not seen at a distance. Their 
 foibles and their infirmities are obvious to their 
 associates, often only capable of discerning these 
 qualities. The defects of great men are the 
 consolation of the dunces. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE AND THE 
 SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 
 
 WHEN a general intercourse in society prevails, 
 the age of great genius has passed ; an equality 
 of talents rages among a multitude of authors and 
 artists ; they have extended the superficies of 
 genius, but have lost the intensity ; the contest 
 ' is more furious, but victory is more rare. The 
 founders of National Literature and Art pursued 
 their insulated studies in the full independence 
 of their mind and the development of their in- 
 ventive faculty. The master-spirits who create 
 an epoch, the inventors, lived at periods when 
 they inherited nothing from their predecessors ; 
 in seclusion they stood apart, the solitary lights of 
 their age. 
 
 At length, when a people have emerged to 
 glory, and a silent revolution has obtained, by 
 
92 THE SPIRIT OP LITERATURE 
 
 a more uniform light of knowledge coming from 
 all sides, the genius of society becomes greater 
 than the genius of the individual: hence, the 
 character of genius itself becomes subordi- 
 nate. A conversation age succeeds a studious 
 one, and the family of genius are no longer 
 recluses. 
 
 The man of genius is now trammelled with 
 the artificial and mechanical forms of life ; and 
 in too close an intercourse with society, the lone- 
 liness and raciness of thinking is modified away 
 in its seductive conventions. An excessive 
 indulgence in the pleasures of social life con- 
 stitutes the great interests of a luxurious and 
 opulent age. 
 
 It may be a question, whether the literary 
 man and the artist are not immolating their 
 genius to society, when, with the mockery of 
 Proteus, they lose their own by all orms, in 
 the shadowiness of assumed talent. But a 
 path of roses, where all the senses are flatter- 
 ed, is now opened to win an Epictetus from 
 his hut. The morning lounge, the luxurious 
 dinner, and the evening party are the regu- 
 lated dissipations of hours which true genius 
 knows are always too short for Art, and too 
 
AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 93 
 
 rare for its inspirations ; and hence so many 
 of our contemporaries, whose card-racks are 
 crowded, have produced only flashy fragments, 
 efforts, and not works. It is seduction, and 
 not reward, which mere fashionable society 
 offers the man of true genius, for he must 
 be distinguished from those men of the world, 
 who have assumed the literary character, for 
 purposes very distinct from literary ones. In 
 this society, the man of genius shall cease to 
 interest, whatever be his talent; he will be 
 sought for with euthuoiacm, but he cannot 
 escape from his certain fate, that of becom- 
 ing tiresome to his pretended admirers. The 
 confidential confession of Racine to his son is 
 remarkable. " Do not think that I am sought 
 after by the great for my dramas ; Corneille 
 composes nobler verses than mine, but no one 
 notices him, and he only pleases by the mouth of 
 the actors. I never allude to my works when 
 with men of the world, but I amuse them about 
 matters they like to hear. My talent with them 
 consists not in making them feel that I have 
 any, but in showing them that they have " 
 Racine treated the Great, like the children of 
 society ; Corneille would not compromise for 
 the tribute he exacted \ and consoled himself 
 
94 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 
 
 when, at his entrance into the theatre, the au- 
 dience usually rose to salute him. 
 
 Has not the fate of our reigning literary 
 favourites been uniform ? Their mayoralty 
 hardly exceeds the year. They are pushed 
 aside to put in their place another, who in his 
 turn must descend. Such is the history of the 
 literary character encountering the perpetual 
 difficulty of appearing what he really is not, 
 while he sacrifices to a few, in a certain comer 
 of the metropolis, who have long fantastically 
 called themselves " The World," that more dig- 
 nified celebrity which makes an author's name 
 more familiar than his person. To one who 
 appeared astonished at the extensive celebrity 
 of Buffon, the modern Pliny replied, " I have 
 passed fifty years at my desk." And has not 
 one, the most sublime of the race, sung 
 
 -che seggendo in piuma 
 
 In Fama non si vien. ne sotto coltre ; 
 Sanza la qua! chi sua vita ronsuma 
 Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia 
 Qual fumrao in acre, ed in acqua la schiuma. 
 
 Dante, Inferno, c. xxiv.* 
 
 * " Not by reposing on pillows or under canopies, is Fame 
 acquired, without which he, who consumes his life, leaves 
 such an unregarded vestige on the earth of his being, as the 
 emoke in the air or the foam on the wave." 
 
AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 95 
 
 Another, who had great experience of the 
 world and of literature,* observes, that literary 
 men (and artists) seek an intercourse with the 
 great from a refinement of self-love ; they are 
 perpetually wanting a confirmation of their own 
 talents in the opinions of others, (for their 
 rivals are, at all times, very cruelly and very 
 adroitly diminishing their reputation ;) for this 
 purpose, they require judges sufficiently en- 
 lightened to appreciate their talents, but who do 
 not exercise too penetrating a judgment. Now 
 this is exactly the state of the generality of the 
 great, (or persons of fashion,) who cultivate 
 taste and literature ; these have only time to ac- 
 quire that degree of light which is just sufficient 
 to set at ease the fears of these claimants of 
 genius. Their eager vanity is more voracious 
 than delicate, and is willing to accept an in- 
 cense less durable than ambrosia. 
 
 The habitudes of genius, before it lost its 
 freshness in this society, are the mould in which 
 the character is cast; and these, in spite of all 
 the disguise of the man, hereafter make him a 
 distinct being from the man of society. There 
 
 * D'Ale^bercr la Societe des Gens de Lettres et des Grands. 
 
96 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 
 
 is something solitary in deep feelings ; and the 
 am users who can only dazzle and surprize, will 
 never spread that contagious energy only spring- 
 ing from the fullness of the heart. Let the man 
 of genius then dread to level himself to that 
 mediocrity of feeling and talent required in 
 every-day society, lest he become one of them- 
 selves. Ridicule is the shadowy scourge of 
 society, and the terror of the man of genius ; 
 Ridicule surrounds him with her chimeras, like 
 the shadowy monsters which opposed -32neas, 
 too impalpable to be grasped, while the airy 
 nothings triumph, unwounded by a weapon. 
 .SSneas was told to pass the grinning monsters 
 unnoticed, and they would then be as harmless, 
 as they were unreal. 
 
 Study, Meditation, and Enthusiasm, this is 
 the progress of genius, and these cannot be the 
 habits of him who lingers till he can only live 
 among polished crowds. If he bears about him 
 the consciousness of genius, he will be still act- 
 ing under their influences. And perhaps there 
 never was one of this class of men who had not 
 either first entirely formed himself in solitude, 
 or amidst society is perpetually breaking out 
 to seek for himself. Wilkes, who, when no 
 longer touched by the fervours of literary and 
 
AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETTf. 97 
 
 patriotic glory, grovelled into a domestic volup- 
 tuary, observed with some surprize of the great 
 Earl of Chatham, that he sacrificed every plea- 
 sure of social life, even in youth, to his great 
 pursuit of eloquence ; and the Earl himself ac- 
 knowledged an artifice he practised in nis inter- 
 course with society, for he said, when he was 
 young he always came late into company, and 
 left it early. Vittorio Alfieri, and a brother- 
 spirit in our own noble poet, were rarely seen 
 amidst the brilliant circle in which they were 
 born ; the workings of their imagination were 
 perpetually emancipating them, and one deep 
 loneliness of feeling proudly insulated them 
 among the unimpassioned triflers of their rank. 
 They preserved unbroken the unity of their cha- 
 racter, in constantly escaping from the proces- 
 sional spectacle of society, by frequent intervals 
 of retirement. It is no trivial observation of 
 another noble writer, Lord Shaftesbury, that 
 * J it may happen that a person may be so much 
 the worse author, for being the finer gentleman." 
 
 An extraordinary instance of this disagree- 
 ment between the man of the world and the 
 literary character, we find in a philosopher 
 seated on a throne. The celebrated Julian 
 stained the imperial purple with an author^ 
 
98 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 
 
 ink ; and when that Emperor resided among the 
 Antiochians, his unalterable character shocked 
 that volatile and luxurious race ; he slighted the 
 plaudits of their theatre, he abhorred their 
 dancers and their horse-racers, he was abstinent 
 even at a festival, and perpetually incorrupt, 
 admonished this dissipated people of their im- 
 pious abandonment of the laws of their country. 
 They libelled the Emperor and petulantly lam- 
 pooned his beard, which the philosopher care- 
 lessly wore, neither perfumed nor curled. 
 Julian, scorning to inflict a sharper punishment, 
 pointed at them his satire of " the Misopogon, 
 or the Antiochian ; the Enemy of the Beard," 
 where amidst the irony and invective, the lite- 
 rary monarch bestows on himself many exqui- 
 site and individual touches. All that those 
 persons of fashion alleged against the literary 
 character, Julian unreservedly confesses his^ un- 
 dressed beard and his awkwardnesses, his obsti- 
 nacy, his unsociable habits, his deficient tastes, 
 &c., while he represents his good qualities as so 
 many extravagancies. But, in this pleasantry 
 of self-reprehension, he has not failed to show 
 this light and corrupt people that he could not 
 possibly resemble them. The unhappiness of 
 too strict an education under a family tutor, 
 who never suffered him to swerve from the one 
 
AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 99 
 
 right way, with the unlucky circumstance of 
 his master having inspired Julian with such a 
 reverence for Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and 
 Theophrastus, as to have made they his models; 
 " Whatever manners," says the Emperor, " I 
 may have previously contracted, whether gentle 
 or boorish, it is impossible for me now to alter or 
 unlearn. Habit is said to be a second nature ; 
 to oppose it is irksome, but to counteract the 
 study of more than thirty years is extremely diffi- 
 cult, especially when it has been imbibed with so 
 much attention." 
 
 And what if men of genius, relinquishing their 
 habits, could do this violence to their nature, 
 should we not lose the original for a factitious 
 genius, and spoil one race without improving 
 the other? If nature, and habit, that second 
 nature which prevails even over the first, have 
 created two beings distinctly different, what 
 mode of existence shall ever assimilate them ? 
 Antipathies and sympathies, those still occult 
 causes, however concealed, will break forth at 
 an unguarded moment. The man of genius 
 will be restive even in his trammelled paces. Clip 
 the wings of an eagle and place him to roost 
 among the domestic poultry ; will be peck with 
 them ? will he chuck like them ? At some un- 
 
THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 
 
 foreseen moment his pinions will overshadow and 
 terrify his tiny associates, for "the feathered 
 king" will be still musing on the rock and the 
 cloud. 
 
 Thus is it, as our literary Emperor discovered, 
 that " we cannot counteract the study of more 
 than thirty years, when it has been imbibed with 
 so much attention." Men of genius are usually 
 not practised in the minuter attentions ; in those 
 heartless courtesies, poor substitutes for generous 
 feelings ; they have rarely sacrificed to the un- 
 laughing graces of Lord Chesterfield. Plato in- 
 geniously compares Socrates to the gallipots of 
 the Athenian apothecaries, which were painted 
 on the exterior with the grotesque figures of 
 apes and owls, but contained within a precious 
 balm. The man of genius may exclaim amidst 
 many a circle, as did Thernistocles, whn asked 
 to play on a lute " I cannot fiddle, but I can 
 make a little village a great city;" and with 
 Corneille he may be allowed to smile at his own 
 deficiencies, and even disdain to please in trivials, 
 asserting that, " wanting all these things, he 
 was not the less Corneille." With the great 
 thinkers and students, their character is still more 
 hopeless. Adam Smith could never free him- 
 self from the embarrassed manners of a recluse j 
 
AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. JQ1 
 
 he was often absent ; and his grave and formal 
 conversation made him seem distant and reserv- 
 ed, when, in fact, no man had warmer feelings 
 for his intimates. Buffon's conversation was 
 very indifferent and the most eloquent writer 
 was then coarse and careless ; after each labori- 
 ous day of study, he pleaded that conversation 
 was to him only a relaxation. Rousseau gave no 
 indication of his energetic style in conversation. 
 A. princess, desirous of seeing the great moralist 
 Nicolle, experienced inconceivable disappoint- 
 ment, when the moral instructor, entering with 
 the most perplexing bow imaginable, sank down 
 silently on his chair; the interview promoted 
 no conversation ; and the retired student, whose 
 elevated spirit might have endured martyrdom, 
 sank with timidity in the unaccustomed honour 
 of conversing with a princess, and having nothing 
 to say. A lively Frenchman, in a very inge- 
 nious description of the distinct sorts of conver- 
 sations of his numerous literary friends, among 
 whom was Dr. Franklin, energetically hits off 
 that close observer and thinker, wary even in 
 society ; among these varieties of conversation 
 he has noted down " the silence of the celebrat- 
 ed Franklin." When Lord Oxford desired to 
 be introduced to the studious Thomas Baker, he 
 very unaffectedly declined, in a letter I have 
 i 2 
 
]02 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 
 
 seen, that honour, " as a rash adventure he could 
 not think of engaging in, not having fitted him- 
 self for any conversation, but with the dead." 
 
 But this deficient agrceableness in a man of 
 genius may be often connected with those quali- 
 ties which conduce to the greatness of his public 
 character. A vivid perception of truth on the 
 sudden, bursts with an irruptive heat on the sub- 
 dued tone of conversation ; should he hesitate, 
 that he may correct an equivocal expression, or 
 grasp at a remote idea, he is in danger of sinking 
 into pedantry or rising to genius. Even the te- 
 diousness he bestows on us, may well out from 
 the fulness of knowledge, or be hammered into a 
 hard chain of reasoning ; and how often is the 
 cold tardiness of decision, the strict balancings of 
 scepticism and candour ! even obscurity may 
 arise from the want of previous knowledge in the 
 listener. But above all, what offends is that 
 freedom of opinion, which a man of genius can 
 no more divest himself of than of the features of 
 bis face ; that intractable obstinacy which may 
 be called resistance of character a rock which 
 checks the flowing stream of popular opinions, 
 and divides them by the collision. Poor Burns 
 could never account to himself why, " though 
 when he had a mind he was pretty generally be- 
 
AND THE SPIRIT OP SOCIETY. 1Q3 
 
 loved, he could never get the art of commanding 
 respect." He imagined it was owing to his 
 being deficient in what Sterne calls " that under- 
 strapping virtue of discretion." " I am so apt," 
 he says, " to a lapsus linguce." 
 
 It is remarkable that the conversationists have 
 rarely proved themselves to be the abler writers. 
 He whose fancy is susceptible of excitement, in 
 the presence of his auditors, making the minds of 
 men run with his own, seizing on the first impres- 
 sions, and touching, as if he really felt them, the 
 shadows and outlines of things with a memory 
 where all lies ready at hand, quickened by habit- 
 ual associations, and varying with all those ex- 
 temporary changes and fugitive colours, which 
 melt away in the rainbow of conversation ; that 
 jargon, or vocabulary of fashion, those terms and 
 phrases of the week perpetually to be learnt ; 
 that wit, which is only wit in one place, and for 
 a certain time ; such vivacity of animal spirits, 
 which often exists separately from the more 
 retired intellectual powers ; all these can strike 
 out wit by habit, and pour forth a stream of 
 phrase that has sometimes been imagined to 
 require only to be written down, to be read 
 with the same delight it was heard ; we have 
 not all the while been sensible of the flutter 
 
104 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 
 
 of their ideas, the violence of their transitions, 
 their vague notions, their doubtful assertions, 
 and their meagre knowledge a pen is the ex- 
 tinguisher of these luminaries. A curious con- 
 trast occurred between Buffon and his friend 
 Montbelliard, who was associated in his great 
 work ; the one possessed the reverse qualities 
 of the other. Montbelliard threw every charm 
 of animation over his delightful conversation, 
 but when he came to take his seat at the rival 
 desk of Buffon, an immense interval separated 
 them ; his tongue distilled the music and 
 the honey of the bee, but his pen seemed to be 
 iron, as cold and as hard, while Buffon's was the 
 soft pencil of the philosophical painter of nature. 
 The characters of Cowly and Killegrew are an 
 instance. Cowly was embarrassed in conversa- 
 tion, and had not quickness in argument or re- 
 partee ; pensive elegance and refined combi- 
 nations could not be struck at to catch fire ; 
 while with Killegrew the sparkling bubbles of 
 his fancy rose and dropped ; yet when this 
 delightful conversationist wrote, the deception 
 ceased. Denham, who knew them both, hit 
 off the difference between them ; 
 
 t( Had Cowly ne'er spoke ; Killegrew ne'er writ, 
 Combined in one, they had made a matchless wit." 
 
AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 195 
 
 Thought and expression are only found easily 
 when they lie on the surface; the operations 
 of the intellect with some, are slow and deep. 
 Hence it is that slow-minded men are not, as 
 men of the world imagine, always the dullest. 
 Nicolle said of a scintillant wit, " He conquers 
 me in the drawing-room 3 but he surrenders to me 
 at discretion on the staircase." Many a great 
 wit has thought the wit which he never spoke, 
 and many a great reasoner has perplexed his lis- 
 teners. The conversation-powers of some re- 
 semble the show-glass of the fashionable trader ; 
 all his moderate capital is there spread out in 
 the last novelties ; the magasin within is neither 
 rich nor rare. Chaucer was more facetious in 
 his Tales, than in his conversation, for the Count- 
 ess of Pembroke used to rally him, observing 
 that his silence was more agreeable to her than 
 his conversation. Tasso's conversation, which 
 his friend Manso has attempted to preserve to 
 us, was neither gay nor brilliant ; and Goldoni, 
 in his drama of Torquato Tasso, has thus con- 
 trasted the poet's writings and conversation ; 
 
 Ammiro il suo talento, gradisco i carmi suoi ; 
 Ma piacer non trovo a conversar con lui. 
 
 
106 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 
 
 The sublime Dante was taciturn or satirical ; 
 Butler was sullen or biting; Descartes, whose 
 habits had formed him for solitude and medita- 
 tion, was silent. Addison and Moliere were only 
 observers in society ; and Dryden has very ho- 
 nestly told us, "my conversation is slow and 
 dull ; my humour saturnine and reserved ; in 
 short I am none of those who endeavour to 
 break jests in company, or make repartees." It 
 was ingeniously said of Vaucanson, that he was 
 as much a machine as any he made. Hogarth 
 and Swift, who looked on the circles of society 
 with eyes of inspiration, were absent in compa- 
 ny ; but their grossness and asperity did not pre- 
 vent the one from being the greatest of comic 
 painters, nor the other as much a creator of man- 
 ners in his way. Genius even in society is pur- 
 suing its own operations ; but it would cease to 
 be itself, in becoming another. 
 
 One peculiar trait in the conversations of men 
 of genius, which has often injured them when 
 the listeners were not intimately acquainted with 
 the man, are certain sports of a vacant mind ; 
 a sudden impulse to throw out opinions, and 
 take views of things in some humour of the mo- 
 ment. Extravagant paradoxes and false opi- 
 nions are caught up by the humbler prosers ; and 
 the Philistines are thus enabled to triumph over 
 
AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 1Q7 
 
 the strong and gifted man, because in the hour 
 of confidence and in the abandonment of the 
 mind, he laid his head in their lap and taught 
 them how he might be shorn of his strength. 
 Dr. Johnson appears often to have indulged this 
 amusement in good and in ill humour. Even 
 such a calm philosopher as Adam Smith, as well 
 as such a child of imagination as Burns, were 
 remarked for this ordinary habit of men of ge- 
 nius, which perhaps as often originates in a gen- 
 tle feeling of contempt for their auditors, as from 
 any other cause. 
 
 Not however that a man of genius does not 
 utter many startling things in conversation which 
 have been found admirable, ^when the public 
 perused them. How widely the public often 
 differ from the individual ! a century's opinion 
 may intervene between them. The fate of 
 genius resembles that of the Athenian sculptor, 
 who submitted his colossal Minerva to a pri- 
 vate party ; before the artist they trembled for 
 his daring chissel, and behind him they calum- 
 niated. The man of genius smiled at the one, 
 and forgave the other. The statue once fixed 
 in a public place, and seen by the whole city, 
 was the divinity. There is a certain distance 
 at which opinions, as well as statues, must be 
 viewed. 
 
108 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 
 
 But enough of those defects of men of genius^ 
 which often attend their conversations. Must 
 we then bow to authorial dignity, and kiss hands, 
 because they are inked ; and to the artist, who 
 thinks us as nothing unless we are canvass under 
 his hands? are there not men of genius, the grace 
 of society ? fortunate men ! more blest than their 
 brothers ; but for this, they are not the more men 
 of genius, nor the others less. To how many 
 of the ordinary intimates of a superior genius, 
 who complain of his defects, might one say, 
 u Do his productions not delight and sometimes 
 surprise you ? You are silent I beg your par- 
 don ; the public has informed you of a great 
 name ; you would not otherwise have perceived 
 the precious talent of your neighbour. You 
 know little of your friend but his name" The 
 personal familiarity of ordinary minds with a 
 man of genius has often produced a ludicrous 
 prejudice. A Scotchman, to whom the name of 
 a Dr. Robertson had travelled down, was curious 
 to know who he was ? "Your neighbour!" but 
 he could not persuade himself that the man 
 whom he conversed with was the great histo- 
 rian of his country. Even a good man could 
 not believe in the anneuncement of the Messiah, 
 from the same sort of prejudice, " Can there 
 
AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 
 
 any thing good come out of Nazareth ?" said 
 Nathaniel. 
 
 Suffer a man of genius to be such as nature 
 and habit have formed him, and he will then be 
 the most interesting companion ; then will you 
 see nothing but his mighty mind when it opens 
 itself on you. Barry was the most repulsive of 
 men in his exterior, in the roughness of his lan- 
 guage and the wildness of his looks ; interming- 
 ling vulgar oaths, which, by some unlucky associa- 
 tion of habit, he seemed to use as strong expletives 
 and notes of admiration. His conversation has 
 communicated even a horror to some : on one of 
 these occasions, a pious lady, who had felt such 
 intolerable uneasiness in his presence, did not 
 however leave this man of genius that evening, 
 without an impression that she had never heard 
 so divine a man in her life. The conversation 
 happening to turn on that principle of Benevo-^ 
 lence which pervades Christianity and the meek- "' 
 ness of the Founder, it gave Barry an opportu- - 
 nity of opening on the character of Jesus, with 
 that copiousness of heart and mind, which once 
 heard could never be forgotten. That artist 
 had indeed long in his meditations, an ideal 
 head of Christ, which he was always talking to 
 execute ; " It is here !" he would cry, striking 
 
THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE, fcc. 
 
 his head. What baffled the invention, as we are 
 told, of Leonardo da Vinci, who left his Christ 
 headless, having exhausted his creative faculty 
 among the apostles, Barry was still dreaming on ; 
 hut this mysterious mixture of a human and ce- 
 lestial nature could only be conceived by his 
 mind, and even the catholic enthusiasm of Bar- 
 ry was compelled to refrain from unveiling it 
 to the eye, but this unpainted picture was 
 perpetually exciting this artist's emotions in con- 
 versation. 
 
 Few authors and artists but are eloquently 
 instructive on that sort of knowledge or that 
 department of art which has absorbed all their 
 affections ; their conversations affect the mind to 
 a distant period of life. Who has forgotten what 
 a man of genius has said at such moments ? the 
 man of genius becomes an exquisite instrument, 
 when the hand of the performer knows to call 
 forth the rich confluence of the sounds ; and 
 
 " The flying fingers touch into a voice." 
 
(Ill ) 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 LITERARY SOLITUDE. 
 
 JL HE literary character is reproached with ai* 
 extreme passion for retirement, cultivating those 
 insulating habits which are great interruptions, 
 and even weakeners of domestic happiness, 
 while in public life these often induce to a 
 succession from its cares, thus eluding its active 
 duties. Yet the vacancies of retired men are 
 eagerly filled by so many unemployed men of 
 the world more happily framed for its business. 
 We do not hear these accusations raised against 
 the painter who wears away his days at his 
 easel, and the musician by the side of his .instru- 
 ment ; and much less should we against the legal 
 and the commercial character ; yet all these are 
 as much withdrawn from public and private life 
 as the literary character ; their desk is as insu- 
 lating as the library. Yet is the man who is 
 working for his individual interest more highly 
 estimated than the retired student, whose disin- 
 
LITERARY SOLITUDE. 
 
 terested pursuits are at least more profitable to 
 the world than to himself. La Bruyere discover- 
 ed the world's erroneous estimate of literary 
 labour: "There requires a better name to be 
 bestowed on the leisure (the idleness he calls it) 
 of the literary character, and that to meditate, to 
 compose, to read and to be tranquil, should be 
 called working." But so invisible is the progress 
 of intellectual pursuits, and so rarely are the ob- 
 jects palpable to the observers, that the literary 
 character appears denied for his pursuits, what 
 cannot be refused to every other. That unre- 
 mitting application, that unbroken series of their 
 thoughts, admired in every profession, is only com- 
 plained of in that one whose professors with so 
 much sincerity mourn over the shortness of life, 
 which has often closed on them while sketching 
 their works. 
 
 It is, however, only in solitude that the genius 
 of eminent men has been formed ; there their first 
 thoughts sprang, and there it will become them 
 to find their last : for the solitude of old age 
 and old age must be often in solitude will be 
 found the happiest with the literary character. 
 Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, and enthu- 
 siasm is the true parent of genius ; in all ages it 
 has been called for it has been flown to. No 
 
XITERARY SOLITUDE. 113 
 
 considerable Tvork was ever composed, but its 
 author, like an ancient magician, first retired to 
 the grove, or to the closet, to invocate. When 
 genius languishes in an irksome solitude among 
 crowds, that is the moment to fly into seclusion 
 and meditation. There is a society in the deepest 
 solitude ; in all the men of genius of the past 
 
 " First of your kind; Society divine !" 
 
 Thomson. 
 
 and in themselves ; for there only they can in- 
 d ulge in the romances of their soul, and only in 
 solitude can they occupy themselves in their 
 dreams and their vigils, and, with the morning, 
 fly without interruption to the labour they had 
 reluctantly quitted. This desert of solitude, so 
 vast and so dreary to the man of the world, to the 
 man of genius opens the magical garden of Ar- 
 mida, whose enchantments arose amidst solitude, 
 while solitude was every where among those en- 
 chantments. 
 
 Whenever Michael Angelo was meditating on 
 some great design, he closed himself up from the 
 world. " Why do you lead so solitary a life ?" 
 asked a friend. " Art," replied the sublime ar- 
 
 K 2 
 
U4 LITERARY SOLITUDE. 
 
 list, " Art is a jealous god ; it requires the whole 
 and entire man." 
 
 We observe men of genius, in public situations-, 
 sighing for this solitude ; amidst the impediments 
 of the world, and their situation in it, they are 
 doomed to view their intellectual banquet often 
 rising before them, like some fairy delusion, 
 never to taste it. They feel that finer existence 
 in solitude. Lord Clarendon, whose life so hap- 
 pily combined the contemplative with the active 
 powers of man, dwells on three periods of retire- 
 ment which he enjoyed ; he always took pleasure 
 in relating the great tranquillity of spirit experi- 
 enced during his solitude at Jersey, where for 
 more than two years, employed on his History, 
 he daily wrote " one sheet of large paper with his 
 own hand." At the close of his life, his literary 
 labours in his other retirements are detailed with 
 a proud satisfaction. Each of his solitudes occa- 
 sioned a new acquisition ; this the Spanish, that 
 the French, and a third the Italian literature. 
 The public are not yet acquainted with the ferti- 
 lity of Lord Clarendon's literary labours. It was 
 not vanity that induced Scipio to declare of soli- 
 tude, that it had no loneliness to him, since he 
 voluntarily retired amidst a glorious life to his 
 Linternum. Cicero was uneasy amidst applaud- 
 
LITERARY SOLITUDE. 
 
 ing Rome, and has distinguished his numerous 
 works by the titles of his various villas. Aulus 
 Gellius marked his solitude by his " Attic Nights." 
 The " Golden Grove" of Jeremy Taylor is the 
 produce of his retreat at the Earl of Carber- 
 ry's seat in Wales ; and the " Diversions of Pur- 
 ley" preserved a man of genius for posterity. 
 Voltaire had talents, and perhaps a taste /or socie- 
 ty ; but at one period of his life he passed five 
 years in the most secret seclusion. Montesquieu 
 quitted the brilliant circles of Paris for his books, 
 his meditations, and his immortal work, and was 
 ridiculed by the gay triflers he deserted. Har- 
 rington, to compose his Oceana, severed himself 
 from the society of his friends. Descartes, in- 
 flamed by genius, hires an obscure house in an 
 unfrequented quarter at Paris, and there he passes 
 two years, unknown to his acquaintance. Adam 
 Smith, after the publication of his first work, 
 throws himself into a retirement that lasts ten 
 years : even Hume rallies him for separating him- 
 self from the world ; but by this means the great 
 political inquirer satisfied the world by his great 
 work. And thus it was with men of genius, long 
 ere Petrarch withdrew to his Val chiusa. 
 
 The interruption of visitors by profession has 
 been feelingly lamented by men of letters. 
 
LITERARY SOLITUDE. 
 
 The mind, maturing its speculations, feels the 
 unexpected conversation of cold ceremony, 
 chilling as the blasts of March winds over the 
 blossoms of the Spring. Those unhappy beings 
 who wander from house to house, privileged by 
 the charter of society to obstruct the knowledge 
 they cannot impart, to tire because they are 
 tired, or to seek amusement at the cost of 
 others, belong to that class of society which 
 have affixed no other value to time than that of 
 getting rid of it ; these are judges not the best 
 qualified to comprehend the nature and evil of 
 their depredations in the silent apartment of the 
 studious. " We are afraid," said some of those 
 visitors to Baxter, " that we break in upon your 
 time." To be sure you do," replied the dis- 
 turbed and blunt scholar. Ursinus, to hint as 
 gently as he could to his ~ friends that he was 
 avaricious of time, contrived to place an inscrip- 
 tion over the door of his study, which could not 
 fail to fix their eye, intimating that whoever re- 
 mained there must join in his labours. The 
 amiable Melancthon, incapable of a harsh ex- 
 pression, when he received these idle visits, only 
 noted down the time he had expended, that he 
 might reanimate his industry, and not lose a day. 
 The literary character has been driven to the 
 most inventive shifts to escape the irruption of a 
 
LITERARY SOLITUDE. U7 
 
 formidable party at a single rush, who enter with- 
 out " besieging or beseeching," as Milton has it. 
 The late elegant, poetical Mr. Ellis, on one of 
 these occasions, at his country-house, showed a 
 literary friend, that when driven to the last, he 
 usually made his escape by a leap out of the win- 
 dow. Brand Hollis endeavoured to hold out 
 " the idea of singularity as a shield ;" and the 
 great Robert Boyle was compelled to advertise 
 in a newspaper that he must decline visits on cer- 
 tain days, that he might have leisure to finish some 
 of his works.* 
 
 But this solitude, at first a necessity, and 
 then a pleasure, at length is not borne without 
 repining. To tame the fervid wildness of youth 
 to the strict regularities of study is a sacrifice 
 performed by the votary ; but even Milton ap- 
 pears to have felt this irksome period of life ; 
 for in the preface to Smectymnuus he says, 
 " It is but justice not to defraud of due esteem 
 the wearisome labours and studious watchings 
 wherein I have spent and tired out almost a 
 whole youth." Cowley, that enthusiast for se- 
 clusion, in his retirement calls himself " the mel- 
 
 *This curious advertisement is preserved in Dr. Birch'* 
 Life f Boyle, p. 272. 
 
HQ LITERARY SOLITUDE. 
 
 ancholy Cowley." I have seen an original letter 
 of this poet to Evelyn, where he expresses his 
 eagerness to see Evelyn's Essay on Solitude ; for 
 a copy of which he had sent over the town, with- 
 out obtaining one, being " either all bought up, 
 or burnt in the fire of London." I am the more 
 desirous, he says, because it is a subject in which 
 I am most deeply interested. Thus Cowley was 
 requiring a book to confirm his predilection, and 
 we know he made the experiment, which did not 
 prove a happy one. We find even Gibbon, with 
 all his fame about him, anticipating the dread he 
 entertained of solitude in advanced life. " I feel, 
 and shall continue to feel, that domestic solitude, 
 however it may be alleviated by the world, by 
 study, and even by friendship, is a comfortless 
 state, which will grow more painful as I descend 
 in the vale of years." And again " Your 
 visit has only served to remind me that man, 
 however amused or occupied in his closet, was 
 not made to live alone." 
 
 Had the mistaken notions of Sprat not de- 
 prived us of Cowley's correspondence, we doubt- 
 less had viewed the sorrows of lonely genius 
 touched by a tender pencil. But we have 
 Shenstone, and Gray, and Swift. The heart of 
 Shenstone bleeds in the dead oblivion of solitude. 
 
LITERARY SOLITUDE. U9 
 
 " Now I am come from a visit, every little 
 uneasiness is sufficient to introduce my whole 
 train of melancholy considerations, and to make 
 me utterly dissatisfied with the life I now lead, 
 and the life I foresee I shall lead, I am angry 
 and envious, and dejected, and frantic, and dis- 
 regard all present things, as becomes a madman 
 to do. I am infinitely pleased, though it is a 
 gloomy joy, with the application of Dr. Swift's 
 complaint, that he is forced to die in a rage, 
 like a rat in a poisoned hole." Let the lover of 
 solitude muse on its picture throughout the 
 year, in this stanza by the same amiable, but 
 suffering poet- 
 Tedious again to curse the drizzling day, 
 
 Again to trace the wintry tracks of snow, 
 Or, soothed by vernal airs, again survey 
 
 The self-same hawthorns bud, and cowslips blow. 
 
 Swift's letters paint with terrifying colours a 
 picture of solitude; and at length his despair 
 closed with idiotism. Even the playful muse 
 of Gresset throws a sombre querulousness over 
 the solitude of men of genius 
 
 Je les vois, Victiraes du Genie, 
 
 Au foible prix d'un eclat passager, 
 
 Vivre isoles, sans jouir de la vie ! 
 
 Vingt ans d'Ennuispour quelques jours de Gioire 
 
J20 LITERARY SOLITUDE. 
 
 Such are the necessity, the pleasures, and the 
 inconveniences of solitude ! Were it a question, 
 whether men of genius should blend with the 
 masses of society, one might answer, in a style 
 rather oracular, but intelligible to the initiated 
 Men of genius ! live in solitude, and do not live 
 in solitude ! 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 
 
 A CONTINUITY of attention, a patient quiet- 
 ness of mind, forms one of the characteristic^ of 
 genius. 
 
 A work on the Art of Meditation has not yet 
 been produced ; it might prove of immense ad- 
 vantage to him who never happened to have 
 more than one solitary idea. The pursuit of a 
 single principle has produced a great work, and 
 a loose hint has conducted to a new discovery. 
 But while in every manual art, every great 
 workman improves on his predecessor, of the 
 art of the mind, notwithstanding the facility of 
 practice and our incessant experience, millions 
 are yet ignorant of the first rudiments ; and men 
 of genius themselves are rarely acquainted with 
 the materials they are working on. Johnson 
 has a curious observation on the mind itself, 
 he thinks it obtains a stationary point, from 
 
E MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 
 
 whence it can never advance, occurring before 
 the middle of life. He says, " when the powers 
 of nature have attained their intended energy, 
 they can be no more advanced. The shrub can 
 never become a tree. Nothing then remains but 
 practice and experience ; and perhaps why they do 
 so little, may be worth inquiry."* The result of 
 this inquiry would probably lay a broader founda- 
 tion for this art of the mind than we have hitherto 
 possessed. Ferguson has expressed himself with 
 sublimity " The lustre which man casts around 
 him, like the flame of a meteor, shines only while 
 his motion continues ; the moments of rest and 
 of obscurity are the same." What is this art of 
 meditation, but the power of withdrawing our- 
 selves from the world, to view that world moving 
 within ourselves, while we are in repose ; as the 
 artist by an optical instrument concentrates the 
 boundless landscape around him, and patiently 
 traces all nature in that small space. 
 
 Certain constituent principles of the mind it- 
 self, which the study of metaphysics has curiously 
 discovered, oflfer many important regulations in 
 this desirable art. We may even suspect, since 
 
 * I recommend the reader to turn to the whole passage, in 
 Johnson's Letters to Mrs. Thrale, vol. i.p 296. 
 
THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 123 
 
 men of genius in the present age have confided to 
 us the secrets of their studies, that this art may 
 be carried on by more obvious means, and even 
 by mechanical contrivances, and practical habits- 
 There is a government of our thoughts; and many 
 secrets yet remain to be revealed in the art of the 
 mind ; but as yet they consist of insulated facts, 
 from which, however, may hereafter be formed 
 an experimental history. Many little habits may 
 be contracted by genius, and may be observed in 
 ourselves. A mind well organized may be regu- 
 lated by a single contrivance : it is by a bit of 
 lead that we are enabled to track the flight of 
 time. The mind of genius can be made to take 
 a particular disposition, or train of ideas. It is a 
 remarkable circumstance in the studies of men of 
 genius, that previous to composition they have 
 often awakened their imagination by the imagina- 
 tion of their favourite masters. By touching a 
 magnet they became a magnet. A circumstance 
 has been recorded of Gray, by Mr. Mathias, " as 
 worthy of all acceptation among the higher vota- 
 ries of the divine art, when they are assured that 
 Mr. Gray never sate down to compose any poetry 
 without previously, and for a considerable time, 
 reading the works of Spenser." But the circum- 
 stance was not unusual with Malherbe, Corneille, 
 and Racine ; and the most fervid verses of Homer, 
 
J24 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENWS. 
 
 and the most tender of Euripides, were often re- 
 peated by Milton. Even antiquity exhibits the 
 same exciting intercourse of the mind of genius. 
 Cicero informs us how his eloquence caught 
 inspiration from a constant study of the Latin 
 and Grecian poetry ; and it has been recorded of 
 Pompey, who was great even in his youth, that 
 he never undertook any considerable enterprise, 
 without animating his genius by having read to 
 him the character of Agamemnon in the first 
 Iliad ; although he acknowledged that the enthu- 
 siasm he caught came rather from the poet than 
 the hero. When Bossuet had to compose a 
 funeral oration, he was accustomed to retire 
 for several days to his study, to ruminate over 
 the pages of Homer; and when asked the reason 
 of this habit, he exclaimed, in these lines, 
 
 Magnam mihi mentem, animunque 
 
 Delius inspiret Vales- 
 It is on the same principle of pre-disposing 
 the mind, that many have first generated their 
 feelings in the symphonies of music. Alfieri, 
 often before he wrote, prepared his mind by 
 listening to music a circumstance which has 
 been recorded of others* 
 
THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 
 
 We are scarcely aware how we may govern 
 our thoughts by means of our sensations. De 
 Luc was subject to violent bursts of passion, 
 but he calmed the interior tumult by the artifice 
 of filling his mouth with sweets and comfits. 
 When Goldoni found his sleep disturbed by the 
 obtrusive ideas still floating from the studies of 
 the day, he contrived to lull himself to rest by 
 conning in his mind a vocabulary of the Vene- 
 tian dialect, translating some word into Tuscan 
 and French ; which being a very uninteresting 
 occupation, at the third or fourth version this 
 recipe never failed. This was an art of with- 
 drawing attention from the greater to the less 
 emotion ; where, as the interest weakened, the 
 excitement ceased. Mendelsohn, whose feeble 
 and too sensitive frame was often reduced to the 
 last stage of suffering by intellectual exertion, 
 when engaged in any point of difficulty, would 
 in an instant contrive a perfect cessation from 
 thinking, by mechanically going to the window, 
 and counting the tiles upon the roof of his neigh- 
 bour's house. Facts like these show how much 
 art may be concerned in the management of the 
 mind. 
 
 Some profound thinkers could not pursue the 
 operations of their mind in the distraction of 
 L 2 
 
|28 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 
 
 light and noise. JMallebranche, Hobbes, Tho- 
 mas, and others closed their curtains to concen- 
 trate their thoughts, as Milton says of the mind, 
 "in the spacious circuits of her musing." The 
 study of on author or an artist would be ill 
 placed in the midst of a beautiful landscape ; 
 the Penseroso of Milton, " hid from day's garish 
 eye," is the man of genius. A secluded and 
 naked apartment, with nothing but a desk, a 
 chair, and a single sheet of paper, was for 
 fifty years the study of Buffon ; the single orna- 
 ment was a print of Newton placed before hie 
 eyes nothing broke into the unity of his rev- 
 eries* 
 
 The arts of memory have at all times excited 
 the attention of the studious; they open a 
 world of undivulged mysteries ; every one 
 seems to form some discovery of his own, 
 but which rather excites his astonishment than 
 enlarges his comprehension. When the late 
 William Hutton, a man of an origninal cast of 
 mind, as an experiment in memory, opened a 
 book which he had divided into 365 columns, ac- 
 cording to the days of the year, he resolved to try 
 to recollect an anecdote, as insignificant and re- 
 mote as he was able, rejecting all under ten years 
 
THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS'. J27 
 
 of age ; and to his surprise, he filled those spa- 
 ces for small reminiscencies, within ten columns ; 
 but till this experiment had been made, he never 
 conceived the extent of this faculty. When 
 we reflect, that whatever we know, and what- 
 ever we feel, are the very smallest portions of 
 all the knowledge and all the feelings we have 
 been acquiring through life, how desirable 
 would be that art, which should open again the 
 scenes which have vanished, revive the emotions 
 which other impressions have effaced, and enrich 
 our thoughts, with thoughts not less precious ; 
 the man of genius who shall possess this art, will 
 not satisfy himself with the knowledge of a few 
 mornings and its transient emotions, writing on 
 the moveable sand of present sensations, present 
 feelings, which alter with the first breezes of 
 public opinion. Memory is the foundation of 
 genius ; for this faculty, with men of genius, is 
 associated with imagination and passion, it is a 
 chronology not merely of events, but of emo- 
 tions ; hence they remember nothing that is not 
 interesting to their feelings, while the ordinary 
 mind, accurate on all events alike, is not impas- 
 s ioned on any. The incidents of the novelist, 
 are often founded on the common ones of life; 
 and the personages so admirably alive in his 
 
 \ 
 
THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 
 
 fictions, he only discovered among the crowd. 
 The arts of memory will preserve all we wish ; 
 they form a saving bank of genius, to which it 
 may have recourse, as a wealth which it can 
 accumulate unperceivably amidst the ordinary 
 expenditure. Locke taught us the first rudi- 
 ments of this art, when he showed us how he 
 stored his thoughts and his facts, by an artificial 
 arrangement ; and Addison, before he commen- 
 ced his Spectators, had amassed three folios of 
 materials ; but the higher step will be the vol- 
 ume which shall give an account of a man to 
 himself, where a single observation, a chronicled 
 emotion, a hope or a project, on which the soul 
 may still hang, like a clew of past knowledge 
 in his hand, will restore to him all his lost stu- 
 dies; his evanescent existence again enters into 
 his life, and he will contemplate on himself as 
 an entire man : to preserve the past, is half of 
 immortality. 
 
 The memorials of Gibbon and Priestly pre- 
 sent us with the experience and the habits of 
 the literary Character. " What I have known/ 5 
 says Dr. Priestly, " with respect to myself, 
 has tended much to lessen both my admiration 
 and niy contempt of others. Could we have 
 
THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 129 
 
 entered into the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, and 
 have traced all the steps by which he produced 
 his great works, we might see nothing very 
 extraordinary in the process." Our student, 
 with an ingenuous simplicity, opens to us that 
 u variety of mechanical expedients by which he 
 secured and arranged his thoughts," and that 
 discipline of the mind, by a peculiar arrange- 
 ment of his studies, for the day and for the year, 
 in which he rivalled the calm and unalterable 
 system pursued by Gibbon. Buffon and Voltaire 
 employed the same manoeuvres, and often only 
 combined the knowledge they obtained, by hum- 
 ble methods. They knew what to ask for, and 
 made use of an intelligent secretary ; aware, 
 as Lord Bacon has expressed it, that some Books 
 " may be read by deputy." Buffon laid down 
 an excellent rule to obtain originality, when he 
 advised the writer, first to exhaust his own 
 thoughts before he attempted to consult other 
 writers. The advice of Lord Bacon, that we 
 should pursue our studies, whether the mind is 
 disposed or indisposed, is excellent ; in the one 
 case, we shall gain a great step, and in the other, 
 we " shall work out the knots and stands of the 
 mind, and make the middle times the more plea- 
 sant." John Hunter very happily illustrated the 
 advantages, which every one derives from putting 
 
X 30 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 
 
 his thoughts in writing ; " it resembles," said he 
 " a tradesman taking stock ; without which, he 
 never knows either what he possesses, or in what 
 he is deficient." Industry is the feature by which 
 the ancients so frequently describe an eminent 
 character; such phrases as " incredibili industries; 
 diligentia singulari," are usual. When we reflect 
 on the magnitude of the labours of Cicero, 
 Erasmus, Gesner, Baronius, Lord Bacon, Usher, 
 and Bayle, we seem asleep at the base of these 
 monuments of study, and scarcely awaken to 
 admire. Such "are the laborious instructors of 
 mankind ! 
 
 Nor let those other artists of the mind, who 
 work in the airy looms of fancy and wit, ima- 
 gine that they are weaving their webs, without 
 the direction of a principle, and without a 
 secret habit which they have acquired ; there 
 may be even an art, unperceived by themselves, 
 in opening and pursuing a scene of pure inven- 
 tion, and even in the happiest turns of wit. 
 One who had all the experience of such an artist, 
 has employed the very terms we have used, of 
 " mechanical" and " habitual." " Be assured," 
 says Goldsmith, " that wit is in some measure 
 mechanical ; and that a man long habituated to 
 catch at even its resemblance, will at last be 
 
THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 131 
 
 happy enough to possess the substance. By a 
 long habit of writing, he acquires a justness of 
 thinking, and a mastery of manner, which holiday 
 writers, even with ten times his genius, may vain- 
 ly attempt to equal." Even in the sublime 
 efforts of imagination, this art of meditation may 
 be practised; and Alfieri has shown us, that in 
 those energetic tragic dramas which were often 
 produced in a state of enthusiasm, he pursued 
 a regulated process. " All my .tragedies have 
 been .composed three times," and he describes 
 the three stages of conception, development, 
 and versifying. " After these three operations, 
 I proceed like other authors, to polish, correct 
 or amend," 
 
 <c All is habit in mankind, even virtue itself!" 
 exclaimed Metastasio ; and we may add, even 
 the meditations of genius. Some of its boldest 
 conceptions are indeed fortuitous, starting up 
 and vanishing almost in the perception ; like 
 that giant form, sometimes seen amidst the gla- 
 cieres, opposite the traveller, afar from him 
 moving as he moves, stopping as he stops, yet, 
 in a moment lost, and perhaps never more seen, 
 although but his own reflection ! Often in the 
 still obscurity of the night, the ideas, the studies, 
 th.e whole history of the day is acted over again, 
 
132 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENfrFS. 
 
 and in these vivid reveries, we are converted into 
 spectators. A great poetical contemporary of our 
 country does not think that even his dreams should 
 pass away unnoticed, and keeps, what he calls, a 
 register of nocturnals. The historian De Thou 
 was one of those great literary characters, who, 
 all his life, was preparing to write the history 
 which he wrote ; omitting nothing, in his travels 
 and his embassies, which went to the formation of 
 a great man, De Thou has given a very curious 
 account of his dreams. Such was his passion for 
 study, and his ardent admiration of the great 
 men whom he conversed with, that he often 
 imagined in his sleep, ttyat he was travelling in 
 Italy, in Germany, and in England, where he 
 saw and consulted the learned, and examined 
 their curious libraries ; he had all his life time 
 these literary dreams, but more particularly 
 when in his travels, he thus repeated the images 
 of the day. If memory does not chain down 
 these hurrying, fading children of the imagina- 
 tion, and 
 
 " Snatch the faithless fugitives to light" 
 
 Pleasures of Memory. 
 
 with the beams of the morning, the mind sud- 
 denly finds itself forsaken and solitary. Rous- 
 
THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 
 
 seau has uttered a complaint on this occasion : 
 full of enthusiasm, he devoted to the subject of 
 his thoughts, as was his custom, the long sleep- 
 less intervals of his nights, meditating in bed, 
 with his eyes closed, he turned over his periods, 
 in a tumult of ideas j but when he rose and 
 had dressed, all was vanished, and when he sat 
 down to his papers, he had nothing to write. 
 Thus genius has its vespers, and its vigils, as 
 well as its matins, which we have been so often 
 told are the true hours of its inspiration but 
 every hour may be full of inspiration for him who 
 knows to meditate. No man was more practised 
 in this art of the mind, than Pope, and even the 
 night was not an unregarded portion of his poet- 
 ical existence. 
 
 Few works of magnitude presented themselves 
 at once, in their extent and their associations to 
 their authors ^ the man of genius perceives not 
 more than two or three striking circumstances, 
 unobserved by another ; in revolving the subject, 
 the whole mind is gradually agitated ; it is a 
 summer landscape, at the break of day, Wrapt in 
 mist, where the sun strikes on a single object, 
 till the light and warmth increasing, all starts 
 up in the noon-clay of imagination. How beauti*- 
 fully this state of the mind, in the progress of 
 
 M 
 
134 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS 
 
 composition, is described by Dryden, alluding 
 to bis work, " when it was only a confused mass 
 of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark ; 
 when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving 
 the sleeping images of things, towards the light, 
 there to be distinguished, and then either to be 
 chosen or rejected, by the judgment." At that 
 moment, he adds, u I was in that eagerness of 
 imagination, which, by over-pleasing fanciful men, 
 flatters them into the danger of writing." Gib- 
 bon tells us of his history, " at the onset, all was 
 dark and doubtful ; even the title of the work, 
 the true era of the decline and fall of the em- 
 pire, &c. I was often tempted to cast away the 
 labour of seven years." Winckelman was long 
 lost in composing his "History of Art;" a hun- 
 dred fruitless attempts were made, before he could 
 discover a plan amidst the labyrinth. Slight con- 
 ceptions kindle finished works : a lady asking for 
 a few verses on rural topics, of the Abbe De 
 Lille, his specimens pleased, and sketches heaped 
 on sketches, produced " Les Jardins. In writing 
 the " Pleasures of Memory," the poet at first 
 proposed a simple description in a few nes, till 
 conducted by meditation, the perfect composition 
 of several years closed in that fine poem. And 
 thus it happened with the Rape of the Lock, 
 and many celebrated productions. 
 
MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 135 
 
 Were it possible to collect some thoughts of 
 great thinkers, which were never written, we 
 should discover vivid conceptions, and an origi- 
 nality they never dared to pursue in their works ! 
 Artists have this advantage over authors, that 
 their virgin fancies, their chance felicities, which 
 labour cannot afterwards produce, are constantly 
 perpetuated ; and these " studies" as they are 
 called, are as precious to posterity, as their more 
 complete designs. We possess one remarkable 
 evidence of these fortuitous thoughts of genius 
 Pope and Swift, being in the country together, 
 observed, that if contemplative men were to 
 notice " the thoughts which suddenly present 
 themselves to their minds, when walking in the 
 fields, &c. they might find many as well worth 
 preserving, as some of their more deliberate 
 reflexions." They made a trial, and agreed to 
 write down such involuntary thoughts as occurred 
 during their stay there ; these furnished out the 
 " Thoughts" in Pope's and Swift's miscellanies.* 
 Among Lord Bacon's Remains, we find a paper 
 entitled " sudden thoughts, set down for profit." 
 At all hours, by the side of Voltaire's bed, or on 
 
 * This anecdote is found in Ruff head's life of Pope, evi- 
 dently given by Warburton, as was every thing of personal 
 knowledge in that tasteless volume of a mere lawyer, writing 
 the life of a poet. 
 
136 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 
 
 his table, stood his pen and ink, with slips of 
 paper. The margins of his books were covered 
 with his " sudden thoughts." Cicero, in reading, 
 constantly took notes and made comments ; but 
 we must recollect there is an art of reading, as 
 well as an art of thinking. 
 
 This art of meditation may be exercised at all 
 hours and in all places ; and men of genius in their 
 walks, at table, and amidst assemblies, turning 
 the eye of the mind inwards, can form an arti- 
 ficial solitude ; retired amidst a crowd, and wise 
 amidst distraction and folly. Some of the great 
 actions of men of this habit of mind, were first 
 meditated on, amidst the noise of a convivial 
 party, or the music of a concert. The victory 
 of Waterloo might have been organized in the 
 ball room at Brussels, as Rodney at the table of 
 Lord Sandwich, while the bottle was briskly 
 circulating, was observed arranging bits of cork ; 
 his solitary amusement having excited an in- 
 quiry, he said that he w r as practising a plan how 
 to annihilate an enemy's fleet; this afterwards 
 proved to be that discovery of breaking the line, 
 which the happy audacity of the hero executed, 
 Thus Hogarth, with an eye always awake to 
 the ridiculous, would catch a character on his 
 thumb-nail : Leonardo da Vinci could detect in 
 
THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 137 
 
 the stains of an old weather-beaten wall, the 
 landscapes of nature, and Haydn carefully noted 
 down in a pocket book, the passages and ideas 
 which came to him in his walks, or amidst com- 
 pany. 
 
 To this habit of continuity of attention, tracing 
 the first simple idea through its remoter con- 
 sequences, Galileo and Newton owed many of 
 their discoveries. It was one evening in the 
 cathedral of Pisa, that Galileo observed the vibra- 
 tions of a brass lustre pendent from the vaulted 
 roof, which had been left swinging by one of the 
 vergers ; the habitual meditation of genius com- 
 bined with an ordinary accident a new idea of 
 science, and hence, conceived the invention of 
 measuring time by the medium of a pendulum. 
 Who but a genius of this order, sitting in his 
 orchard, and being struck by the fall of an apple, 
 could have discovered a new quality in matter 
 by the system of gravitation; or have imagined, 
 while viewing boys blowing soap-bladders, the 
 properties of light, and then anatomised a ray! 
 It was the same principle which led Franklin 
 when on board a ship, observing a partial still- 
 ness in the waves, when they threw down water 
 which had been used for culinary purposes, to 
 the discovery of the wonderful property in oil 
 M 2 
 
138 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS 
 
 of calming the agitated ocean, and many a ship 
 has been preserved in tempestuous weather, or 
 a landing facilitated on a dangerous surf, by this 
 simple meditation of genius. 
 
 In the stillness of meditation the mind of 
 genius must be frequently thrown ; it is a kind 
 of darkness which hides from us all surrounding 
 objects, even in the light of day. This is the 
 first state of existence in genius. In Cicero, 
 on Old Age, we find Cato admiring that Caius 
 Sulpitius Gallus, who when he sat down to 
 write in the morning was surprised by the evening, 
 and when he took up his pen in the evening, was 
 surprized by the appearance of the morning. 
 Socrates has remained a whole day in immovea- 
 ble meditation, his eyes and countenance direct- 
 ed to one spot as if in the stillness of death. 
 La Fontaine, when writing his comic tales, has 
 been observed early in the morning and late in 
 the evening, in the same recumbent posture under 
 the same tree. This quiescent state is a sort of 
 enthusiasm, and renders every thing that sur- 
 rounds us a? distant as if an immense interval 
 separated us from the scene. Poggius has told 
 us of Dante, that he indulged his meditations 
 more strongly than any man he knew ; and when 
 once deeply engaged in reading he seemed to live 
 
THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 139 
 
 only in his ideas. The poet went to view a pub- 
 lic procession, and having entered a bookseller's 
 shop, taking up a book he sunk into a reverie ; on 
 his return he declared that he had neither seen 
 nor heard a single occurrence in the public exhi- 
 bition which had passed before him. It has been 
 told of a modern astronomer, that one summer 
 night when he was withdrawing to his chamber, the 
 brightness of the heavens showed a phenomenon. 
 He passed the whole night in observing it ; and 
 when they came to him early in the morning, 
 and found him in the same attitude, he said, like 
 ore who had been recollecting his thoughts for a 
 ft w moments, " It must be thus ; but I'll go to 
 ted before it is late." He had gazed the entire 
 light in meditation, and was not aware of it. 
 
 There is nothing incredible in the stories re- 
 lated of some who have experienced this en- 
 tranced state, in a very extraordinary degree ; 
 that ecstasy in study, where the mind deliciously 
 inebriated with the object it contemplates, feels 
 nothing, from the excess of feeling, as a philo- 
 sopher well describes it : Archimedes, involved 
 in the investigation of mathematical truth, and 
 the painters Protogenes and Parmeggiano, found 
 their senses locked up as it were in meditation, 
 so as to be incapable of withdrawing themselves 
 
140 Tm MEDITATIONS OF GENtUS. 
 
 from their work even in the rnidst of the terrors 
 and storming of the place by the enemy. Mari- 
 no was so absorbed in the composition of his 
 " Adonis," that he suffered his leg to be burnt 
 for some time before the pain grew stronger than 
 the intellectual pleasure of his imagination. 
 Thomas, an intense thinker, would sit for hours 
 against a hedge, composing with a low voice, 
 taking the same pinch of snuff for half an hour 
 together, without being aware that it had long 
 disappeared ; when he quitted his apartment, 
 after prolonging his studies there, a visible alter- 
 ation was observed in his person, and the agi- 
 tation of his recent thoughts was stiil traced in 
 his air and manner. With what eloquent truth 
 has Buffon described those reveries of the stu- 
 dent, which compress his day, and mark the 
 hours by the sensations of minutes. " Inven- 
 tion," he says, " depends on patience ; contem- 
 plate your subject long, it will gradually unfold 
 till a sort of electric spark convulses for a mo- 
 ment the brain, and spreads down to the very 
 heart a glow of irritation. Then come the luxu- 
 ries of genius, the true hours for production and 
 composition; hours so delightful that I have 
 spent twelve or fourteen successively at my 
 writing-desk, and still been in a state of plea- 
 
THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. J4j[ 
 
 This eager delight of pursuing his study, and 
 this impatience of interruption in the pursuit, are 
 finely described by Milton in a letter to his friend 
 Deodati. 
 
 " Such is the character of ray mind, that no 
 delay, none of the ordinary cessations (for rest 
 or otherwise) no, I had nearly said, care or 
 thinking of the very subject, can hold me back 
 from being hurried on to the destined point, and 
 from completing the great circuit, as it were, of 
 the study in which I am engaged."* 
 
 Such is the picture of genius, viewed in the 
 stillness of meditation, but there is yet a more 
 excited state, when, as if consciousness were 
 mixing with its reveries, in the allusion of a 
 scene, a person, a passion, the emotions of the 
 soul aflect even the organs of sense. It is ex- 
 perienced in the moments the man of genius is 
 producing ; these are the hours of inspiration, 
 and this is the gentle enthusiasm of genius ! 
 
 x Meum sic est ingenium, nulla ut mora, rmlla quies, nulla 
 ferine illius rei cura aut cogitatio distineat, quoad pervadara 
 quo feror, et grandem aliquem studiorum meorum quasi 
 periodum conficiara." 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 A STATE of mind occurs in the most active ope- 
 rations of genius, which the term reverie in- 
 adequately indicates ; metaphysical distinctions 
 but ill describe it, and popular language affords 
 no terms for those faculties and feelings which 
 escape the observation of the multitude who are 
 not affected by the phenomenon. 
 
 The illusion of a drama, over persons of great 
 sensibility, where a)l the senses are excited by 
 a mixture of reality with imagination, is expe- 
 rienced by men of genius in their own vivified 
 ideal world ; real emotions are raised by fiction. 
 In a scene, apparently passing in their presence, 
 where the whole train of circumstances succeeds 
 in all the continuity of nature, and a sort of real 
 existences appear to rise up before them, they 
 perceive themselves spectators or actors, feel 
 their sympathies excited, and involuntarily use 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 143 
 
 language and gestures, while the exterior organs 
 of sense are visibly affected ; not that they are 
 spectators and actors, nor that the scene exists. 
 In this equivocal state, the enthusiast of genius 
 produces his master-pieces. This waking dream 
 is distinct from reverie, where our thoughts 
 wandering without connection, the faint impres- 
 sions are so evanescent as to occur without even 
 being recollected. Not so when one closely 
 pursued act of meditation carries the enthusiast 
 of genius beyond the precinct of actual exist- 
 ence, while this act of contemplation makes the 
 thing contemplated. He is now the busy painter 
 of a world which he himself only views ; alone 
 he hears, he sees, he touches, he laughs and 
 weeps ; his brows and lips, and his very limbs 
 move. Poets and even pointers, who as Lord 
 Bacon describes witches, u are imaginative," 
 have often involuntarily betrayed in the act of 
 composition those gestures which accompany 
 this enthusiasm. Quintillian has nobly compared 
 them to the lashings of the lion's tail preparing 
 to combat. Even actors of genius have accus- 
 tomed themselves to walk on the stage for an 
 hour before the curtain was drawn, to fill their 
 minds with all the phantom's of the drama, to 
 personify, to catch the passion, to speak to others. 
 
 
144 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 to do all that a man of genius would have viewed 
 in the subject 
 
 Aware of this peculiar faculty so prevalent in 
 the more vivid exercise of genius, Lord Kaimes 
 seems to have been the first who, in a work on 
 criticism, attempted to name it the ideal pre- 
 sence, to distinguish it from the real presence of 
 things; it has been called the representative 
 faculty, the imaginative state, &c. Call it what 
 we will, no term opens to us the invisible mode 
 of its operations, or expresses its variable nature. 
 Conscious of the existence of such a faculty, 
 our critic perceived that the conception of it is 
 by no means clear when described in words. 
 Has not the difference of any actual thing and 
 its image in a glass perplexed some philosophers? 
 and it is well known how far the ideal philo- 
 sophy has been carried. " All are pictures, 
 alike painted on the retina, or optical senso- 
 rium!" exclaimed the enthusiast Barry, who 
 only saw pictures in nature and nature in pic- 
 tures. 
 
 Cold and barren tempers without imagination, 
 \vhose impressions of objects never rise beyond 
 those of memory and reflection, which know only 
 to compare, and not to excite^ will smile at this 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 145 
 
 equivocal state of the ideal presence ; yet it is 
 a real one to the enthusiast of genius, and it is 
 his happiest and peculiar condition without 
 this power no metaphysical aid, no art to be 
 taught him, no mastery of talent shall avail him ; 
 unblest with it the votary shall find each sacrifice 
 lying cold on the altar, for no accepting flame 
 from heaven shall kindle it. 
 
 - 
 
 This enthusiasm indeed can only be discovered 
 by men of genius themselves, yet when most 
 under its influence, they can least perceive it, as 
 the eye which sees all things cannot view itself; 
 and to trace this invisible operation, this wamth 
 on the nerve, were to search for the principle of 
 life which found would cease to be life. There 
 is however something of reality in this state of 
 the ideal presence ; for the most familiar instan- 
 ces show that the nerves of each external sense 
 are put in motion by the idea of the object, as if 
 the real object had been presented to it ; the dif- 
 ference is only in the degree. Thus the exterior 
 senses are more concerned in the ideal world 
 than at first appears ; we thrill at even the idea 
 of any thing that makes us shudder, and only 
 imagining it often produces a real pain. A curi- 
 ous consequence flows from -.this principle : 
 Milton, lingering amidst the freshness of nature 
 
146 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 in Eden, felt all the delights of those elements 
 with which he was creating; his nerves moved 
 with the images which excited them. The fierce 
 and wild Dante amidst the abysses of his Inferno, 
 must often have been startled by its horrors, and 
 often left his bitter and gloomy spirit in the 
 stings he inflicted on the great criminal. The 
 moving nerves then of the man of genius are 
 a reality; he sees, he hears, he feels by each. 
 How mysterious to us is the operation of this 
 faculty : a Homer and a Richardson,* like Na- 
 ture, open a volume large as life itself embracing 
 a circuit of human existence ! 
 
 Can we doubt of the reality of this faculty, 
 when the visible and outward frame of the man 
 of genius bears witness to its presence ? When 
 Fielding said "I do not doubt but the most 
 pathetic and affecting scenes have been writ 
 with tears," he probably drew that discovery 
 from an inverse feeling to his own. Fielding 
 would have been gratified to have confirmed the 
 
 * Richardson assembles a family about him, writing down 
 what they said, seeing their very manner of saying, living with 
 them as often and as long as he wills with such a personal 
 unity, that an ingenius lawyer once told me that he required 
 no stronger evidence of a fact in any court of law than a cir- 
 cumstantial scene in Richardson. 
 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 147 
 
 observation by facts which never reached him. 
 Metastasio, in writing the ninth scene of the 
 second act of his Olympiad, found himself 
 suddenly moved shedding tears. The ima- 
 gined sorrows inspired real tears ; and they after- 
 wards proved contagious. Had our poet not 
 perpetuated his surprise by an interesting sonnet, 
 the circumstance had passed away with the 
 emotion, as many such have. Aliieri, the most 
 energetic poet of modern times, having com- 
 posed, without a pause, the whole of an act, 
 noted in the margin " Written under a paroxysm 
 of enthusiasm, and while shedding a flood of 
 tears." The impressions which the frame ex- 
 periences in this state, leave deeper traces 
 behind them than those of reverie. The tre- 
 mors of Dryden, after having . written an ode, 
 a circumstance accidentally preserved, were not 
 unusual with him for in the preface to his 
 Tales he tells us, that " in translating Homer 
 he found greater pleasure than in Virgil; but 
 it was not a pleasure without pain ; the con- 
 tinual agitation of the spirits must needs be a 
 weakener to any constitution, especially in age, 
 and many pauses are required for refreshment 
 betwixt the heats." We find Metastasio, like 
 others of the brotherhood, susceptible of this 
 state, complaining of his sufferings during the 
 
 
 
J4S T HE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 poetical asstus. " When I apply with attention, 
 the nerves of my sensorium are put into a vio- 
 lent tumult ; I grow as red as a drunkard, and 
 am obliged to quit my work." When Buffon 
 was absorbed on a subject which presented 
 ^reat objections to his opinions, he felt his head 
 burn, and saw his countenance flushed ; and this 
 was a warning for him to suspend his attention. 
 Gray could never compose voluntarily; his 
 genius resembled the armed apparition in Shake- 
 speare's master tragedy. " He would not be 
 commanded," as we are told by Mr. Mathias. 
 When he wished to compose the Installation 
 Ode, for a considerable time he felt himself 
 without the power to begin it: a friend calling 
 on him, Gray flung open his door hastily, and 
 in a hurried voice and tone exclaiming, in the 
 first verse of that ode, 
 
 (; Hence, avaunt ! 'tis holy ground !" 
 
 his friend started at the disordered appearance 
 of the bard, whose orgasm had disturbed his 
 very air and countenance, till he recovered bim*- 
 self. Listen to one labouring with all the magic 
 of the spell. Madam Roland has thus power- 
 fully described the ideal presence in her first 
 readings -of Telemachus and Tasso: "My 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 149 
 
 respiration rose, I felt a rapid fire colouring my 
 face and my voice changing had betrayed my 
 agitation. I was Eucharis for Telemachus, and 
 Erminia for Tancred. However, during this 
 perfect transformation, I did not yet think that 
 I myself was any thing, for any one : the whole 
 had no connection with myself. I sought for 
 nothing around me; I was them; I saw only 
 the objects which existed for them ; it was a 
 dream, without being awakened." The effect, 
 which the study of Plutarch's illustrious men 
 produced on the mighty mind of Alfieri, during 
 a whole winter, while he lived as it were among 
 the heroes of antiquity, he has himself told. 
 Alfieri wept and raved with grief and indigna- 
 tion that he was born under a government which 
 favoured no Roman heroes nor sages ; as often 
 as he was struck with the great actions of these 
 great men, in his extreme agitation he rose 
 from his seat like one possessed. The feeling 
 of genius in Alfieri was suppressed for more 
 than twenty years, by the discouragement of 
 his uncle ; but as the natural temperament can- 
 not be crushed out of the soul of genius, he 
 was a poet without writing a single verse ; and 
 as a great poet, the ideal presence at times be- 
 came ungovernable and verging to madness. 
 In traversing the wilds of Arragon, his emo- 
 N 2 
 
 
1 J50 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 tions, he says, would certainly have given birth 
 to poetry, could he have expressed himself in 
 verse. It was a complete state of the imagina- 
 tive existence, or this ideal presence ; for he 
 proceeded along the wilds of Arragon in a re- 
 verie, weeping and laughing by turns. He con- 
 sidered this as a folly, because it ended in 
 nothing but in laughter and tears. He was 
 not aware that he was then yielding to a demon- 
 stration, could he have judged of himself, that 
 he possessed those dispositions of mind and 
 energy of passion which form the poetical char- 
 acter. 
 
 Genius creates by a single conception ; the 
 statuary conceives the statue at once, which he 
 afterwards executes by the slow process of art ; 
 and the architect contrives a whole palace in an 
 instant. In a single principle, opening as it were 
 on a sudden to genius, a great and new system of 
 things is discovered. It has happened, some- 
 times, that this single conception, rushing over 
 the whole concentrated soul of genius, has agi- 
 tated the frame convulsively ; it comes like a 
 whispered secret from Nature. When Malle- 
 branche first took up Descartes's treatise on Man, 
 the germ of his own subsequent philosophic sys- 
 tem, such was his intense feeling, that a violent 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 151 
 
 palpitation of the heart, more than once, obliged 
 him to lay down the volume. When the first idea 
 of the Essay on the Arts and Sciences rushed on 
 the mind of Rousseau, a feverish symptom in his 
 nervous system approached to a slight delirium : 
 stopping under an oak, he wrote with a pencil the 
 Prosopopeiae of Fabricius. " I still remember 
 my solitary transport at the discovery of a philo- 
 sophical argument against the* 'doctrine of tran- 
 substantiation," exclaimed Gibbon in his Me- 
 moirs. 
 
 This quick sensibility of genius has suppressed 
 the voices of poets in reciting their most pathetic 
 passages. Thomson was so oppressed by a pas- 
 sage in Virgil or Milton, when he attempted to 
 read, that " his voice sunk in ill-articulated 
 sounds from the bottom of his breast." The 
 tremulous figure of the ancient Sybil appears to 
 have been viewed in that land of the Muses, by 
 the energetic description of Paulus Jovius of the 
 impetus and afflatus of one of the Italian impro- 
 visatorl, some of whom, I have heard from one 
 present at a similar exhibition, have not degener- 
 ated in poetic inspiration, nor in its corporeal ex- 
 citement. " His eyes fixed downwards, kindle, 
 as he gives utterance to his effusions, the moist 
 drops flow down his cheeks, the veins of his fore- 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 head swell, and wonderfully his learned ears, as 
 it were, abstracted and intent, moderate each im- 
 pulse of his flowing numbers."* 
 
 This enthusiasm throws the man of genius into 
 those reveries where, amidst Nature, while others 
 are terrified at destruction, he can only view Na- 
 ture herself. The mind of Pliny, to add one 
 more chapter to his mighty scroll, sought her 
 amidst the volcano in which he perished. Verne t 
 was oft board a ship in the midst of a raging tem- 
 pest, and all hope was given up : the astonished 
 captain beheld the artist of genius, his pencil in 
 his hand, in calm enthusiasm, sketching the ter- 
 rible world of waters studying the wave that was 
 rising to devour him. 
 
 There is a tender enthusiasm in the elevated 
 studies of antiquity, in which the ideal presence 
 or the imaginative existence is seen prevailing 
 over the mind. It is finely said by Livy, that 
 u in contemplating antiquity, the mind itself be- 
 comes antique." Amidst the monuments of great 
 and departed nations, our imagination is touched 
 
 * The passage is curious. " Canenti defixi exardent oculi, 
 sudores manant, frontis venae contumescunt, et quod mirunV 
 est, eruditae aures tanquam alienae et intenta? omnera impetum 
 profluentium numerorum exactissima ratione moderantur." 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIU&. 153 
 
 by the grandeur of local impressions, and the vi- 
 vid associations of the manners, the arts, and the 
 individuals, of a great people. Men of genius 
 have roved amidst the awful ruins till the ideal 
 presence has fondly built up the city anew, and 
 have become Romans in the Rome of two thou- 
 sand years past. Pomponius Laetus, who devoted 
 his life to this study, was constantly seen wander- 
 ing amidst the vestiges of this " throne of the 
 world :" there, in many a reverie, as his eye rest- 
 ed on the mutilated arch and the broken column, 
 lie stopped to muse, and dropt tears in the ideal 
 presence of Rome and of the Romans. Another 
 enthusiast of this class was Bosius, who sought be- 
 neath Rome for another Rome, in those cata- 
 combs built by the early Christians, for their asy- 
 lum and their sepulchres. His work of " Roma 
 Sotteranea" is the production of a subterraneous 
 life, passed in fervent and perilous labours. Tak- 
 ing with him a hermit's meal for the ?week, this 
 new Pliny often descended into the bdwels of the 
 earth, by lamp-light, clearing away the sand and 
 ruins, till some tomb broke forth, or some in- 
 scription became legible : accompanied by some 
 friend whom his enthusiasm had inspired with his 
 own sympathy, here he dictated his notes, tracing 
 .the mouldering sculpture, and catching the fading 
 picture. Thrown back into the primitive ages of 
 
254 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 Christianity, amidst the local impressions, the 
 historian of the Christian catacombs collected the 
 memorials of an age and of a race, which were 
 hidden beneath the earth. 
 
 Werner, the mineralogist, celebrated for his" 
 lectures, by some accounts transmitted by his au- 
 ditors, appears to have exercised this faculty. 
 Werner often said that " he always depended on 
 the muse for inspiration." His unwritten lecture 
 was a reverie till kindling in his progress, blend- 
 ing science and imagination in the grandeur of his 
 conceptions, at times, as if he had gathered about 
 him the very elements of Nature, his spirit seem- 
 ed to be hovering over the waters and the strata. 
 
 It is this enthusiasm which inconceivably 
 fills the mind of genius in all great and solemn 
 operations : it is an agitation in calmness, and is 
 required not only in the fine arts, but wherever 
 a great and continued exertion of the soul must 
 be employed. It was experienced by De Thou, 
 the historian, when after his morning prayers 
 he always added another to implore the Divinity 
 to purify his heart from partiality and hatred, 
 and to open his spirit in developing the truth, 
 amidst the contending factions of his times ; 
 and by Haydn, when employed in his " Crea- 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OE GENIUS. 155 
 
 tion," earnestly addressing the Creator ere he 
 struck his instrument. In moments like these, 
 man becomes a perfect unity one thought and 
 one act, abstracted from all other thoughts and 
 all other acts. It was felt by Gray in his lof- 
 tiest excursions, and is perhaps the same power 
 which impels the villager, when, to overcome 
 his rivals in a contest for leaping, he retires 
 back some steps, collects all exertion into his 
 mind, and clears the eventful bound. One of 
 our Admirals in the reign of Elizabeth, held as 
 a maxim, that a height of passion, amounting 
 to phrenzy, was necessary to qualify a man for 
 that place ; and Nelson, decorated by all his 
 honours about him, on the day of battle, at the 
 sight of those emblems of glory emulated him- 
 self. This enthusiasm was necessary and effec- 
 tive for his genius. 
 
 This enthusiasm, prolonged as it often has 
 been by the operation of the imaginative exis- 
 tence becomes a state of perturbed feeling, 
 "and can only be distinguished from a disordered 
 intellect by the power of volition, in a sound 
 mind, of withdrawing from the ideal world into 
 the world of sense. It is but a step which car- 
 ries us from the wanderings of fancy into the 
 aberrations of delirium. 
 
156 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 " With curious art the brain too finely wrought 
 Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought ; 
 Constant attention wears the active mind, 
 Blots out her powers, and leaves a blank behind 
 The greatest genius to this fate may bow." 
 
 Churchill 
 
 There may be an agony in thought which only 
 deep thinkers experience. The terrible effects 
 of metaphysical studies on Beattie, has been told 
 by himself. " Since the Essay on Truth was 
 printed in quarto, I have never dared to read it 
 over. I durst not even read the sheets to see 
 whether there were any errors in the print, and 
 was obliged to get a friend to do that office for 
 me. These studies came in time to have dread- 
 ful effects upon my nervous system ; and I cannot 
 read what I then wrote without some degree of 
 horror, because it recalls to my mind the horrors 
 that I have sometimes felt after passing a long 
 evening in those severe studies." Goldoni, after 
 a rash exertion of writing sixteen plays in a year, 
 confesses he paid the penalty of the folly ; he 
 flew to Genoa, leading a life of delicious vacuity ; 
 to pass the day without doing any thing, was all 
 the enjoyment he was now capable of feeling. 
 But long after he said, " I felt at that time, and 
 have ever since continued to feel, the consequence 
 of that exhaustion of spirits I sustained in com- 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OP GENIUS. . 151 
 
 posing my sixteen comedies." Boerhaave has re- 
 lated of himself, that having imprudently indulged 
 in intense thought on a particular subject, he did 
 not close his eyes for six weeks after : and Tissot, 
 in his work on the health of men of letters, 
 abounds in similar cases, where a complete stupor 
 has affected the unhappy student for a period of 
 six months. 
 
 Assuredly the finest geniuses could not always 
 withdraw themselves from that intensely interest- 
 ing train of ideas, which we have shown has not 
 been removed from about them by even the vio- 
 lent stimuli of exterior objects ; the scenical illu- 
 sion, the being of their passion, the invisible 
 existences repeatedly endowed by them with a 
 vital force, have still hung before their eyes. It 
 was in this state that Petrarch found himself in 
 that minute narrative of a vision in which Laura 
 appeared to him ; and Tasso in the lofty conver- 
 sations he held with a spirit that glided towards 
 him on the beams of the sun : and thus, Malle- 
 branche listening to the voice of God within him ; 
 or Lord Herbert on his knees, in the stillness of 
 the sky ; or Paschal starting at times at an abyss 
 opening by his side. Descartes, when young, 
 and in a country seclusion, his brain exhauste 
 with meditation, and his imagination heated to 
 o 
 
IHE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 excess, beard a voice in the air which called him 
 to pursue the search of truth ; he never doubted 
 the vision, and this dream in the delirium of 
 genius charmed him even in his after-studies. 
 Our Collins and Cowper were often thrown into 
 that extraordinary state of mind, when the ideal 
 presence converted them into visionaries ; and 
 their illusions were as strong as Swedenburgh's, 
 who saw heaven on earth in the glittering streets 
 of his New Jerusalem, and Cardan's, when he so 
 carefully observed a number of little armed men 
 at his feet; and Benvenuto Cellini, whose vivid 
 imagination and glorious egotism so frequently 
 contemplated " a resplendent light hovering over 
 his shadow," 
 
 Yet what less than enthusiasm is the purchase- 
 price of high passion and invention ? Perhaps 
 never has there been a man of genius of this rare 
 cast, who has not betrayed early in youth the 
 ebullitions of the imagination in some outward 
 action at that period, when the illusions of life are 
 more real to them than its realities. A slight de- 
 rangement of our accustomed habits, a little per- 
 turbation of the faculties, and a romantic tinge on 
 the feelings, give no indifferent promise of genius ; 
 of that generous temper which knows nothing of 
 the baseness of mankind, unsatisfied, and raging 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 with a devouring eagerness for the aliment it has 
 not yet found ; to perfect some glorious design, 
 to charm the world, or make it happier. Often 
 ive hear from the confessions of men of genius, of 
 their having indulged in the puerile state the most 
 noble, the most delightful, the most impossible 
 projects; and if age ridicules the imaginative ex- 
 istence of its youth, be assured that it is the de- 
 cline of its genius. That virtuous and tender 
 enthusiast, Fenelon, in his early youth, troubled 
 his friends with a classical and religious reverie. 
 He was on the point of quitting them to restore 
 the independence of Greece, in the character of a 
 missionary, and to collect the relics of antiquity 
 with the taste of a classical antiquary. The Pe- 
 loponnesus opened to him the Church of Corinth, 
 where St. Paul preached, the Piraeus where So- 
 crates conversed ; while the latent poet was to 
 pluck laurels from Delphos, and rove amidst the 
 amenites of Tempe. Such was the influence of 
 the ideal presence J and barren will be his imagin- 
 ation, and luckless his fortune, who, claiming 
 the honours of genius, has never been touched by 
 such a temporary delirium. 
 
 To this enthusiasm, and to this alone, can we 
 attribute the self-immolation of men of genius. 
 Mighty and laborious works have been pursued, 
 
|60 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 as a forlorn hope, at the certain destruction of 
 the fortune of the individual. The fate of Cas- 
 tell's Lexicon,* of Bioch's magnificent work on 
 Fishes, and other great and similar labours, attest 
 the enthusiasm which accompanied their pro- 
 gress. They have sealed their works with their 
 blood : they have silently borne the pangs of dis- 
 ease ; they have barred themselves from the pur- 
 suits of fortune ; they have torn themselves away 
 from all they loved in life, patiently suffering 
 these self-denials, to escape from those interrup- 
 tions and impediments to their studies. Martyrs 
 of literature and art, they behold in their solitude 
 that halo of immortality over their studious heads, 
 \vhich is a reality to the visionary of glory. Mil- 
 ton would not desist from proceeding with one of 
 his works, although warned by the physician of 
 the certain loss of his sight ; he declared he pre- 
 ferred his duty to his eyes, and doubtless his fame 
 to his comfort. Anthony Wood, to preserve the 
 
 * Castell tost 12000/. by this great work ; and gave away 
 copies, while the rest rotted at home. He exhibits a curious 
 picture of literary labour in his preface " As for myself, I 
 have been unceasingly occupied for such a number of years 
 in this mass Molendino he calls them that day seemed as 
 it were a holiday in which I have not laboured so much as six- 
 teen or eighteen hours in these enlarging Lexicons and Poly- 
 glot Bibles." Bloch expended all his fortune in his splendid 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 161 
 
 lives of others, voluntarily resigned his own to 
 cloistered studies ; nor did the literary passion de- 
 sert him in his last moments, when with his dying 
 hands he still grasped his beloved papers, and his 
 last mortal thoughts dwelt on his Athence Oxoni- 
 enses.* Moreri, the founder of our great biogra- 
 phical collections, conceived the design with such 
 enthusiasm, and found such voluptuousness in the 
 labour, that he willingly withdrew from the popu- 
 lar celebrity he had acquired as a preacher, and 
 the preferment which a minister of state, in whose 
 house he resided, would have opened to his views. 
 After the first edition of his Historical Dictionary, 
 he had nothing so much at heart as its improve- 
 ment. His unyielding application was converting 
 labour into death ; but collecting his last renovat- 
 ed vigour, with his dying hands he gave the vo- 
 lume to the world, though he did not live to wit- 
 ness even its publication. All objects in life 
 appeared mean to him compared with that ex- 
 alted delight of addressing to the literary men of 
 his age, the history of their brothers. The same 
 enthusiasm consumes the pupils of art devoured 
 by their own ardour. The young and classical 
 sculptor, who raised the statue of Charles II. 
 placed in the centre of the Royal Exchange^ 
 
 * See Calamities of Authors, vol. i. p. 243. 
 o2 
 
162 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 was, in the midst of his work, advised by his 
 medical friends to desist from marble ; for the 
 energy of his labour, with the strong excitement 
 of his feelings, already had made fatal inroads in 
 his constitution. But he was willing, he said, to 
 die at the foot of his statue. The statue was rais- 
 ed, and the young sculptor, with the shining eyes 
 and hectic blush of consumption, beheld it there 
 returned home and shortly was no more. 
 Drouais, a pupil of David, the French painter, 
 was a youth of fortune, but the solitary pleasure 
 of his youth was his devotion to Raphael ; he 
 was at his studies at four in the morning till 
 night ; " Painting, or Nothing !" was the cry of 
 this enthusiast of elegance 5 " First fame, then 
 amusement," was another. His sensibility was 
 great as his enthusiasm ; and he cut in pieces 
 the picture for which David declared he would 
 inevitably obtain the prize. <c I have had my 
 reward in your approbation; but next year I 
 shall feel more certain of deserving it," was the 
 reply of this young enthusiast. Afterwards he 
 astonished Paris with his Marius but while en- 
 gaged on a subject which he could never quit, 
 the principle of life itself was drying up in 
 his veins Henry Headly i.nd Kirke White were 
 the early victims of the enthusiasm of study j 
 
THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 
 
 and are mourned fur ever by the few who are 
 organised like themselves. 
 
 " 'Twas thine own genius gave the fatal blow, 
 And helped to plant the wound that laid thee low ; 
 So the struck eagle, stretched upon the plain 
 No more through rolling clouds to soar again, 
 Viewed his own feather on the fatal dart, 
 And winged the shaft that quivered in his heart ; 
 Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel 
 He nursed the pinion which impelled the steel, 
 While the same plumage that had warmed his nest, 
 Drank the last life-drop of his bleeding breast." 
 
 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 
 
 Thus comes the shadow of death among those 
 who are existing with more than life about them. 
 Yet " there is no celebrity for the artist," said 
 Gesner, " if the love of his own heart does not 
 become a vehement passion ; if the hours he 
 employs to cultivate it are not for him the most 
 delicious ones of his life ; if study becomes not 
 his true existence and his first happiness ; if the 
 society of his brothers in art is not that which 
 most pleases him ; if even in the night-time the 
 ideas of his art do not occupy his vigils or his 
 dreams ; if in the morning he flies not to his 
 work with a new rapture. These are the marks 
 of him who labours for true glory and posterity ; 
 but if he seek only to please the taste of his age 3 
 
THE EiNTHUSIASM OF GENIUS, 
 
 his works will not kindle the desires nor touch 
 the hearts of those who love the arts and the 
 artists." 
 
 Unaccompanied by enthusiasm, genius will 
 produce nothing but uninteresting works of art; 
 not a work of art, resembling the dove of Arcbi- 
 das, which other artists beheld flying, but could 
 not make another dove to meet it in the air. 
 Enthusiasm is the secret spirit which hovers 
 over the production of genius, throwing the rea- 
 der of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into 
 the very ideal presence whence these works have 
 really originated. A great work always leaves us 
 in a state of musing. 
 
( 165) 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 LITERARY JEALOUSY. 
 
 JEALOUSY, long declared to be the offspring of 
 little minds, is not, however, restricted to them ; 
 it fiercely rages in the literary republic, among 
 the Senate and the Order of Knights, as well as 
 the people. In that curious self-description 
 which Linnaeus comprised in a single page, writ- 
 ten with the precision of a naturalist, that great 
 man discovered that his constitution was liable 
 to be afflicted with jealousy. Literary jealousy 
 seems often proportioned to the degree of 
 genius; the shadowy and equivocal claims of 
 literary honour is the real cause of this terrible 
 fear ; in eases where the object is more palpable 
 and definite, and the pre-eminence is more uni- 
 versal, than intellectual excellence can be, jeal- 
 ousy will not so strongly affect the claimant for 
 our admiration. The most beautiful woman, in 
 the age of beauty 3 will be rarely jealous : seldom 
 
166 LITERARY JEALOUSY. 
 
 she encounters a rival ; and while her claims exist, 
 who can contend with a fine feature or a dissolv- 
 ing glance ? But a man of genius has no other 
 existence than in the opinion of the world; a 
 divided empire would obscure him, a contested 
 one might annihilate him. 
 
 The lives of authors and artists exhibit a most 
 painful disease in that jealousy which is the per- 
 petual fever of their existence. Why does Plato 
 never mention Zenophon, and why doesZenophon 
 inveigh against Plato, studiously collecting every 
 little report which may detract from his fame ? 
 They wrote on the same subject ! Why did Cor- 
 neille, tottering on the grave, when Racine con- 
 sulted him on his first tragedy, advise the author 
 never to write another? Why does Voltaire 
 continually detract from the sublimity of Corneille, 
 the sweetness of Racine, and the fire of Crebil- 
 lon ? Why, when Boccaccio sent to Petrarch a 
 copy of Dante, declaring that the work was like 
 a first light which had illuminated his mind, did 
 Petrarch coldly observe that he had not been 
 anxious to inquire after it, having intended to com' 
 pose in the vernacular idiom and not wishing to be 
 considered as a plagiary ; while he only allows Dan- 
 te's superiority from having written in the vulgar 
 idiom, which he djd not think was an enviable, 
 
LITERARY JEALOUSY, 167 
 
 but an inferior merit. Thus frigidly Petrarch 
 took the altitude of the solitary JEtna before him, 
 in the " Inferno," while he shrunk into himself 
 with the painful consciousness of the existence of 
 another poet, who obscured his own solitary ma- 
 jesty. Why is Waller silent on the merits of 
 Cowley, and why does he not give one verse to 
 return the praise with which Dryden honoured 
 him, while he is warm in panegyric on Beaumont 
 and Fletcher, on Sandys, Ware, and D'Avenant ? 
 Because of some of these their species of com- 
 position was different from his own, and the rest 
 he could not fear. 
 
 The moral feeling has often been found too 
 weak to temper the malignancy of literary jeal- 
 ousy, and has led some men of genius to an in- 
 credible excess. A memorable and recent ex- 
 ample offers in the history of the two brothers, 
 Dr. William, and John Hunter, both great cha- 
 racters, fitted to be rivals, but Nature, it was 
 imagined, in the tenderness of blood had placed 
 a bar to rivalry. John, without any determined 
 pursuit in his youth, was received by his brother 
 at the height of his celebrity ; the Doctor initi- 
 ated him into his school ; they performed their 
 experiments together ; and William Hunter was 
 the first to announce to the world the great 
 
1(38 LITERARY JEALOUSY. 
 
 genius of his brother. After this close connec- 
 tion in all their studies and discoveries. Dr. Wil- 
 liam Hunter published his magnificent work- 
 the proud favourite of his heart, the assertor of 
 his fame. Was it credible that the genius of the 
 celebrated anatomist, which had been nursed 
 under the wing of his brother, should turn on 
 that wing to clip it? John Hunter put in his 
 claim to the chief discovery; it was answered 
 by his brother. The Royal Society, to whom 
 they appealed, concealed the documents of this 
 unnatural feud. The blow was felt, and the jeal- 
 ousy of literary honour for ever separated the 
 brothers, and the brothers of genius.* 
 
 In the jealousy of genius, however, there is a 
 peculiar case, where the fever rages not in its 
 malignancy, yet silently consumes. Even the 
 man of genius of the gentlest temper dies under 
 its slow wastings ; and this infection may happen 
 among dear friends, when a man of genius loses 
 that sell-opinion which animated his solitary 
 labours and constituted his happiness when he 
 viesvs himself at the height of his class, suddenly 
 eclipsed by another great genius. It is then the 
 morbid sensibility, acting on so delicate a frame, 
 
 * See Dr. Adams's interesting life of Mr. John Hunter, 
 
LITERARY JEALOUS?. 
 
 feels as if under the old witchcraft of tying the 
 knot on the nuptial day, the faculties are sud- 
 denly extinct by the very imagination. This 
 is the jealousy not of hatred, but of despair. A 
 curious case of this kind appears in the anecdote 
 of the Spanish artist Castillo, a man distinguished 
 by every amiable disposition ; he was the great 
 painter of Seville. When some of Morillo's 
 paintings were shown to him, who seems to have 
 been his nephew, he stood in meek astonishment 
 before them, and when he recovered his voice, 
 turning away, he exclaimed with a sigh, Yd murio 
 Castillo! C^tillo is no more ! Returning home 
 the stricken genius relinquished his pencil, and 
 pined away in hopelessness. 
 
 
 
( 170 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 
 
 WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 
 
 AMONG men of genius that want of mutual es- 
 teem, usually attributed to envy or jealousy, often 
 originates in a deficiency of analogous ideas, or 
 sympathy, in the parties. On this principle seve- 
 ral curious phenomena in the history of genius 
 may be explained. 
 
 Every man of genius has a manner of his own ; 
 a mode of thinking and a habit of style ; and usu- 
 ally decides on a work as it approximates or 
 varies from his own. When one great author 
 depreciates another it has often no worse source 
 than his own taste. The witty Cowly despised 
 the natural Chaucer ; the cold classical Boileau 
 the rough sublimity of Crebillon ; the refining 
 Marivaux the familiar Moliere Fielding ridiculed 
 Richardson, whose manner so strongly contrasted 
 with his own ; and Richardson contemned Field- 
 ing and declared he would not last, Cumberland 
 
WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 171 
 
 escaped a fit of unforgiveness, not living to read 
 liis own character by Bishop Watson, whose logi- 
 cal head tried the lighter elegancies of that po- 
 lished man by his own nervous genius, destitute 
 of whatever was beautiful in taste. There was 
 no envy in the breast of Johnson when he advis- 
 ed Mrs. Thrale not to purchase Gray's Letters as 
 trifling and dull, no more than in Gray himself 
 when he sunk the poetical character of Shenstone, 
 his simplicity and purity of feeling, by an image 
 of ludicrous contempt. The deficient sympathy 
 in these men of genius, for modes of feeling op- 
 posite to their own, was the real cause of their 
 opinions ; and thus it happens that even superior 
 genius is so often liable to be unjust and false in 
 its decisions. 
 
 The same principle operates still more strik- 
 ingly in the remarkable contempt of men of geni- 
 us for those pursuits and the pursuers, which 
 require talents quite distinct from their own, with 
 a cast of mind thrown by nature into another 
 mould. Hence we must not be surprised at the 
 antipathies of Selden and Locke, of Longerue and 
 Buffon, and this class of genius, against poetry 
 au J poets ; while on the other side, these under- 
 value the pursuits of the antiquary, the naturalist, 
 and the metaphysician, by their own favourite 
 
WAN* OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 
 
 course of imagination. We can only understand 
 in the degree we comprehend ; and in both these 
 cases the parties will be found quite deficient in 
 those qualities of genius which constitute the ex- 
 cellence of the other. A professor of polite 
 literature condemned the study of botany, as 
 adapted to mediocrity of talent and only de- 
 manding patience ; but Linnaeus showed how a 
 man of genius becomes a creator even in a sci- 
 ence which seems to depend only on order and 
 method. It will not be a question with some 
 whether a man must be endowed with the ener- 
 gy and aptitude of genius, to excel in antiquari- 
 anism, in natural history, Sec. ; and that the preju- 
 dices raised against the claims of such to the 
 honours of genius have probably arisen from the 
 secluded nature of their pursuits, and the little 
 knowledge the men of wit and imagination have 
 of these persons, who live in a society of their 
 own. On this subject a very curious circumstance 
 lias been revealed of Peiresc, whose enthusiasm 
 for science was long felt throughout Europe ; his 
 name was known in every country, and his death 
 was lamented in forty languages ; yet was this great 
 man unknown to several men of genius in his OWQ 
 country ; Rochefoucauld declared he had never 
 heard of his name, and Malherbe wondered why 
 liis death created so universal a sensation. Thus 
 
WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 173 
 
 we see the classes of literature, like, the planets 
 of Heaven, revolving like distinct worlds ; and it 
 would not be less absurd for the inhabitants of 
 Venus to treat with contempt the powers and 
 faculties of those of Jupiter, than it is for the 
 men of wit and imagination, those of the men 
 of knowledge and curiosity. They are incapa- 
 ble of exerting the peculiar qualities which give 
 a real value to these pursuits, and therefore they 
 must remain ignorant of their nature and their 
 result. 
 
 It is not then always envy or jealousy which 
 induce men of genius to undervalue each other; 
 the want of sympathy will sufficiently account 
 for their false judgments. Suppose Newton, 
 Quinault, and Machiavel, accidentally meeting 
 together, unknown to each other, would they 
 not soon have desisted from the vain attempt of 
 communicating their ideas ? The philosopher 
 had condemned the poet of the Graces as an in- 
 tolerable trifler, and the author of the " The 
 Prince" as a dark political spy. Machiavel had 
 conceived Newton to be a dreamer among the 
 stars, and a mere almanack-maker among men ; 
 and the other a rhimer, nauseously doucereux. 
 Quinault might have imagined he was seated 
 between two madmen. Having annoyed each 
 
174 WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 
 
 other for some time, they would have relieved 
 their ennui by reciprocal contempt, and each 
 have parted with a determination to avoid here- 
 after two disagreeable companions.* 
 
 * See Hclvetius, De FEsprit. 
 
( 175 ) 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 SELF-PRAISE. 
 
 VANITY, egotism, a strong sense of their owe 
 sufficiency, form another accusation against men 
 of genius ; but the complexion of self-praise 
 must alter with the occasion ; for the simplicity 
 of truth may appear vanity, and the conscious- 
 ness of superiority seem envy to Mediocrity. 
 It is we who do nothing, who cannot even 
 imagine any thing to be done, who are so much 
 displeased with self-lauding, self-love, self-inde- 
 pendence, self-admiration, which with the man 
 of genius are nothing but a modification of the 
 passion of glory. 
 
 He who exults in himself is at least in earnest ; 
 but he who refuses to receive that praise in 
 public for which he has devoted so much labour 
 in his privacy, is not : he is compelled to sup- 
 press the very instinct of his nature ; for while 
 we censure no man for loving fame, but only 
 
176 SELF-PRAISE. 
 
 for showing us how much he is possessed by the 
 passion, we allow him to create the appetite, 
 but we deny him the aliment. Our effeminate 
 minds are the willing dupes of what is called the 
 modesty of genius, or, as it has been termed, 
 " the polished reserve of modern times ;" and this 
 from the selfish principle that it serves at least 
 to keep out of the company its painful pre-emi- 
 nence. But this " polished reserve," like some- 
 thing as fashionable, the ladies' rouge, at first 
 appearing with rather too much colour, will 
 in the heat of an evening, be dying away, till 
 the true complexion comes out We know well 
 the numerous subterfuges, of these modest men 
 of genius, to extort that praise from their pri- 
 vate circle which is thus openly denied them. 
 Have they not been taken by surprise, en- 
 larging their own panegyric, which might rival 
 Pliny's on Trajan, for care and copiousness? 
 or impudently veiling their naked beauty with 
 the transparency of a third person ? or never 
 prefixing their name to the volume, which 
 they would not easily forgive a friend to pass 
 unnoticed. 
 
 The love of praise is instinctive in the nature 
 gf men of genius. Their praise is the foot on 
 which the past rests, and the wheel on which the 
 
SfcLF-PRAISE. 177 
 
 future rolls. The generous qualities and the 
 virtues of a man of genius are really produced 
 by the applause conferred on him. To him 
 whom the world admires, the happiness of the 
 world must be dear, said Madame De Stael. 
 Like the North American Indian, (for the savage 
 and the man of genius preserve the genuine feel- 
 ings of Nature,) he would listen to his own 
 name, when amidst his circle they chaunt their 
 gods and their heroes. The honest savages laud 
 the worthies among themselves, as well as their 
 departed; and when an auditor hears his own 
 name, he answers by a cry of pleasure and of 
 pride. But pleasure and pride in his own name 
 must raise no emotion in the breast of genius, 
 amidst a polished circle : to bring himself down 
 to them, he must start at a compliment, and turn 
 away even from one of his own votaries. 
 
 But this, it seems, is not always the case with 
 men of genius, since the accusation we are no- 
 ticing has been so often reiterated. Take from ' 
 some that supreme opinion of themselves, that 
 pride of exultation, and you crush the germ of 
 their excellence. Many vast designs must have 
 perished in the conception, had not their authors 
 breathed this vital air of self-delight, this energy 
 of vanity, so operative in great undertakings. 
 
178 SELF-PRAISE. 
 
 We have recently seen this principle in the litera- 
 ry character unfold itself in the life of the late 
 Bishop of Landaff: whatever he did, he felt it 
 was done as a master ; whatever he wrote, it was 
 as he once declared, the best work on the subject 
 yet written. It was this feeling with which he 
 emulated Cicero in retirement or in action. 
 " When I am dead, you will not soon meet with 
 another John Hunter," said the great anatomist, 
 to one of his garrulous friends. An apology is 
 formed for relating the fact, but the weakness is 
 only in the apology. Corneille has given a very 
 noble full-length of the sublime egotism which 
 accompanied him through life :* and I doubt if 
 we had any such author in the present day, whe- 
 ther he would dare to be so just to himself, and 
 so hardy to the public. The self-praise of Buffbn 
 at least equalled his genius ; and the inscription 
 beneath his statue in the library of the Jardin 
 des Plantes, which I was told was raised to him 
 in his life time, exceeds all panegyric ; it places 
 him alone in Nature, as the first and the last inter- 
 preter of her works. He said of the great geniuses 
 of modern times, that there were not more than 
 five, "Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, 
 and Myself." It was in this spirit that he con- 
 
 * See it versified in Curiosities of Literature; vol. ii. 
 
SELF-PRAISE. 
 
 179 
 
 ceived and terminated his great work?, that he 
 sat in patient meditation at his desk for half a 
 century, and that all Europe, even in a state of 
 ivar, bowed to the modern Pliny. 
 
 Nor is the vanity of Buffon, and Voltaire, and 
 Rousseau so purely national as some will suppose ; 
 for men of genius in all ages have expressed a 
 consciousness of the internal force of genius. 
 No one felt this self-exultation more potent than 
 our Hobbes, who has indeed, in his controversy 
 with Wallis, asserted that there may be nothing 
 more just than self-commendation ;* and De 
 Thou, one of the most noble-minded, the most 
 thinking, the most impartial of historians, in the 
 Memoirs of his own life, composed in the third 
 person, has surprised and somewhat puzzled 
 the critics, by that frequent distribution of self- 
 commendation which they knew not how to 
 accord with the modesty and gravity with 
 which he was so amply endowed. After his 
 great and solemn labour, amidst the injustice 
 of his persecutors, that great man had sufficient 
 experience of his own merits to assert them. 
 Kepler, amidst his great discoveries, looks down 
 like a superior being on other men. Thus hf> 
 
 * See Quarrels of Authors, vol. Hi. p. 113, 
 
180 SELF-PRAISE, 
 
 breaks forth in glory and egotism : " I dare insult 
 mankind by confessing that I am he who has 
 turned science to advantage. If I am par- 
 doned, I shall rejoice ; if blamed, I shall endure 
 it. The die is cast ; I have written this book, 
 and whether it be read by posterity or by my 
 contemporaries, is of no consequence ; it may 
 Avell wait for a reader during one century, when 
 God himself during six thousand years has 
 waited for an observer like myself." He predicts 
 that " his discoveries would be verified in suc- 
 ceeding ages," yet were Kepler now among us in 
 familiar society, we should be invited to inspect 
 a monster of inordinate vanity. But it was this 
 solitary majesty, this lofty conception of their ge- 
 nius, which hovered over the sleepless pillow, and 
 charmed the solitude, of Bacon, of Newton, and 
 of Montesquieu ; of Ben Jonson, of Milton, 
 and Corneille ; and of Michael Angelo. Such 
 men of genius anticipate their contemporaries, 
 and know they are creators, long before the tar- 
 dy consent of the Public ; 
 
 " They see the laurel which entwines their bust, 
 They mark the pomp whieh consecrates their dust, 
 Shake off the dimness which obscures them now, 
 And feel the future glory bind their brow." 
 
 Sm e dletfa Prescien cf 
 
SELF-PRAISE igj 
 
 To be admired, is the noble simplicity of the 
 Ancients in expressing with ardour the conscious- 
 ness of genius, and openly claiming that praise 
 by which it was nourished. The ancients were 
 not infected by our spurious effeminate modesty. 
 Socrates, on the day of his trial, firmly commend- 
 ed himself : he told the various benefits he had 
 conferred on his country. " Instead of con- 
 demning me for imaginary crimes, you would do 
 better, considering my poverty, to order me to be 
 maintained out of the public treasury." Epicu- 
 rus writing to a minister of state, declares " If 
 you desire glory, nothing can bestow it more than 
 the letters I write to you :" and Seneca, in quot- 
 ing these words, adds " What Epicurus promis- 
 ed to his friend, that, my Lucilius, I promise 
 you." Orna me ! was the constant cry of Cicero 5 
 and he desires the historian Lucceius to write 
 separately the conspiracy of Catiline, and pub- 
 lish quickly, that while he yet lived he might 
 taste of the sweetness of his glory. Horace and 
 Ovid were equally sensible to their immortality : 
 but what modern poet would be tolerated with 
 such an avowal ? Yet Dryden honestly declares 
 that it was better for him to own this failing of 
 vanity, than the world to do it for him ; and adds 
 " For what other reason have I spent my life in 
 so unprofitable a study ? Why am I grown old in 
 
SELF-PRAISE. 
 
 seeking so barren a reward as fame ? The same 
 parts and application which have made me a 
 poet, might have raised me to any honours 
 of the gown." Was not Cervantes very sensible 
 to his own merits, when a rival started up ; and 
 did he not assert them too, when passing sentence 
 on the bad books of the times, he distinguishes 
 his own work by a handsome compliment ? Nor 
 was Butler less proud of his own merits ; for he 
 has done ample justice to his Hudibras, and trac- 
 ed out, with great self-delight, its variety of ex- 
 cellencies. Richardson, the novelist, exhibits 
 one of the most striking instances of what is call- 
 ed literary vanity the delight of an author in his 
 works ; he has pointed out all the beauties of his 
 three great works, in various manners.* He al- 
 ways taxed a visitor by one of his long letters. 
 It was this intense self-delight, which produced 
 his voluminous labours. 
 
 There are certain authors whose very existence 
 seems to require a high conception of their own 
 talents ; and who must, as some animals appear 
 to do, furnish the means of life out of their own 
 substance. These men of genius open their ca- 
 reer with peculiar tastes, or, with a predilection for 
 
 * I have observed thepi in Curiosities of Literature, vol. ii 
 
SELF-PRAISE. 
 
 some great work ; in a word, with many unpopu- 
 lar dispositions. Yet we see them magnanimous, 
 though defeated, proceeding with the public feel- 
 ing against them. At length we view them rank- 
 ing with their rivals. Without having yielded up 
 their peculiar tastes or their incorrigible vitious- 
 ness, they have however, heightened their indi- 
 vidual excellencies. No human opinion can 
 change their self opinion ; alive to the conscious- 
 ness of their powers, their pursuits are placed 
 above impediment, and their great views can 
 suffer no contraction. These men of genius bear 
 a charmed mail on their breast ; " hopeless, not 
 heartless," may be often the motto of their en- 
 sign ; and if they do not always possess reputa- 
 tion, they still look for fame ; for these do not 
 necessarily accompany each other. 
 
 Acknowledge, too, that an author must be more 
 sensible to his real merits, while he is unques- 
 tionably much less to his defects, than most 
 of his readers ; the author not only comprehends 
 his merits better, because they have passed 
 through a long process in his mind, but he is 
 familiar with every part, while the reader has had 
 but a vague notion of the whole. Why does 
 the excellent work, by repetition, rise in interest ? 
 because in obtaining this gradual intimacy with 
 
XQ4 SELF-PRAISE. 
 
 an author, we appear to recover half the genius 
 we had lost on a first perusal. The work of 
 genius too is associated, in the mind of the au- 
 thor, with much more than it contains. Why 
 are great men often found greater than the 
 books they write ? Ask the man of genius, if he 
 has written all he wished he could have written ? 
 Has he satisfied himself, in this work for which 
 you accuse his pride ? The true supplement has 
 not always accompanied the work itself. The 
 mind of the reader has the limits of a mere re- 
 cipient, while that of the author, even after his 
 work, is teeming with creation. ." On many 
 occasions, my soul seems to know more than 
 it can say, and to be endowed with a mind by 
 itself, far superior to the mind I really have," 
 said Marivaux, with equal truth and happiness. 
 
 With these explanations of what are called 
 the vanity and egotism of genius, be it remember- 
 ed, that the sense of their own sufficiency is as- 
 sumed at their own risk ; the great man who 
 thinks greatly of himself, is not diminishing 
 that greatness, in heaping fuel on his fire. With 
 his unlucky brethren, such a feeling may end in 
 4he abarrations of harmless madness; as it hap- 
 pened with Percival Stockdale. He, who after 
 a parallel between himself and Charles XII. 
 
SELF-PRAISE. 185 
 
 of Sweden, concludes that " some parts will 
 be to his advantage, and some to mine," but in 
 regard to fame, the main object between Stock- 
 dale and Charles XII. Percival imagined that 
 " his own will not probably take its fixed and 
 immoveable station, and shine with its expanded 
 and permanent splendour till it consecrates his 
 ashes, till it illumines his tomb." After this, 
 the reader, who may never have heard of the 
 name of Percival Stockdale, must be told, that 
 there exist his own " Memoirs of his Life and 
 Writings."* The memoirs of a scribbler are in- 
 structive to literary men ; to correct, and to be 
 corrected, should be their daily practice, that 
 they may be taught not only to exult in them- 
 selves, but to fear themselves. 
 
 It is hard to refuse these men of genius that 
 aura vitalis, of which they are so apt to be liber- 
 al to others. Are they not accused of the mean- 
 est adulations? When a young writer finds the 
 notice of a person of some eminence, he has 
 expressed himself in language which transcended 
 that of mortality ; a finer reason than reason 
 itself, inspired it; the sensation has been ex- 
 pressed with all its fulness, by Milton, 
 
 *I have sketched a character of Percival Stockdale, in 
 Calamities of Authors, ii. 313, it was taken ad vivum. 
 
1S6 SELF-PRAISE. 
 
 " The debt immense of endless gratitude." 
 
 Who ever pays an " immense debt," in small 
 sums? Every man of genius has left such ho- 
 nourable traces of his private affections, from 
 Locke, whose dedication of his great work is 
 more adulative than could be imagined, from 
 a temperate philosopher, to Churchill, whose 
 warm eulogiums on his friends so beautifully 
 contrast with the dark and evil passions of his 
 satire. Even in advanced age, the man of genius 
 dwells on the nutritious praise he caught in his 
 youth from veteran genius; that seed sinks 
 deep into a genial soil, roots there, and, like 
 the aloe, will flower at the end of life. When 
 Virgil was yet a youth, Cicero heard one of his 
 eclogues, and exclaimed with his accustomed 
 warmth, 
 
 Magna spes altera Romae ! 
 
 rt The second great hope of Rome " intending 
 by the first, either himself or Lucretius. The 
 words of Cicero were the secret honey on which 
 the imagination of Virgil fed for many a year ; 
 for in one of his latest productions, the twelfth 
 book of the JEneid, he applies these very words 
 
SELF-PRAISE. 157 
 
 to Ascanius ; the voice of Cicero had hung for 
 ever in his ear. 
 
 Such then, is the extreme susceptibility of 
 praise in men of genius, and not less their exuber- 
 ant sensibility to censure; I have elsewhere 
 shown how some have died of criticism. The 
 Abbe Cassagne felt so acutely the severity of 
 Boileau, that in the prime of life he fell me- 
 lancholy, and died insane. I am informed that 
 the poet, Scott of Amwell, could never recover 
 from a ludicrous criticism, written by a physician, 
 who never pretended to poetical taste. Some, 
 like Racine, have died of a simple rebuke, and 
 some have found an epigram, as one who fell a 
 victim to one, said, " fasten on their hearts, and 
 have been thrown into a slow fever." Pope has 
 been seen writhing in anguish on his chair ; and 
 it is told of Montesquieu, that notwithstanding 
 the greatness of his character, he was so much 
 affected by the perpetual criticisms on his work 
 on Laws, that they hastened his death, The 
 morbid feelings of Hawkesworth closed in suicide. 
 The self-love of genius is, perhaps, much more 
 delicate than gross. 
 
 But alas, their vengeance as quickly kindled, 
 lasts as long ! Genius is a dangerous gift of na- 
 
jgg SELF-PRAISE. 
 
 lure ; with a keener relish for enjoyment, and 
 with passions more effervescent, the same materi- 
 al forms a Catiline and a Cromwell, or a Cicero 
 and a Bacon. Plato, in his visionary man of 
 genius, lays great stress on his possessing the most 
 vehement passions, while he adds reason to res- 
 train them. But it is imagination which tor- 
 ments even their inflammable senses ; give to the 
 same vehement passion a different direction, and 
 it is glory, or infamy. 
 
 Si je n'etois Caesar, j'aurois etc Brutus." 
 
 Voltaire. 
 
 The imagination of genius is the hreath of its 
 life, which breeds its own disease. How are we to 
 describe symptoms which come from one source, 
 but show themselves in all forms ? It is now an 
 intermittent fever, now a silent delirium, an hys- 
 terical affection, and now a horrid hypochondri- 
 asm. Have we no other opiate to still the agony, 
 no other cordial to send its warmth to the heart, 
 than Plato's reason ? Must men of genius, who 
 so rarely pass through this slow curative method, 
 remain with all their tortured and torturing pas- 
 sions about them, often self-disgusted, self-humil- 
 iated ? The enmities of genius are often connect- 
 ed with their morbid imagination ; these origin- 
 
SELF-PRAISE, 189 
 
 ate in casual slights, or in unguarded expressions, 
 or in hasty opinions, or in a witty derision, or even 
 in the obtruding goodness of tender admonition 
 The man of genius broods over the phantom that 
 darkens his feelings, ancl sharpens his vindictive 
 fangs, in a libel, called his memoirs, or in another 
 public way, called a criticism. We are told, that 
 Comines the historian, when residing at the court 
 of the Count de Charolois afterwards Duke of 
 Burgundy, one day returning from hunting, with 
 inconsiderate jocularity sat ' down before the 
 Count, ordering the Prince to pull off his boots ; 
 the Count would not affect greatness, and having 
 executed his commission, in return for the prince- 
 ly amusement, the Count dashed the boot on 
 Comines's nose, which bled ; and from that time, 
 he was mortified at the Count of Burgundy, by 
 retaining the nick-name of the booted head. The 
 blow rankled in the heart of the man of genius, 
 and the Duke of Burgundy has come down to us 
 in his memoirs, blackened by his vengeance. 
 Many, unknown to their readers, like Comines, 
 have had a booted head, but the secret poison is 
 distilled on their lasting page. I have elsewhere 
 fully written a tale of literary hatred, where is 
 seen a man of genius, devoting a whole life in 
 harassing the industry or the genius which he 
 himself could not attain, in the character of Gil- 
 

 }90 SELF-PRAISE. 
 
 bert Stuart.* The French Revolution, among its 
 illustrations of the worst human passions exhibits 
 one, in Collot d'Herbois ; when this wretch was 
 tossed up in the storm, to the summit of power, a 
 monstrous imagination seized him ; he projected 
 rasing the city of Lyons and massacring its inha- 
 bitants. He had even the heart to commence, 
 and to continue this conspiracy against human 
 nature ; the ostensible motive was royalism, but 
 the secret one was literary vengeance ! as wretch- 
 ed a poet and actor as a man, he had been hissed 
 off the theatre in Lyons, and his dark remorseless 
 genius resolved to repay that ignominy, by the 
 blood of its citizens and the very walls of the 
 city. Is there but one Collot d'Herbois in the 
 universe ? When the imagination of genius be- 
 comes its madness, even the worst of human be- 
 ings is only a genus. 
 
 * See Calamities of Authors, ii. 49. 
 
( 191 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 
 
 WHEN the temper and the leisure of the literary 
 character are alike broken, even his best works, 
 the too faithful mirrors of his state of mind, will 
 participate of its inequalities ; and surely the in- 
 cubations of genius in its delicate and shadowy 
 combinations, are not less sensible in their opera- 
 tion than the composition of sonorous bodies, 
 where, while the warm metal is settling in the 
 mould, even an unusual vibration of the air, 
 during the moment of fusion, will injure the 
 
 tone. 
 \ 
 
 Some of the conspicuous blemishes of several 
 great compositions may be attributed to the do- 
 mestic infelicities of their authors. The desulto- 
 ry life of Camoens is imagined to be perceptible 
 in the deficient connection of his epic ; and Mil- 
 ton's peculiar situation and divided family prevent- 
 
192 T7 * E DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 
 
 ed those passages from being erased, which 
 otherwise had not escaped from his revising 
 hand he felt himself in the situation of his 
 Sampson Agonistes, whom he so pathetically 
 describes, as 
 
 " His foes derision, captive, poor and blind." 
 
 Cervantes, through precipitate publication, fell 
 into those slips of memory observable in his satir- 
 ical romance. The careless rapid lines of Dry- 
 den are justly attributed to his distress, and he 
 indeed pleads for his inequalities from his domes- 
 tic circumstances. Johnson silently, but eagerly, 
 often corrected the Ramblers in their successive 
 editionSj of which so many had been despatched 
 in haste. The learned Greaves offered some ex- 
 cuses for his errors in his edition of Abulfeda, 
 from " his being five years encumbered with law- 
 suits and diverted from his studies." When at 
 length he returned to them, he expresses his 
 surprise <: at the pains he had formerly under- 
 gone," but of which he now felt himself " un- 
 willing, he knew not how, of again undergoing.'* 
 Goldoni, when at the bar, abandoned his comic 
 talent for several years ; and having resumed it, 
 bis first comedy totally failed : " My head," says 
 lie, " was occupied with my professional em- 
 
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 
 ployment, I was uneasy in mind and in bad hu- 
 
 The best years of Mengs's life were em- 
 bittered by the misery and the harshness of his 
 father, who himself a poor artist, and with 
 poorer feelings, converted his home into a 
 prison-house, forced his son into the slavery of 
 stipulated task-work, while his bread and water 
 were the only fruits of the fine arts; in this 
 domestic persecution, from which he was at 
 length obliged to fly, he contracted those morose 
 and saturnine habits, which for ever after shut 
 up the ungenial Mengs in the dark solitude of 
 his soul. It has been said of Alonso Cano, a 
 celebrated Spanish painter, that he would have 
 carried his art much higher had not the un- 
 ceasing persecution of the inquisitors entirely 
 deprived him of that tranquillity so necessary 
 to the very existence of art. The poet Rous- 
 seau passed half his life in trouble, in anger, and 
 in despair, from the severe persecution, or the 
 justice, of his enemies, respecting an anonymous 
 libel Attributed to him ; his temper was poisoned, 
 and he poisoned. Ovid, in exile on the barren 
 shores of Tomos, deserted by his genius, even in 
 his copious Tristia, loses the luxuriance of his 
 fancy. The reason which Rousseau alleges for 
 the cynical spleen which so frequently breathes' 
 
194 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 
 
 forth in his works, shows how the domestic char- 
 acter of the man of genius leaves itself behind 
 in his productions. After describing the infelici- 
 ty of his domestic affairs occasioned by the 
 mother of Theresa, and Theresa herself, both 
 women of the lowest order, he adds on this 
 wretched marriage, " these unexpected dis- 
 agreeable events, in a state of my own choice 9 
 plunged me into literature, to give a new direc- 
 tion and diversion to my mind ; and in all my 
 first works, I scattered that bilious humour 
 which had occasioned this very occupation." 
 Our author's character in his works was the 
 very opposite one in which he appeared to these 
 low people ; they treated his simplicity as utter 
 silliness ; feeling his degradation among them, 
 his personal timidity assumed a tone of bold* 
 ness and originality in his writings, while a 
 strong sense of shame heightened his causticity, 
 contemning that urbanity he knew not to prac^ 
 tise. His miserable subservience to these people 
 was the real cause of his oppressed spirit calling 
 out for some undefined freedom in society. 
 Thus the real Rousseau, with all his disordered 
 feelings, only appeared in his writings ; the 
 secrets of his heart were in his pen. 
 
 The home of the literary character should be 
 the abode of repose and of silence. There must 
 
 
JTHE DOMESTICTLIFE OF GENIUS. 195 
 
 iie look for the feasts of study, in progressive and 
 alternate labours ; a taste " which," says Gibbon, 
 " I would not exchange for the treasures of India." 
 Rousseau had always a work going on, for 
 rainy days and spare hours, such as his dictionary 
 of music ; a variety of works never tired ; the 
 single one only exhausted. Metastasio talks with 
 delight of his variety, which resembled the fruits 
 in the garden of Armida, 
 
 E mentre spunta Tun, 1'altro mature. 
 
 While one matures, the other buds arid blows. 
 
 Nor is it always fame, nor any lower motive, 
 which may induce him to hold an indefatigable 
 pen ; another equally powerful exists, which 
 must remain inexplicable to him who knows not 
 to escape from the listlessness of life the passion 
 for literary occupation. He whose eye can only 
 measure the space occupied by the voluminous 
 labours of the elder Pliny, of a Mazzuchelli, a 
 Muratori, a Montfaucon, and a Gough, all men 
 who laboured from the love of labour, and can see 
 nothing in that space but the industry which filled 
 it, is like him who only views a city at a distance 
 the streets and the squares, and all the life and 
 population within, he can never know. These 
 literary characters projected these works as so 
 many schemes to escape from uninteresting pur- 
 suits \ and, in these folios? how many evils of life' 
 
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 
 
 did they bury, while their happiness expanded 
 with their volume. Aulus Gellius desired to live 
 no longer, than he was able to retain the faculty 
 of writing and observing. The literary character 
 must grow as impassioned with his subject as ^Elian 
 with his History of Animals ; " wealth and hon- 
 our I might have obtained at the courts of 
 princes; but I preferred the delight of multi- 
 plying my knowledge. I am aware that the ava- 
 ricious and the ambitious will accuse me of folly, 
 but I have always found most pleasure in observ- 
 ing the nature of animals, studying their charac- 
 ter, and writing their history." Even with those 
 who have acquired their celebrity, the love of 
 literary labour is not diminished, a circumstance 
 recorded by the younger Pliny of Livy ; in a 
 preface to one of his lost books, that historian 
 had said that he had got sufficient glory by his 
 former writings on the Roman history, and might 
 now repose in silence ; but his mind was so rest- 
 less and so abhorrent of indolence, that it only 
 felt its existence in literary exertion. Such are 
 the minds who are without hope, if they axe 
 without occupation. 
 
 Amidst the repose and silence of study, de- 
 lightful to the literary character, are the soothing 
 interruptions of the voices of those whom he 
 loves; these shall re-animate his languor, and 
 
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 197 
 
 moments of inspiration shall be caught in the 
 emotions of affection, when a father or a friend, 
 a wife, a daughter, or a sister, become the par- 
 ticipators of his own tastes, the companions of 
 his studies, and identify their happiness with his 
 fame. If Horace was dear to his friends, he der 
 clares they owed him to his father, 
 
 - purus et insons 
 
 (Ut me collaudem) si vivo et carus amicis, 
 
 Causa fuit Pater his. 
 
 Lib. i. Sat. vi. v. 69, 
 
 If pure and innocent, if dear (forgive 
 These little praises) to ray friends I live, 
 My father was the cause. 
 
 Francis. 
 
 This intelligent father, an obscure tax-gather- 
 er, discovered the propensity of Horace's mind ; 
 for he removed the boy of genius from a rural 
 occlusion to the metropolis, anxiously attending 
 on him to his various masters. Vitruvius pours 
 forth a grateful prayer to the memory of his pa- 
 rents, who had instilled into his soul a love for 
 literary and philosophical subjects. The father 
 of Gibbon urged him to literary distinction, and 
 the dedication of the " Essay on literature," to 
 thai father, connected with his subsequent labour, 
 shows the force of the excitement. The son of 
 JBuffon one day surprised his father by the sight 
 
jgg THE DOMESTIC LIFE Of GENIUS 
 
 of a column, which he had raised to the memory 
 of his father's eloquent genius. " It will do you 
 honour," observed the Gallic sage. And when 
 that son in the revolution was led to the guillo- 
 tine, he ascended in silence, so impressed with his 
 father's fame, that he only told the people, " I am 
 the son of Buffon!" It was the mother of Burns 
 who kindled his genius by delighting his child- 
 hood with the recitations of the old Scottish bal- 
 lads, while to his father he attributed his cast of cha- 
 racter ; as Bishop Watson has recently traced to 
 the affectionate influence of his mother, the reli- 
 gious feelings which he declares he had inherited 
 from her. There is. what may be called, family 
 genius ; in the home of a man of genius he dif- 
 fuses an electrical atmosphere ; his own pre-em- 
 inence strikes out talents in all. Evelyn, in his 
 beautiful retreat at Sayes Court, had inspired his 
 family with that variety of tastes which he him- 
 self was spreading throughout the nation. His 
 son translated Rapin's " Gardens," which poem 
 the father proudly preserved in his " Sylva ;" his 
 ]ady, ever busied in his study, excelled in the arts 
 her husband loved, and designed the frontispiece 
 to his Lucretius ; she was the cultivator of their 
 celebrated garden, which served as " an exam- 
 ple," of his great work on " forest trees." Cow- 
 ley, who has commemorated Evelyn's love of 
 books and gardens, has delightfully applied them 
 
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 199 
 
 to his lady, in whom, says the bard, Evelyn meet? 
 both pleasures ; 
 
 tc The fairest garden in her looks, 
 And in her mind the wisest books." 
 
 The house of Haller resembled a temple conse- 
 crated to science and the arts, for the votaries 
 were his own family. The universal acquire- 
 ments of Haller, were possessed in some degree 
 by every one under his roof; and their studious 
 delight in transcribing manuscripts, in consulting 
 authors, in botanising, drawing and colouring the 
 plants under his eye, formed occupations which 
 made the daughters happy and the sons eminent. 
 The painter Stella inspired his family to copy 
 his fanciful inventions, and the playful graver of 
 Claudine Stella, his niece, animated his " Sports 
 of Children." The poems of the late Hurdis 
 were printed by the hands of his sisters. 
 
 No event in literary history is more impressive 
 than the fate of Quintillian ; it was in the midst 
 of his elaborate work, composed to form the lite- 
 rary character of a son, his great hope, that he 
 experienced the most terrible affliction in the 
 domestic life of genius the deaths of his wife, 
 and one child after the other. It was a moral 
 earthquake with a single survivor amidst the 
 ruins. An awful burst of parental and literary 
 
200 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 
 
 affliction breaks forth in Quintillian's lamentation, 
 " my wealth, and my writings, the fruits of a 
 long and painful life, must now be reserved only 
 for strangers ; all I possess is for aliens and no 
 longer mine !" The husband, the father, and the 
 man of genius, utter one cry of agony. 
 
 Deprived of these social consolations, we see 
 Johnson call about him those whose calamities 
 exiled them from society, and his roof lodges the 
 blind, the lame and the poor ; for the heart of 
 genius must possess something human it can call 
 its own to be kind to. Its elevated emotions*, 
 even in domestic life, would enlarge the moral 
 vocabulary, like the Abbe de Saint Pierre, who 
 has fixed in his language two significant words ; 
 one which served to explain the virtue most fa- 
 miliar to him bienfaisance ; and the irritable 
 vanity magnifying its ephemeral fame th e sage 
 reduced to a mortifying diminutive la gloriole. 
 
 It has often excited surprise that men of 
 genius eminent in the world, are not more rever- 
 enced than other men in their domestic circle. 
 <\ The disparity between the public and the pri- 
 vate esteem of the same man is often striking ; 
 in privacy the comic genius is not always cheer- 
 ful, the sage is sometimes ridiculous, and the poet 
 not delightful. The golden hour of invention 
 
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 
 
 must terminate like other hours, and when the 
 man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the 
 vexations, and the amusements of life, his com- 
 panions behold him as one of themselves the 
 creature of habits and infirmities. Men of 
 genius, like the deities of Homer, are deities 
 only in their " Heaven of Invention :" mixing 
 with mortals, they shed their blood like Venus s 
 or bellow like Mars. Yet in the business of life 
 the cultivators of science and the arts, with all 
 their simplicity of feeling and generous openness 
 about them, do not meet on equal terms with 
 other men ; their frequent abstractions calling 
 off the mind to whatever enters into its favourite 
 pursuits, render them greatly inferior to others 
 in practical and immediate observation. A man 
 of genius may know the whole map of the world 
 of human nature ; but, like the great geographer, 
 may be apt to be lost in the wood, which any 
 one in the neighbourhood knows better than him. 
 " The conversation of a poet," says Goldsmith, 
 " is that of a man of sense, while his actions are 
 those of a fool." Genius, careless of the future, 
 and absent in the present, avoids to mix too 
 deeply in common life as its business ; hence it 
 becomes an easy victim to common fools and vul- 
 gar villains. " F love my family's welfare, but I 
 cannot be so foolish as to make myself the slave 
 to the minute affairs of a house," said Montes- 
 
202 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 
 
 quieu. The story told of a man of learning i& 
 probably true, however ridiculous ; deeply occu- 
 pied in his library, one, rushing in, informed him 
 that the house was on fire ! " Go to my wife 
 these matters belong to her!" pettishly replied 
 the interrupted student. Bacon sat at one end 
 of his table wrapt in many a reverie, while at 
 the other the creatures about him were trafficking 
 with his honour, and ruining his good name ; " I 
 am better fitted for this," said that great man 
 once, holding out a book, " than for the life I 
 have of late led." Buffon, who consumed his 
 mornings in his old tower of Montbar, at the end 
 of his garden, with all nature opening to him, 
 formed all his ideas of what was passing before 
 him by the arts of an active and pliant capuchin, 
 and the comments of a perruquier on the scanda- 
 lous chronicles : these he treated as children ; 
 but the children commanded the great man. 
 Dr. Young, whose satires give the very anatomy 
 of human foibles, was entirely governed by his 
 housekeeper ; she thought and acted for him, 
 which probably greatly assisted the " Night 
 Thoughts," but his curate exposed the do- 
 mestic economy of a man of genius by a satiri- 
 cal novel. Was not the hero Marlborough, at the 
 moment he was the terror of France and the 
 glory of Germany, held under the finger of his 
 wife by the meanest passion of avarice ? 
 
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENItJS. 203 
 
 But men of genius have too often been ac- 
 cused of imaginary crimes ; their very eminence 
 attracts the lie of calumny, a -lie which tradition 
 conveys beyond the possibility of refutation. 
 Sometimes reproached for being undutiful sons, 
 because they displeased their fa thers in making 
 an obscure name celebrated. The family of Des- 
 cartes were insensible to the lustre his studies 
 reflected on them; they lamented, as a blot in 
 their escutcheon, that Descartes, who was born 
 a gentleman, should become a philosopher. This 
 elevated genius was even denied the satisfaction 
 of embracing an unforgiving parent, while his 
 dwarfish brother, with a mind diminutive as his 
 person, ridiculed his philosophic relative, and 
 turned to advantage his philosophic dispositions. 
 They have been deemed disagreeable compa- 
 nions, because they felt the weariness of dull- 
 ness, or the impertinence of intrusion ; as bad 
 husbands, when united to women, who without 
 a kindred feeling had the mean sense, or the 
 unnatural cruelty, to prey upon their infirmities, 
 But is the magnet less a magnet, though the 
 particles scattered about it, incapable of attrac- 
 tion, are unagitated by its occult quality ? 
 
 Poverty is the endemial distemper of the 
 commonwealth; but poverty is no term for 
 ' ears polite." Few can conceive a great cha- 
 
204 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS 
 
 racter in a state of humble existence ! That 
 passion for wealth through all ranks, leaving the 
 Hollanders aside, seems peculiar to the country 
 where the " Wealth of Nations" is made the first 
 principle of its existence ; and where the cui 
 bonot is ever referred to a commercial result, 
 This is not the chief object of life among the 
 continental nations, where it seems properly re- 
 stricted to the commercial class. Montesquieu, 
 who was in England, observed that " if he had 
 been born here nothing could have consoled him 
 on failing to accumulate a large fortune, but I 
 do not lament the mediocrity of my circumstan- 
 ces in France." This evil, for such it may be 
 considered, has much increased here since Mon- 
 tesquieu's visit. It is useless to persuade some 
 that there is a poverty, neither vulgar nor terri- 
 fying, asking no favours, and on no terms receiv- 
 ing any a poverty which annihilates its ideal 
 evils, and becomes even a source of pride a 
 state which will confer independence, that first 
 step to genius ! 
 
 There have been men of genius who have eveia 
 learnt to want. We see Rousseau rushing out 
 of the hotel of the financier, selling his watch, 
 copying music by the styeet, and by the mechan- 
 ical industry of two hours, purchasing ten for ge- 
 nius. We may smile at the enthusiasm of young 
 
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 205 
 
 Barry, who finding himself too constant a haunter 
 of tavern-company, imagined that this expendi- 
 ture of time was occasioned by having money ; 
 to put an end to the conflict, he threw the little 
 he possessed at once into the Liffey ; but let us 
 not forget that Barry, in the maturity of life, con- 
 fidently began a labour of years, and one of the 
 noblest inventions in his art, a great poem in a 
 picture, with no other resource than what he 
 found in secret labours through the night, by 
 which he furnished the shops with those slight 
 and saleable sketches which secured uninterrupt- 
 ed mornings for his genius. Spinosa, a name 
 as celebrated and calumniated as Epicurus, lived 
 in all sorts of abstinence, even of honours, of 
 pensions, and of presents, which, however dis- 
 guised by ^kindness, he would not accept, so 
 fearful was this philosopher of a chain ; lodg- 
 ing in a cottage, and, obtaining a livelihood by 
 polishing optical glasses, at his death his small 
 accounts showed how he had subsisted on a few 
 pence a day. 
 
 " Enjoy spare feast! a radish and an egg." Cowper. 
 
 Spinosa said he never had spent more than he 
 earned, and certainly thought there was such a 
 thing as superfluous earnings. Such are the 
 men who have often smiled at the light regard of 
 their neighbours in contrast with their growing 
 
206 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 
 
 celebrity; and who feel that eternal truth, which 
 the wisest and the poorest of the Athenians has 
 sent down to us, that " not to want any thing is 
 an attribute of the Divinity ; but man approxi- 
 mates to this perfection by wanting little." 
 
 There may be sufficient motives to induce 
 the literary character to make a state of medi- 
 ocrity his choice. If he loses his happiness, he 
 mutilates his genius. Goldoni, with the sim- 
 plicity of his feelings and habits, in reviewing 
 his life, tells us how he was always relapsing 
 into his old propensity of comic writing ; " but 
 the thought of this does not disturb me ; for 
 though in any other situation I might have been 
 in easier circumstances, I should never have 
 been so happy." Bayle is a parent of the 
 modern literary character; he pursued the same 
 course, and early in life adopted the principle 
 " Neither to fear bad fortune, nor have any 
 ardent desires for good." He was acquainted 
 with the passions only as their historian, and 
 living only for literature, he sacrificed to it the 
 two great acquisitions of human pursuits for- 
 tune and a family ; but in England, in France, 
 in Germany, in Italy, in Holland, in Flanders^ 
 at Geneva, he found a family of friends, and 
 an accumulation of celebrity. A life of hard 
 deprivations was long the life of Linnaeus. 
 
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 207 
 
 Without a fortune, it never seemed to him 
 necessary to acquire one. Peregrinating on foot 
 with a stylus, a magnifying glass, and a basket 
 for plants, he shared with the peasant his rustic 
 meal. Never was glory acquired at a cheaper 
 rate, says one of his eulogists. Satisfied with 
 the least of the little, he only felt the necessity 
 of completing his Floras ; and the want of for- 
 tune did not deprive him of his glory, nor of 
 that statue raised to him after death in the 
 gardens of the University of Upsal ; nor of that 
 solemn eulogy delivered by a crowned head ; 
 nor of those medals which the king of Sweden, 
 and the Swedes, struck, to commemorate the 
 genius of the three kingdoms of Nature. 
 
 In substituting fortune for the object of his 
 designs, the man of genius deprives himself of 
 the inspirations of him who lives for himself; 
 that is, for his Art. If he bends to the public 
 taste, not daring to raise it to his own, he has 
 not the choice of his subjects, which itself is a 
 sort of invention. A task-worker ceases to think 
 his own thoughts; the stipulated price and time 
 are weighing on his pen or his pencil, while the 
 hour-glass is dropping its hasty sands. If the 
 man of genius would become something more 
 than himself if he would be wealthy and even 
 luxurious, another fever torments him, besides 
 
208 rHE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 
 
 the thirst of glory ; such ardent desires create 
 many fears, and a mind in fear is a mind in 
 slavery. So inadequate, too, are the remunera- 
 tions of literary works, that the one of the 
 greatest skill and difficulty, and the longest 
 labour, is not valued with that hasty spurious 
 novelty for which the taste of the public is 
 craving, from the strength of its disease rather 
 than its appetite. Rousseau observed that his 
 musical opera, the work of five or six weeks, 
 brought him as much money as he had received 
 for his Emilius, which had cost him twenty 
 years of meditation, and three years of compo- 
 sition. This single fact represents a hundred. 
 In one of Shakespeare's sonnets he pathetically 
 laments this compulsion of his necessities which 
 r forced him on the trade of pleasing the public ; 
 and he illustrates this degradation by a novel 
 image. " Chide Fortune," cries the bard, 
 
 " The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds, 
 That did not better for my life provide 
 Than public means which public manners breeds; 
 Thence conies it that my name receives a brand ; 
 And almost thence my nature is subdued 
 To what it works in, LIKE THE DYER'S HAND." 
 
 Such is the fate of that author, who, in his 
 variety of task-works, blue, yellow, and red, 
 lives without ever having shown his own natu- 
 ral complexion. We hear the eloquent truth 
 
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 209 
 
 from another who has shared in the bliss of 
 composition, and the misery of its u daily bread." 
 " A single hour of composition won from the 
 business of the day, is worth more than the 
 whole day's toil of him who works at the trade 
 of literature : in the one case the spirit comes 
 joyfully to refresh itself, like a hart to the 
 water-brooks ; in the other it pursues its miser- 
 able way, panting and jaded with the dogs of 
 hunger and necessity behind."* 
 
 Genius undegraded and unexhausted, may, 
 indeed, ev^ in a garret, glow in its career; 
 but it * jUS t b e on tne principle which induced 
 R O iv>seau solemnly to renounce writing " par 
 uetier." This in the Journal des Scavans he 
 once attempted, but found himself quite inade- 
 quate to " the profession,"f In a garret, the 
 author of the " Studies of Nature" exultingly 
 tells us that he arranged his work. " It was in 
 a little garret, in the new street of St. Etienne 
 du Mont, where I resided four years, in the 
 midst of physical and domestic afflictions. But 
 there I enjoyed the most exquisite pleasures of 
 my life, amid profound solitude and an enchant- 
 ing horizon. There I put the finishing hand 
 
 * Quarterly Review, No. XVI. p. 538 
 
 t Twice he repeated this resolution. See his works, vol 
 *xxi. p. 283 ; vol. xxxii. p. 90. 
 
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GEMUS. 
 
 to my " Studies of Nature," and there I publish- 
 ed them." 
 
 It has been a question with some, more indeed 
 abroad than at home, whether the art of instruct- 
 ing mankind by the press would not be less sus- 
 picious in its character, were it less interested in 
 one of its motives ? We have had some noble 
 self-denials of this kind, and are not without 
 them even in our country. Boileau almost cen- 
 sures Racine for having accepted money for one 
 of his dramas, while he who was not rich, gave 
 away his elaborate works to the pu\>li c anc | ne 
 feems desirous of raising the art of wrir^g. to a 
 more disinterested profession than any o^ er> 
 requiring no fees. Milton did not compose Lr 
 immortal labour with any view of copyright ; 
 and Linnaeus sold his works for a single ducat. 
 The Abbe Mably, the author of many political 
 and moral works, preserved the dignity of the 
 literary character, for while he lived on little, he 
 would accept only a few presentation copies 
 from the booksellers. Since we have become a 
 nation of book collectors, the principle seems 
 changed ; even the wealthy author becomes 
 proud of the largest tribute paid to his genius, 
 because this tribute is the evidence of the num- 
 bers who pay it ; so that the property of a book 
 represents to the literary candidate so many thou- 
 sand voters in his favour. 
 
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 21 1 
 
 The man of genius wrestling with heavy and 
 oppressive fortune, who follows the avocations 
 of an author as a precarious source of existence, 
 should take as the model of the authorial life 
 that of Dr. Johnson ; the dignity of the literary 
 character was ever associated with his feelings ; 
 and the " reverence thyself" was present to his 
 mind even when doomed to be one of the He- 
 lotce of literature, by Osborn, by Cave, or by 
 Millar. Destitute of this ennobling principle, the 
 author sinks into the tribe of those rabid adven- 
 turers of the pen who have masked the degrad- 
 ed form of the literary character under the title 
 of" authors by profession" the Guthries, the 
 Ralphs, and the Amhursts.* " There are worse 
 evils, for the literary man," says a modern author, 
 who is himself the true model of the great lite- 
 rary character, " than neglect, poverty, impri- 
 sonment, and death. There are even more piti- 
 able objects than Chatterton himself with the 
 poison at his lips." " I should die with hunger, 
 ^re I at peace with the world," exclaimed a 
 corsa,, O f Ut era t ur e } and dashed his pen into 
 that blau fjood before him of SQot and 
 
 * Tfri* rparpr 
 
 1 '.'1 find an original letter by Guthrie to a 
 Minister of State,, n . ^ ^^ ^^ ^ probably 
 
 his own invention, with . e unb]ushi , avowed . 
 
 See < Calamrties of author"., ^ . g farther 
 
 opens mysteries, in an anonym H of Tfae Case 
 
 of Authors by Profession" They - ^ 
 

 
 ( 212) 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 
 
 MATRIMONY has often been considered as a 
 condition not well suited to the domestic life of 
 genius ; it is accompanied by too many embar- 
 rassments for the head and the heart.. It was an 
 aixom with Fuessli, the Swiss artist, that the 
 marriage state is incompatible with a high cul- 
 tivation of the fine arts. Peiresc, the great 
 French collector, refused marriage, convinced 
 that the cares of a family were too absorbing 
 for the freedom necessary to literary pursuits, 
 and a sacrifice of fortune incompatible with his 
 great designs. Boyle, who would not suffer his 
 studies to be interrupted by " household affairs," 
 lived as a boarder with his sister, Lady Hanela^ft. 
 Bayle, and Hobbes^ and Hume, and Giob^*' 
 and Adam Smith, decided for celibacy. JUC " 
 has been the state of the great au* ir f whose 
 sole occupation is combined wi^ P assion > and 
 whose happiness is his fame f^ 6 ' whicb balan " 
 ces that of the heroes o^ Qe a S 6 ' who have 
 sometimes honoured t v< nselves b ? acknowledg- 
 ing it. 
 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 213 
 
 This debate, for our present topic has some- 
 times warmed into one, in truth is ill adapted 
 for controversy ; the heart is more concerned in 
 its issue than any espoused doctrine terminating 
 in partial views. Look into the domestic annals 
 of genius observe the variety of positions into 
 which the literary character is thrown in the 
 nuptial state. Will cynicism always obtain his 
 sullen triumph, and prudence he allowed to cal- 
 culate away some of the richer feelings of our 
 nature ? Is it an axiom that literary characters 
 must necessarily institute a new order of celi- 
 bacy ? One position we may assume, that the 
 studies, and even the happiness of the pursuits 
 of literary characters, are powerfully influenced 
 by the domestic associate of their lives. 
 
 Men of genius rarely pass through the age of 
 love without its passion : even their Delias and 
 Amandas are often the shadows of some real 
 object. According to Shakespeare's experience, 
 
 " Never durst poet touch a pen to write, 
 Until his ink were tempered with love's sighs." 
 
 Love's Labour Lost, Act IV, Scene 3. 
 
 Their imagination is perpetually colouring Ihose 
 pictures of domestic happiness they delight to 
 dwell on. He who is no husband may sigh 
 for that devoted tenderness which is at once 
 bestowed and received; and tears may start in 
 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 
 
 the eyes of him who can become a child among 
 children, and is no father. These deprivations 
 have usually been the concealed cause of the 
 querulous and settled melancholy of the literary 
 character. The real occasion of Shenstone's 
 unhappiness was, that early in life he had been 
 captivated by a young lady adapted to be both 
 the muse and the wife of the poet. Her mild 
 graces were soon touched by his plaintive love- 
 songs and elegies. Their sensibility was too 
 mutual, and lasted for some years, till she died. 
 It was in parting from her that he first sketched 
 his " Pastoral Ballad." Shenstone had the for- 
 titude to refuse marriage ; his spirit could not 
 endure that she should participate in that life of 
 deprivations to which he was doomed, by an in- 
 considerate union with poetry and poverty. But 
 he loved, and his heart was not locked up in the 
 ice of celibacy. He says in a moment of hu- 
 mour, " It is long since I have considered myself 
 as undone. The world will not perhaps consider 
 me in that light entirely till I have married my 
 maid." Thomson met a reciprocal passion in 
 his Amanda, while the full tenderness of his heart 
 was ever wasting itself, like waters in a desert. 
 As we have been made little acquainted with this 
 part of the history of the poet of the Seasons, I 
 give his own description of these deep feelings 
 from a manuscript letter written to Mallet. " To 
 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 215 
 
 turn my eyes a softer way, to you know who * 
 absence sighs it to me. What is my heart made 
 of? a soft system of low nerves, too sensible for 
 my quiet capable of being very happy or very 
 unhappy, I am afraid the ast will prevail. Lay 
 your hand upon a kindred heart, and despise me 
 not. I know not what it is, but she dwells upon 
 my thought in a mingled sentiment, which is the 
 sweetest, the most intimately pleasirg the soul 
 can receive, and which I would wish never to 
 want towards some dear object or another. To 
 have always some secret darling idea to which 
 one can still have recourse amidst the noise and 
 nonsense of the world, and which never fails to 
 touch us in the most exquisite manner, is an art 
 of happiness that fortune cannot deprive us of. 
 This may be called romantic ; but whatever the 
 cause is, the effect is really felt. Pray, when 
 you write, tell me wh^n you saw her, and with 
 the pure eye of a friend, when you see her again, 
 whisper that I am her most humble servant." 
 Even Pope was enamoured of " a scornful lady ;" 
 and, as Johnson observed, " polluted his will with 
 female resentment." Johnson himself, we are 
 told by Miss Sevvard, who knew him, " had al- 
 ways a metaphysical passion for one princess or 
 other, the rustic Lucy Porter, or the haughty 
 Molly Aston, or the sublimated methodistic Hill 
 Boothby; and, lastly, the more charming Mrs. 
 
216 E MATRIMONIAL STATE. 
 
 Thrale." Even in his advanced age, at the 
 height of his celebrity, we hear his cries of lone- 
 ly wretchedness. " I want every comfort; my 
 life is very solitary and very cheerless. Let me 
 know that f have yet a friend let us be kind to 
 one another." But the " kindness" of distant 
 friends is like the polar sun, too far removed to 
 warm. A female is the only friend the solitary 
 can have, because her friendship is never absent. 
 Even those who have eluded individual tender- 
 ness, are tortured by an aching void in their 
 feelings. The stoic Akenside, in his books of 
 " Odes," has preserved the history of a life of 
 genius in a series of his own feelings. One en- 
 titled, " At Study," closes with these memorable 
 lines : 
 
 11 Me though no peculiar fair 
 Touches with a lover's care ; 
 
 Though the pride of my desire 
 Asks immortal friendship's name, 
 Asks the palm of honest fame 
 
 And the old heroic lyre ; 
 Though the day have smoothly gone, 
 Or to lettered leisure known, 
 
 Or i n social duty spent ; 
 Yet at eve my lonely breast 
 Seeks in vain for perfect rest, 
 
 Languishes for true content." 
 
 If ever a man of letters lived in a state of 
 energy and excitement which might raise him 
 above the atmosphere of social love, it was as- 
 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 3^7 
 
 suredly the enthusiast, Thomas Hollis, who, sole- 
 ly devoted to literature and to republicanism, 
 was occupied in furnishing Europe and America 
 with editions of his favourite authors. He would 
 not marry, lest marriage should interrupt the la- 
 bours of his platonic politics. But his extraor- 
 dinary memoirs, while they show an intrepid 
 mind in a robust frame, bear witness to the self- 
 tormentor who had trodden down the natural 
 bonds of domestic life. Hence the deep " de- 
 jection of his spirits ;" those incessant cries, that 
 he has " no one to advise, assist, or cherish those 
 magnanimous pursuits in him." At length he re- 
 treated into the country, in utter hopelessness. 
 " I go not into the country for attentions to agri- 
 culture as such, nor attentions of interest of any 
 kind, which I have ever despised as such ; but as a 
 used man, to pass the remainder of a life in tole- 
 rable sanity and quiet, after having given up the 
 flower of it, voluntarily, day, week, month, year 
 after year, successive to each other, to public ser- 
 vice, and being no longer able to sustain, in body or 
 mind, the labours that I have chosen to go through 
 without falling speedily into the greatest disorders, 
 and it might be imbecility itself. This is not 
 colouring, but the exact plain truth," and Gray's, 
 
 Poor moralist, and what art thou ? 
 A solitary fiy ! 
 
 T 
 
218 
 
 THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 
 
 Thy joys no glittering female meets, 
 No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets." 
 
 Assuredly it would not be a question whether 
 these literary characters should have married, 
 had not Montaigne, when a widower, declared 
 that " he would not marry a second time, though 
 it were wisdom itself ;" but the airy Gascon has 
 not disclosed how far Madame was concerned in 
 this anathema. 
 
 If the literary man unites himself to a woman 
 whose tastes, and whose temper, are adverse to 
 his pursuits, he must courageously prepare for a 
 martyrdom. Should a female mathematician be 
 united to a poet, it is probable that she would be 
 left to her abstractions ; to demonstrate to her- 
 self how many a specious diagram fails when 
 brought into its mechanical operation ; or while 
 discovering the infinite varieties of a curve, may 
 deduce her husband's. . If she becomes as jea- 
 lous of his books as other wives are of the mis- 
 tresses of their husbands, she may act the virago 
 even over his innocent papers. The wife of 
 Bishop Cooper, while her husband was employed 
 on his Lexicon, one day consigned the volume 
 of many years to the flames ; and obliged that 
 scholar to begin a second siege of Troy in a se- 
 cond Lexicon. The wife of Whitelocke often 
 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 219 
 
 destroyed his MSS. and the marks of her nails 
 have come down to posterity in the numerous 
 lacerations still gaping in his " Memorials." 
 The learned Sir Henry Saville, who devoted 
 more than half his life, and near ten thousand 
 pounds, to his magnificent edition of St. Chry- 
 sostom, led a very uneasy life between that 
 Saint and Lady Saville ; what with her tender- 
 ness fo? him and her own want of amusement, 
 Saint Chrysostom incurred more than one dan- 
 ger. One of those learned scholars who trans- 
 lated the Scriptures, kept a diary of his studies 
 and his domestic calamities, for they botfi went 
 on together; busied only among his books, his 
 wife, from many causes, plunged him into debt; 
 he was compelled to make the last sacrifice of a 
 literary man, by disposing of his library. But 
 now, he without books, and she worse and worse 
 in temper, discontents were of fast growth be- 
 tween them. Our man of study, found his 
 wife, like the remora, a little fish, sticking at 
 the bottom of his ship impeding its progress. 
 He desperately resolved to fly from his country 
 and his wife. There is a cool entry in the diary, 
 on a warm proceeding, one morning; wherein 
 he expresses some curiosity to know the cause 
 of his wife being out of temper ! Simplicity of 
 a patient scholar!* The present matrimonial 
 
 * The entry may amuse. Hodie, nescio qua intemperia 
 uxorem meara agitavit, nam pecuniam usudatam projecit humi, 
 
220 THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 
 
 case, however, terminated in unexpected happi- 
 ness ; the wife, after having forced her husband 
 to be deprived of his library, to be daily chro- 
 nicling her caprices, and finally, to take the 
 serious resolution of abandoning his country, 
 yet, living in good old times, religion and con- 
 science united them again; and, as the connu- 
 bial diarist ingeniously describes this second 
 marriage of himself and his wife, " made it be 
 wiih them, as surgeons say it is with a fractured 
 bone, if once well set, the stronger for a frac- 
 ture." A new consolation for domestic rup- 
 tures ! 
 
 Observe the errors and infirmities of the great- 
 est men of genius in their matrimonial connec- 
 tions. Milton carried nothing of the greatness of 
 his mind, in the choice of his wives ; his first wife 
 was the object of sudden fancy. He left the 
 metropolis, and unexpectedly returned a married 
 man ; united to a woman of such uncongenial 
 dispositions, that the romp was frightened at the 
 literary habits of the great poet, found his house 
 solitary, beat his nephews, and ran away after a 
 single month's residence ! to this circumstance, 
 we owe his famous treatise on Divorce, and a 
 
 ac sic irata discessit." " This day, I know not the cause of 
 the ill-temper of ray wife ; when I gave her money for daily 
 expences, she flung it upon the ground and departed in pas- 
 sion." For some, this Flemish picture must be too familiar to 
 please, too minute a copy of vulgar life. 
 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 221 
 
 party, (by no means extinct,) who, having made 
 as ill choices in their wives, were for divorsing, as 
 fast as they had been for marrying, calling them- 
 selves Miltonists. When we find that Moliere, so 
 skilful in human life, married a girl from his 
 own troop, who made him experience all those 
 bitter disgusts and ridiculous embarrassments 
 which he himself played off at the Theatre ; 
 that Addison's fine taste in morals and in life, 
 could suffer the ambition of a courtier to prevail 
 with himself to seek a Countess, whom he des- 
 cribes under the stormy character of Oceana, 
 who drove him contemptuously into solitude, and 
 shortened his days ; and, that Steele, warm and 
 thoughtless, was united to a cold precise " Miss 
 Prue," as he calls her, and from whom he never 
 parted without bickerings ; in all these cases, we 
 censure the great men, not their wives.^ ROUS- 
 SEAU has honestly confessed his error : he had 
 united himself to a low illiterate woman and 
 when he retreated into solitude, he felt the weight 
 which he carried with him. He laments that he 
 had not educated his wife ; " In a docile age, I 
 could have adorned her mind with talents and 
 knowledge which would have more closely united 
 us in retirement. We should not then have felt 
 the intolerable taedium of a tete a tete ; it is in 
 
 * See Curiosities of Literature, vol. ii. for various anecdotes 
 of Literary Wives." Sixth Edition, 1817. 
 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE 
 
 solitude one feels the advantage of living with 
 another who can think." Thus Rousseau con- 
 fesses the fatal error, and indicates the right prin- 
 ciple. 
 
 But it seems not absolutely necessary for the 
 domestic happiness of the literary character, that 
 his wife should be a literary woman. The lady 
 of Wieland was a very pleasing domestic person, 
 who without reading her husband's works, knew 
 he was a great poet. Wieland was apt to exer- 
 cise his imagination in a sort of angry declama- 
 tion and bitter amplifications ; and the writer of 
 this account, in perfect German taste, assures us, 
 " that many of his felicities of diction were thus 
 struck out at a heat :" during this frequent ope- 
 ration of his genius, the placable temper of Mrs. 
 Wieland overcame the orgasm of the German 
 bard, merely by her admiration and her patience. 
 When the burst was over, Wieland himself was 
 so charmed by her docility, that he usually 
 closed with giving up all his opinions. There 
 is another sort of homely happiness, aptly des- 
 cribed in the plain words of Bishop Newton : 
 He found 4C the study of sacred and classic au- 
 thors ill agreed with butchers' and bakers' bills ;" 
 and when the prospect of a bishopric opened 
 on him, " more servants, more entertainments, 
 a better table, &c." it became necessary to look 
 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE, 23 
 
 out for " some clever sensible woman to be his 
 wife, who would lay out his money to the best 
 advantage, and be careful and tender of his 
 health ; a friend and companion at all hours, and 
 who would be happier in staying at home than 
 be perpetually gadding abroad." Such are the 
 wives, not adapted to be the votaries, but who 
 may be the faithful companions through life, 
 even of a man of genius. 
 
 That susceptibility, which is love in its most 
 compliant forms, is a constitutional faculty in 
 the female character, and hence its docility and 
 enthusiasm has varied with the genius of differ- 
 ent ages- When universities were opened to 
 the sex, have they not acquired academic glory ? 
 Have not the wives of military men shared in 
 the perils of the field, and as Anna Comnena, 
 and our Mrs. Hutchinson, become even their 
 historians? In the age of love and sympathy 
 the female receives an indelible character from 
 her literary associate ; his pursuits are even the 
 objects of her thoughts ; he sees his tastes reflect- 
 ed in his family, much less by himself, whose soli- 
 tary labours often preclude him from forming 
 them, than by that image of his own genius in 
 his house the mother of his children. Anti- 
 quity abounds with many inspiring examples of 
 this camekon reflection of the female character. 
 
224 THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 
 
 Aspasia, from the arms of Pericles, borrowing his 
 genius, could instruct the archons how to govern 
 the republic ; Portia, the wife of the republican 
 Brutus, devouring the burning coals, showed a 
 glorious suicide which Brutus had approved ; 
 while Paulina, the wife of Seneca, when the 
 veins of that philosopher were commanded to 
 be opened, voluntarily chose the same death ; 
 the philosopher commanded that her flowing 
 blood should be stopped, but her pallid features 
 ever after showed her still the wife of Seneca ! 
 The wife of Lucan is said to have transcribed 
 and corrected the Pharsalia after the death of 
 her husband ; the tender mind of the wife had 
 caught the energy of the bard by its intercourse ; 
 and when he was no more, she placed his bust 
 on her bed, that she might never close her ey.es 
 without being soothed by his image. The pic- 
 ture of a literary wife of antiquity has descended 
 to us, touched by the domestic pencil of a man 
 of genius. It is the susceptible Calphurnia, the 
 lady of the younger Pliny ; " her affection to me 
 has given her a turn to books her passion will 
 increase with our days, for it is not my youth or 
 my person, which time gradually impairs, but my 
 reputation and my glory, of which she is en- 
 amoured." Could Mrs. Hutchinson have written 
 the life of her husband, had she not reflected 
 from the patriot himself, all his devotedness to 
 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 
 
 the country, had she not lent her whole soul to 
 every event which concerned him ? This female 
 susceptibility was strong in the wife of Klop- 
 stock ; our novelist Richardson, who could not 
 read the Messiah in the original, was desirous of 
 some account of the poem, and its progress. 
 She writes to him that no one can inform him 
 better than herself, for she knows the most of 
 that which is not published, " being always pre- 
 sent at the birth of the young verses, which be- 
 gin by fragments here and there, of a subject of 
 which his soul is just then filled. Persons who 
 live as we do have no need of two cham- 
 bers we are always in the same ; I with my little 
 work, still, still, only regarding sometimes my 
 husband's sweet face, which is so venerable at 
 that time, with tears of devotion and all the sub- 
 limity of the subject my husband reading me 
 his young verses and suffering my criticisms." 
 Meta Hollers writes with enthusiasm, and in 
 German English ; but he is a pitiful critic who 
 has only discovered the oddness of her language. 
 
 GESNER declared that whatever were his ta- 
 lents, the person who had most contributed to 
 develope them was his wife. She is unknown 
 to the public ; but the history of the mind of such 
 a woman can only be truly discovered in the 
 " Letters of Gesner and his Family." While 
 Gesner gave himself up entirely to his favour- 
 
226 THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 
 
 ite arts, drawing, painting, etching, and com- 
 posing poems, his wife would often reanimate a 
 genius that was apt to despond in its attempts, 
 and often exciting him to new productions, her 
 certain and delicate taste was attentively con- 
 sulted by the poet-painter but she combined 
 the most practical good sense with the most 
 feeling imagination; this forms the rareness of 
 the character for this same woman, who united 
 with her husband in the education of their 
 children, to relieve him from the interruptions of 
 common business, carried on alone the concerns 
 of his house in la librairie. Her correspondence 
 with her son, a young artist travelling for his 
 studies, opens what an old poet comprehensively 
 terms " a gathered mind." Imagine a woman 
 attending the domestic economy, and the com- 
 mercial details, yet withdrawing out of this busi- 
 ness of life into that of the more elevated pur- 
 suits of her husband, and the cares and counsels 
 she bestowed on her son to form the artist and 
 the man. To know this incomparable woman 
 we must hear her. " Consider your father's 
 precepts as oracles of wisdom ; they are the re- 
 sult of the experience he has collected, not only 
 of life, but of that art which he has acquired sim- 
 ply by his own industry." She would not have 
 her son suffer his strong affection to herself to 
 absorb all other sentiments. " Had you remain- 
 ed at home, and been habituated under your 
 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 227 
 
 mother's auspices to employments merely do- 
 mestic, what advantage would you have ac- 
 quired ? I own we should have passed some de- 
 lightful winter evenings together; but your love 
 for the arts, and my ambition to see my sons as 
 much distinguished for their talents as their vir- 
 tues, would have been a constant source of regret 
 at your passing your time in a manner so little 
 worthy of you." How profound is her observa- 
 tion on the strong but confined attachments of a 
 youth of genius. " I have frequently remarked, 
 with some regret, the excessive attachment you in- 
 dulge towards those who see and feel as you do 
 yourself, and the total neglect with which you seem 
 to treat every one else. I should reproach a man 
 with such a fault who was destined to pass his life 
 in a small and unvarying circle ; but in an artist, 
 who has a great object in view, and whose coun- 
 try is the whole world, this disposition seems to 
 me likely to produce a great number of inconve- 
 niences alas! my son, the life you have hither- 
 to led in your father's house has been in fact a 
 pastoral life, and not such a one as was necessary 
 for the education of a man whose destiny sum- 
 mons him to the world." And when her son, 
 after meditating on some of the most glorious 
 productions of art, felt himself, as he says, 
 " disheartened and cast down at the unattainable 
 superiority of the artist, and that it was. only by 
 
228 THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 
 
 reflecting on the immense labour and continued 
 efforts which such master pieces must have 
 required, that I regained my courage and my 
 ardour," she observes, " this passage, my dear 
 son, is to me as precious as gold, and I send it to 
 you again, because I wish you to impress it 
 strongly on your mind. The remembrance of 
 this may also be a useful preservative from too 
 great confidence in your abilities, to which a warm 
 imagination may sometimes be liable, or from 
 the despondence you might occasionally feel from 
 the contemplation of grand originals. Continue, 
 therefore, my dear son, to form a sound judgment 
 and a pure taste from your own observations ; 
 your mind, while yet young and flexible, may 
 receive whatever impressions you wish. Be 
 careful that your abilities do not inspire in you 
 too much confidence, lest it should happen to you 
 as it has to many others, that they have ne r 
 possessed any greater merit than that of having 
 good abilities." One more extract to preserve 
 an incident which may touch the heart of genius. 
 This extraordinary woman, whose characteristic 
 is that of strong sense with delicacy of feeling, 
 would check her German sentimentality at the 
 moment she was betraying those emotions in 
 which the imagination is so powerfully mixed up 
 with the associated feelings. Arriving at their 
 cottage at Sihlwald, she proceeds " On enter- 
 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 229 
 
 ing the parlour three small pictures, painted 
 by you, met my eyes. I passed some time in 
 contemplating them. It is now a year, thought I, 
 since I saw him trace these pleasing forms ; he 
 whistled and sang, and 1 saw them grow under 
 his pencil ; now he is far, far from us. In 
 short, I had the weakness to press my lips on one 
 of these pictures. You well know, my dear son, 
 that 1 am not much addicted to scenes of a sen- 
 timental turn; but to-day, while I considered 
 your works, I could not restrain from this little 
 impulse of maternal feelings. Do not, however, 
 be apprehensive that the tender affection of a 
 mother will ever lead me too far, or that I shall 
 suffer my mind to be too powerfully impressed 
 with the painful sensations to which your absence 
 gives birth. My reason convinces me that it is 
 for your welfare that you are now in a place wher* 
 your abilities will have opportunities of unfolding, 
 and where you can become great in your art." 
 
 Such was the incomparable wife and mother 
 of the Gesners* Will it now be a question 
 whether matrimony is incompatible \vith the 
 cultivation of the arts? A wife who reanimates 
 the drooping genius of her husband, and a mo- 
 ther who is inspired by the ambition of seeing 
 her sons eminent, is she not the real being which 
 the ancients only personified in their Muse ? 
 
( 230 ) 
 
 CHAPTER XIV, 
 LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 
 
 AMONG the virtues which literature inspires, is 
 that of the most romantic friendship. The deli- 
 rium of love, and even its lighter caprices, are 
 incompatible with the pursuits of the student ; 
 but to feel friendship like a passion, is necessary 
 to the mind of genius, alternately elated and 
 depressed, ever prodigal of feeling, and excursive 
 in knowledge. 
 
 The qualities which constitute literary friend- 
 ship, compared with those of men of the world, 
 must render it as rare as true love itself, which it 
 resembles in that intellectual tenderness of which 
 both so deeply participate. Two atoms must 
 meet out of the mass of nature, of such parity, 
 that when they once adhere, they shall be as one, 
 resisting the utmost force of separation. This 
 literary friendship begins " in the dews of their 
 youth," and may be said not to expire on their 
 tomb. Engaged in similar studies, if one is found 
 to excel, he shall find in the other the protector 
 of his fame. In their familiar conversations. 
 
LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 231 
 
 the rttemory of the one associates with the fancy 
 of the other ; and to such an intercourse, the 
 world owes some of the finer effusions of genius, 
 and some of those monuments of labour which 
 required more than one giant hand* 
 
 In the poem Cowley composed on the death 
 of his friend Harvey, this stanza opens a pleasing 
 scene of two young literary friends engaged in 
 their midnight studies. 
 
 " Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights 
 How oft unwearied have we spent the nights, 
 Till the Ladaean stars, so famed for love. 
 Wondered at us from above. 
 We spent them not in toys, in lust, or wine ; \ 
 
 But search of deep philosophy, 
 
 Wit, eloquence, and poetry ; 
 Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine." 
 
 Milton has not only given the exquisite Lyci- 
 das to the memory of one young friend, but his 
 Epitaphium Damonis to another. 
 
 Now, mournfully cries the youthful genius, 
 as versified by Langhorne, 
 
 r< To whom shall I my hopes and fears impart, 
 Or trust the cares and follies of my heart ?" 
 
 The sonnet of Gray on West, is another beau- 
 tiful instance of that literary friendship of which 
 we have several instances in our own days, from 
 
232 LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 
 
 the school or the college ; and which have ri- 
 valled in devoted affections any which these pages 
 can record. 
 
 Such a friendship can never be the lot of men 
 of the world, for it takes its source in the most 
 elevated feelings ; it springs up only in the fresh- 
 
 \l ness of nature, and is gathered in the golden age 
 of human life. It is intellectual, and it loves 
 solitude ; for literary friendship has no convivial 
 gaieties and factious assemblies. The friend- 
 ships of the men of society move on the princi- 
 ple of personal interest, or to relieve themselves 
 from the listlessness of existence ; but interest 
 can easily separate the interested, and as weari- 
 ness is contagious, the contact of the propagator 
 is watched. Men of the world may look on 
 each other with the same countenances, but not 
 
 v with the same hearts. Literary friendship is a 
 sympathy, not of manners, but of feelings. In 
 the common mart of life may be found intima- 
 cies which terminate in complaint and contempt ; 
 the more they know one another, the less is their 
 mutual esteem ; the feeble mind quarrels with 
 one still more imbecil than himself; the dissolute 
 riot with the dissolute, and while they despise 
 their companions, they too have become despi- 
 cable. 
 
LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS 233 
 
 That perfect unity of feeling, that making of 
 two individuals but one being, is displayed in 
 such memorable friendships as those of Beaumont 
 and Fletcher ; whose labours were so combined 
 that no critic can detect the mingled production 
 of either; and whose lives were so closely united, 
 that no biographer can compose the memoirs 
 of the one without running into the life of the 
 other. Their days were as closely intervoven as 
 their verses. Montaigne and Charron, in the eyes 
 of posterity, are rivals, but such literary friendship 
 knows no rivalry ; such was Montaigne's affec- 
 tion for Charron, that he requested him by his 
 will to bear the arms of the Montaignes ; and 
 Charron evinced his gratitude to the manes of 
 his departed friend, by leaving his fortune to the 
 sister of Montaigne. How pathetically Erasmus 
 mourns over the death of his beloved Sir Thomas 
 More " In Moro mihi videor extinct us" " I 
 seem to see myself extinct in More." It was a 
 melancholy presage of his own death, which 
 shortly after followed. The Doric sweetness and 
 simplicity of old Isaac Walton, the angler, were 
 reflected in a mind as clear and generous, when 
 Charles Cotton continued the feelings, rather 
 than the little work of Walton. Metastasio and 
 Farinelli called each other il Gemello, the Twin ; 
 and both delighted to trace the resemblance 
 of their lives and fates, and the perpetual alii* 
 
234 LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 
 
 ance of the verse and the voice. Goguet, the 
 author of " The Origin of the Arts and Sciences," 
 bequeathed his MSS. and his books to his friend 
 Fugere, with whom he had long united his affec- 
 tions and his studies, that his surviving friend 
 might proceed with them ; but the author had 
 died of a slow and painful disorder, which Fugere 
 had watched by the side of his dying friend, in 
 silent despair ; the sight of those MSS. and books 
 was his death-stroke ; half his soul which had 
 once given them animation was parted from him, 
 and a few weeks terminated his own days. When 
 Loyd heard of the death of Churchill, he neither 
 wished to survive him nor did. The Abbe de St. 
 Pierre gave an interesting proof of literary friend- 
 ship for Varignon the geometrician ; they were 
 of congenial dispositions, and St. Pierre, when 
 he went to Paris, could not endure to part with 
 Varignon, who was too poor to accompany him ; 
 and St. Pierre was not rich. A certain income, 
 however moderate, was necessary for the tran- 
 quil pursuits of geometry. St. Pierre presented 
 Varignon with a portion of his small income 1 , 
 accompanied by that delicacy of feeling which 
 men of genius who know each other can best 
 conceive : " I do not give it you," said St. Pierre, 
 4< as a salary but an annuity, that thus you may 
 be independent and quit me when you dislike 
 me." The same circumstance occurred between 
 Akenside and Dyson, who, when the poet was 
 
LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 235 
 
 in great danger of adding one more illustrious 
 name to the Calamities of Authors, interposed 
 between him and ill-fortune, by allowing him 
 an annuity of three hundred a-year, and when 
 he found the fame of his literary friend attacked, 
 although not in the habit of composition, Dyson 
 published an able and a curious defence of Aken- 
 side's poetical and philosophical character. The 
 name and character of Dyson have been suffered 
 to die away, without a single tribute of even 
 biographical sympathy ; but in the record of 
 literary glory, the patron's name should be in- 
 scribed by the side of the literary character ; for 
 the public incurs an obligation whenever a man 
 of genius is protected. 
 
 The statesman Fouquet, deserted by all others, 
 witnessed La Fontaine hastening every literary 
 inan to the prison-gate ; many have inscribed 
 their works to their disgraced patron, in the hour 
 
 When Int'rest calls off all her sneaking train, 
 And all the obliged desert, and all the vain, 
 They wait, or to the scaffold, or the cell, 
 When the last ling'ring friend has bid farewell. 
 
 Such are the friendships of the great literary 
 Character ! Their elevated minds have raised them 
 into domestic heroes, whose deeds have been of- 
 /ten only recorded on that fading register, the hu- 
 man heart. 
 
( 236 ) 
 CHAPTER 
 
 THE LITERARY AND THE PERSONAL CHARACTER/ 
 
 ARE the personal dispositions of an author dis- 
 coverable in his writings as those of an artist are 
 imagined to appear in his works, where Michael 
 Angelo is always great and Raphael ever graceful ? 
 
 Is the moralist a moral man ? Is he malignant 
 who publishes caustic satires ? Is he a libertine 
 who composes loose poems? And is he whose 
 imagination delights in terror and in blood, the 
 very monster he paints ? 
 
 Many licentious writers have led chaste lives. 
 La Mothe le Vayer wrote two works of a free 
 nature ; yet his was the unblemished life of a re- 
 tired sage. Bayle is the too faithful compiler of 
 impurities, but he resisted the corruption of the 
 senses as much as Newton. La Fontaine wrote 
 tales fertile in intrigues, yet the " bon horn me" 
 has not left on record a single ingenious amour. 
 Smollet's character is immaculate ; yet he has 
 described two scenes which offend even in the 
 freedom of imagination. Cowley, who boasts 
 with such gaiety of the versatility of his passion 
 among so many mistresses, wanted even the con- 
 fidence to address or\e. Thus, licentious writers 
 
THE LITERARY, fcc. 337 
 
 may be very chaste men; for the imagination 
 may be a volcano, while the heart is an Alp of ice. 
 
 Turn to the moralist there we find Seneca, 
 the disinterested usurer of seven millions, writing 
 on moderate desires, on a table of gold. Sallust, 
 who so eloquently declaims against the licentious- 
 ness of the age, was repeatedly accused in the Sen- 
 ate of public and habitual debaucheries; and when 
 this inveigher against the spoilers of provinces 
 attained to a remote government, Sallust pillaged 
 like Verres. Lucian, when young, declaimed 
 against the friendship of the great, as another 
 name for servitude ; but when his talents procured 
 him a situation under the Emperor, he facetiously 
 compared himself to those quacks, who themselves 
 plagued with a perpetual cough, offer to sell an 
 infallible remedy for one. Sir Thomas More, in 
 his Utopia, declares that no man ought to be 
 punished for his religion ; yet he became a fierce 
 persecutor, racking and burning men when his 
 o\\ r n true faith here was at the ebb. At the mo- 
 meut the Poet Rosseau was giving versions of the 
 Psa)ms, full of unction, as our neighbours say, he 
 wa'j profaning- the same pen with the most infa- 
 n/ous of epigrams. We have heard of an erotic 
 rjoet of our times composing sacred poetry, or 
 night-hymns in church-yards. The pathetic ge- 
 nius of Sterne played about his head, but never 
 reached his heart 
 
238 THE LITERARY AND 
 
 And thus with the personal dispositions of an 
 author, which may be quite the reverse from those 
 which appear in his writings. Johnson would not 
 believe that Horace was a happy man, because his 
 verses were cheerful, no more than he could think 
 Pope so, because he is continually informing us of it. 
 Young, who is constantly contemning preferment in 
 his writings, was all his life pining after it ; and 
 while the sombrous author of the "Night Thoughts" 
 was composing them, he was as cheerful as any other 
 man ; he was as lively in conversation as he was 
 gloomy in his writings: and when a lady expressed 
 her suprise at his social converse, he replied 
 " There is much difference between writing and 
 talking." Moliere, on the contrary, whose hu- 
 mour was so perfectly comic, and even ludicrous, 
 was a very thoughtful and serious man, and 
 perhaps even of a melancholy temper : his strong- 
 ly-featured physiognomy exhibits the face of a 
 great tragic, rather than of a great comic, poet. 
 Could one have imagined that the brilliant wit, 
 the luxuriant raillery, and the fine and deep sense 
 of Paschal could have combined with the most 
 opposite qualities the hypochondriasm and 
 bigotry of an ascetic ? Rochefoucauld, says 
 the eloquent Dugald Stewart, in private life was 
 a conspicuous example of all those moral qualities 
 of which he seemed to deny the existence, and 
 exhibited in this respect a striking contrast to the 
 
THE PERSONAL CHARACTER. 239 
 
 Cardinal De Retz, who has presumed to censure 
 him for his want of faith in the reality of virtue j 
 and to which we must add, that De Retz was one 
 of those pretended patriots without a single of 
 those virtues for which he was the clamorous 
 advocate of faction. When Valincour attributed 
 the excessive tenderness in the tragedies of Racine 
 to the poet's own impassioned character, the 
 younger Racine amply showed that his father was 
 by no means this slave of love ; that his intercourse 
 with a certain actress was occasioned by his pains 
 to form her, who with a fine voice, and memory, 
 and beauty, was incapable of comprehending the 
 verses she recited, or accompanying them with 
 any natural gesture. The tender Racine never 
 wrote a single love poem, nor had a mistress; 
 and his wife had never read his tragedies, for 
 poetry was not her delight. Racine's motive 
 for making love the constant source of action in 
 his tragedies, was on the principle which has 
 influenced so many poets, who usually conform to 
 the prevalent taste of the times. In the court 
 of a young monarch, it was necessary that heroes 
 should be lovers; and since Corneille had so 
 nobly run in one career, Racine could not have 
 existed as a great poet, had he not rivalled him 
 in an opposite one. The tender Racine was no 
 lover; but he was a subtle and epigrammatic 
 observer, before whom his convivial friends never 
 
240 THE LITERARY AND 
 
 cared to open their minds. It is not therefore 
 surprising if we are often erroneous in the con- 
 ception we form of the personal character of a 
 distant author. Klopstock, the votary of Zion's 
 muse, so astonished and wanned the sage Bodmer, 
 that he invited the inspired bard to his house ; 
 but his visitor shocked the grave professor, when, 
 instead of a poet rapt in silent meditation, a vola- 
 tile youth leapt out of the chaise, who was 
 an enthusiast for retirement only when writ- 
 ing verses. An artist whose pictures exhibit 
 a series of scenes of domestic tenderness, awa- 
 kening all the charities of private life, participa- 
 ted in them in no other way than on his can- 
 vass. Evelyn, who has written in favour of 
 active life, loved and lived in retirement ; while 
 Sir George Mackenzie framed an eulogium on 
 solitude, who had been continually in the bustle 
 of business. 
 
 Thus an author and an artist may yield no 
 certain indication of their personal character in 
 their works. Inconstant men will write on con- 
 stancy, and licentious minds may elevate them- 
 selves into poetry and piety. And were this not 
 so, we should be unjust to some of the greatest 
 geniuses, when the extraordinary sentiments they 
 put into the mouths of their dramatic personages 
 are maliciously applied to themselves. Euri- 
 
THE PERSONAL CHARACTER. 241 
 
 pides was accused of atheism, when he made a 
 denier of the gods appear on the stage. Milton 
 has been censured by Clarke for the impiety of 
 Satan ; and it w r as possible that an enemy of 
 Shakespeare might have reproached him for his 
 perfect delineation of the accomplished villain 
 lago ; as it was said that Dr. Moore was some- 
 times hurt in the opinions of some, by his horrid 
 Zeluco. Crebillon complains of this. " They 
 charge me with all the iniquities of Atreus, and 
 they consider me in some places as a wretch with 
 whom it is unfit to associate ; as if all which the 
 mind invents must be derived from the heart." 
 This poet offers a striking instance of the little 
 alliance existing between the literary and person- 
 al dispositions of an author. Crebillon, who ex* 
 ulted on his entrance into the French academy, 
 that he had never tinged his pen with the gall of 
 satire, delighted to strike on the most harrowing 
 string of the tragic lyre. In his Atreus, the father 
 drinks the blood of his son ; in Rhadamistus, the 
 son expires under the hand of the father ; in 
 Electra, the son assassinates the mother. A poet 
 is a painter of the soul ; but a great artist^ is not 
 therefore a bad man. 
 
 Montaigne appears to have been sensible of 
 this fact in the literary character. Of authors, he 
 says, he likes to read their little anecdotes and 
 w 
 
242 THE LITERARY AND 
 
 private passions ; and adds, " Car j'ai une singu- 
 Here curiosite de connoltre 1'ame et les naifsjuge- 
 mens de mes auteurs. II faut bien juger leur 
 suffisance, mais non pas leurs moeurs, ni eux, par 
 cette montre de leurs ecrits qu'ils etalent au thea- 
 tre du monde." Which may be thus translated 
 " For I have a singular curiosity to know the soul 
 and simple opinions of my authors. We must 
 judge of their ability, but not of their manners, 
 nor of themselves, by that show of their writings 
 which they display on the theatre of the world." 
 This is very just, and are we yet convinced, that 
 the simplicity of this old favourite of Europe, 
 might not have been as much a theatrical ges- 
 ture, as the sentimentality of Sterne f 
 
 We must not therefore consider that he who 
 paints vice with energy is therefore vicious, lest 
 we injure an honourable man ; nor must we 
 imagine that he who celebrates virtue is there- 
 fore virtuous, for we may then repose on a heart 
 which knowing the right pursues the wrong. 
 
 These paradoxical appearances in the history 
 of genius present a curious moral phenomenon. 
 Much must be attributed to the plastic nature of 
 the versatile faculty itself. Men of genius have 
 often resisted the indulgence of one talent to ex- 
 ercise another with equal power ; some, who have 
 
THE PERSONAL CHARACTER. 
 
 solely composed, sermons, could have touched on 
 the foibles of society with the spirit of Horace or 
 Juvenal ; Blackstone and Sir William Jones di- 
 rected that genius to the austere studies of law 
 and philology, which might have excelled in the 
 poetical and historical character. So versatile 
 is this faculty t)f genius, that its possessors a're 
 sometimes uncertain of the manner in which they 
 shall treat their subject ; whether to be grave or 
 ludicrous? When Breboeuf. the French translator 
 of the Pharsalia of Lucan, had completed the first 
 book as it now appears, he at the same time com- 
 posed a burlesque version, and sent both to the 
 great arbiter of taste in that day, to decide which 
 the poet should continue ? The decision proved 
 to be difficult. Are there not writers who can 
 brew a tempest or fling a sunshine with all the 
 vehemence of genius at their will? They adopt 
 one principle, and all things shrink into the pig- 
 my forms of ridicule ; they change it, and all rise 
 to startle us, with animated Colossuses. On this 
 principle of the versatility of the faculty, a pro- 
 duction of genius is a piece of art which wrought 
 up to its full effect is merely the result of certain 
 combinations of the mind, with a felicity of man- 
 ner obtained by taste and habit. 
 
 Are we then to reduce the works of a man of 
 genius to a mere sport of his talents ; a game 
 
THE LITERARY AND 
 
 in which he is only the best player? Can he 
 whose secret power raises so many emotions in 
 our breasts, be without any in his own ? A mere 
 actor performing a part ? Is he unfeeling when 
 te is pathetic, indifferent when he is indignant ? 
 An alien to all the wisdom and virtue he inspires ? 
 No ! were men of genius themselves to assert 
 this, arid it is said some incline to it, there is a 
 more certain conviction, than their mistakes, 
 in our own consciousness, which for ever assures 
 us, that deep feelings and elevated thoughts must 
 spring from their source. 
 
 In proving that the character of the man may 
 be very opposite to that of his writings, we must 
 recollect that the habits of life may be contrary 
 to the habits of the mind. The influence of their 
 studies over men of genius, is limited ; out of 
 the ideal world, man is reduced to be the active 
 ... creature of- sensation. An author has, in truth, 
 two distinct characters ; the literary, formed by 
 the habits of his study; the personal, by the 
 habits of situation. Gray, cold, effeminate and 
 timid in his personal, was lofty and awful in his 
 literary character ; we see men of polished man- 
 ners and bland affections, in grasping a pen, are 
 thrusting a poignard ; while others in domestic 
 life, with the simplicity of children and the fee- 
 bleness of nervous affections, can shake the senate 
 
THE PERSONAL CHARACTER. 245 
 
 or the bar with the vehemence of their eloquence 
 and the intrepidity of their spirit. 
 
 And, however the personal character may con- 
 trast with that of their genius, still are the works 
 themselves genuine, and exist in realities for us 
 and were so doubtless to themselves, in the 
 act of composition. In the calm of study, a 
 beautiful imagination may convert him whose 
 morals are corrupt, into an admirable moralist, 
 awakening feelings which yet may be cold in 
 the business of life ; since we have shown that 
 the phlegmatic can excite himself into wit, and 
 the cheerful man delight in Night-thoughts. 
 Sallust, the corrupt Sallust, might retain the 
 most sublime conceptions of the virtues which 
 were to save the Republic ; and Sterne, whose 
 heart was not so susceptible in ordinary occur- 
 rences, while he was gradually creating incident 
 after incident, touching the emotions one after 
 another, in the stories of Le Fevre and Maria, 
 
 might have thrilled like some of his readers.* 
 
 
 
 * Long after this was written, and while this volume was 
 passing through the press. I discovered a new incident in the 
 life of Sterne, which verifies my conjecture. By some un- 
 published letters of Sterne's in Mr. Murray's Collection O 
 Autographical Letters, it appears that early in life, he deeply 
 fixed the affections of a young lady, during a period of five 
 years, and for some cause T know not, he suddenly deserted her, 
 and married another. The young lady was too sensible of 
 w 2 
 
246 THE LITERARY, fcc. 
 
 Many have mourned over the wisdom or the 
 virtue they contemplated, mortified at their own 
 infirmities. Thus, though there may be no 
 identity between the book and the man, still for 
 us, an author is ever an abstract being, and, as 
 one of the Fathers said, " a dead man may sin 
 dead, leaving books that make others sin." An 
 author's wisdom -or his folly does not die with 
 him. The volume, not the author, is our com- 
 panion, and is for us a real personage, performing 
 before us whatever it inspires; "he being dead, 
 yet speaketh." Such is the vitality of a book ! 
 
 this act of treachery ; she lost her senses and was confined in 
 a private mad-house, where Sterne twice visited her. He has 
 drawn and coloured the picture of her madness, which he 
 himself had occasioned ! This fact only adds to some which 
 have so deeply injured the sentimental character of this author, 
 and the whole spurious race of his wretched apes. His life 
 was loose, and sbandean, his principles unsettled, and it does 
 not seem that our wit bore a single attraction of personal 
 affection about him; for his death was characteristic of his 
 life. Sterne died at his lodgings x with neither friend nor 
 relative by his side ; a hired nurse was the sole companion of 
 the man whose wit found admirers in every street, but whose 
 heart could not draw one by his death-bed. 
 
- 
 ( 247 ) , ; 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 AMONG the more active members of Ihe re- 
 public there is a class to whom may be appropri- 
 ately assigned the title of MEN OF LETTERS. 
 
 The man of letters, whose habits and whose 
 whole life so closely resemble those of an author, 
 can only be distinguished by the simple circum- 
 stance, that the man of letters is not an author. 
 
 Yet he whose sole occupation through life is 
 literature, who is always acquiring and never 
 producing, appears as ridiculous as the architect 
 who never raised an edifice, or the statuary who 
 refrains from sculpture. His pursuits are re- 
 proached with terminating in an epicurean sel- 
 fishness, and amidst his incessant avocations he 
 himself is considered as a particular sort of idler. 
 
 This race of literary characters, as they now 
 exist, could not have appeared till the press had 
 poured its affluence ; in the degree that the na- 
 tions of Europe became literary, was that philo- 
 sophical curiosity kindled, which induced some 
 
248 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 to devqte their fortunes and their days, and to 
 experience some of the purest of human enjoy- 
 ments, in preserving and familiarising them- 
 selves with " the monuments of vanished minds," 
 that indistructible history of the genius of every 
 people, through all its asras and whatever men 
 have thought and whatever men have done, were 
 at length discovered to be found in Books. 
 
 Men of letters occupy an intermediate station 
 between authors and readers ; with more curi- 
 osity of knowledge and more multiplied tastes, 
 and by those precious collections which they 
 are forming during their lives, mor,e completely 
 furnished with the means than are possessed by 
 the multitude who read, and the few who write. 
 
 The studies of an author are usually restricted 
 to particular subjects ; his tastes are tinctured by 
 their colouring, and his mind is always shaping 
 itself to them. An author's works form his soli- 
 tary pride, and often mark the boundaries of his 
 empire ; while half his life wears away in the 
 slow maturity of composition ; and still the am- 
 bition of authorship torments its victim alike in 
 disappointment or in possession. 
 
 But the solitude of the man of letters is soothed 
 by the surrounding objects of his passion ; he pos- 
 sesses them, and they possess him. His volumes 
 
THE MAN OF LETTERS. 249 
 
 in triple rows on their shelves; his portfolios, 
 those moveable galleries of pictures and sketches ; 
 his rich medaillier of coins and gems, that library 
 without books ; some favourite sculptures and 
 paintings, on which his eye lingers as they catch a 
 magical light ; and some antiquities of all nations, 
 here and there, about his house ; these are his 
 furniture ! Every thing about him is so endeared 
 to him by habit, and many higher associations, 
 that even to quit his collections for a short time 
 becomes a real suffering ; he is one of the lief- 
 kebbers of the Hollanders a lover or fancier.^ 
 He lives where he will die ; often his library and 
 his chamber are contiguous, and this " Parva, sed 
 apta," this contracted space, has often marked the 
 boundary of the existence of the opulent owner. 
 
 ' 
 
 His invisible days flow on in this visionary world 
 of literature and art ; all the knowledge, and all 
 the tastes, which genius has ever created are 
 transplanted into his cabinet ; there they flourish 
 together in an atmosphere of their own. But 
 tranquillity is essential to his existence ; for 
 though his occupations are interrupted without 
 inconvenience, and resumed without effort, yet 
 
 * The Dutch call every thing for which they have a passion 
 licf-hebberge things having their love ; and as their feeling is 
 much stronger than their delicacy, they apply the term to every- 
 thing, from poesy and picture to tulips and tobacco. Lief- 
 hebbers are lovers or fanciers. 
 
250 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 if the realities of life, with all their unquiet 
 thoughts, are suffered to enter into his ideal world, 
 they will be felt as if something were flung with 
 violence among the trees where the birds are 
 , all would instantly disperse ! 
 
 Such is that life of self-oblivion of the man of 
 letters, for which so many have voluntarily relin- 
 quished a public station ; or their rank in socie- 
 ty ; neglecting even fortune and health. Of 
 the pleasures of the man of letters it may be 
 said, they combine those opposite sources of en- 
 joyment observed in the hunter and the angler. 
 Of a great hunter it was said, that he did not 
 live but hunted ; and the man of letters, in his 
 perpetual researches, feels the like heat, and the 
 joy of discovery, in his own chase ; while in the 
 deep calm of his spirits, such is the sweetness of 
 his uninterrupted hours, like those of the angler, 
 that one may say of him what Colonel Vena- 
 bles, an enthusiastic angler, declared of his fa- 
 vourite pursuit, " many have cast off other re- 
 creations and embraced this ; but I never knew 
 any angler wholly cast off, though occasions 
 might interrupt, their affections to their beloved 
 recreation." 
 
 But " me'n of the world," as they are so empha- 
 tically distinguished, imagine .that a man so life- 
 
THE MAN OF LETTERS. 2Bl 
 
 less in <c the world" must be one of the dead in it, 
 and, with mistaken wit, would inscribe over the 
 sepulchre of his library, " Here lies the body of 
 our friend." If the man of letters has volun- 
 tarily quitted their " world," at least he has past 
 into another, where he enjoys a sense of ex- 
 istence through a long succession of ages, and 
 where Time, who destroys all things for others, 
 for him only preserves and discovers. This 
 world is best described by one who has lingered 
 among its inspirations. " We are wafted into 
 other times and strange lands, connecting us by 
 a sad but exalting relationship with the great 
 events and great minds which 'have passed away. 
 Our studies at once cherish and controul the im- 
 agination, by leading it over an unbounded range 
 of the noblest scenes in the overawing company 
 of departed wisdom and genius."* 
 
 If the man of letters is less dependent on 
 others for the very perception of his own exist- 
 ence, his solitude is not that of a desert, but of 
 the most cultivated humanity ; for all there 
 tends to keep alive those concentrated feelings 
 which cannot be indulged with security, or even 
 without ridicule, in general society. Like the 
 Luculius of Plutarch, he would not only Jive 
 among the votaries of literature, but would live 
 
 * Quarterly Review, No. XXXIII. p. 145. 
 
252 ' THE MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 for them ; he throws open his library, his gal- 
 lery, and his cabinet, to all the Grecians. Such 
 are the men who father neglected genius, or 
 awaken its infancy by the perpetual legacy of 
 the " Prizes" of Literature and science ; who 
 project those benevolent institutions, where they 
 have poured out the philanthropy of their 
 hearts in that world which they appear to have 
 forsaken. If Europe is literary, to whom does 
 she owe this, more than to these men of letters ? 
 To their noble passion of amassing through life 
 those magnificent collections, which often bear 
 the names of their founders from the gratitude 
 of a following age ? Venice, Florence, and Co- 
 penhagen, Oxford and London, attest the ex- 
 istence of their labours. Our Bodleys and >our 
 Harleys, our Cottons and our Sloanes, our Cra- 
 cherodes and our Townleys, were of this race ! 
 In the perpetuity of their own studies, they felt 
 as if they were extending human longevity, by 
 throwing an unbroken light of knowledge into 
 the next age. Each of these public works, for 
 such they beeome, was the project and the exe- 
 cution of a solitary man of letters during half a 
 century ; the generous enthusiasm which inspir- 
 ed their intrepid labours ; the difficulties over- 
 come ; the voluntary privations of what the world 
 calls its pleasures and its honours, would form an 
 interesting history not yet written ; their due, yet 
 undischarged. 
 
THE MAN OP LETTERS, 
 
 'Living more with books than with men, the 
 man of letters is more tolerant of opinions than 
 they are among themselves, nor are his views of 
 human affairs contracted to the day, as those who 
 in the heat and hurry cf life can act only on ex- 
 pedients, and not on principles ; who deem them- 
 selves politicians because they are not moralists ; 
 to whom the centuries behind have conveyed no 
 results, and who cannot see how the present time 
 is always full of the future ; as Leibnitz has ex~ 
 pressed a profound reflection. " Every thing," 
 says the lively Burnet, " must be brought to the 
 nature of tinder or gunpowder, ready for a spark 
 to set it on fire," before they discover it. The 
 man of letters is accused of a cold indifference 
 to the interests which divide society. In truth, 
 he knows their miserable beginnings and their 
 certain terminations ; he is therefore rarely ob- 
 served as the head, or the rump, of a party. 
 
 Antiquity presents such a man of letters in 
 Atticus, who retreated from a political to a lite- 
 rary life; had his letters accompanied those of 
 Cicero they would have illustrated the ideal cha- 
 racter of a man of letters. But the sage Atticus 
 rejected a popular celebrity for a passion not less 
 powerful, yielding up his whole soul to study, 
 Cicero, with all his devotion to literature, was 
 still agitated by another kind of glory, and the 
 
254 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 most perfect author in Rome imagined that he 
 was enlarging his honours by the intrigues of the 
 consulship. He has distinctly marked the cha- 
 racter of the man of letters in the person of his 
 friend Atticus, and has expressed his respect, 
 although he could not content himself with its 
 imitation. " I know," says this man of genius 
 and ambition, " I know the greatness and inge- 
 nuousness of your soul, nor have I found any 
 difference between us, but in a different choice 
 of life ; a certain sort of ambition has led me 
 earnestly to seek after honours, while other mo- 
 tives, by no means blameable, induced you to 
 adopt an honourable leisure ; honestum otium."* 
 These motives appear in the interesting memoirs 
 of this man of letters a contempt of political 
 intrigues with a desire to escape from the bustle 
 and splendour of Rome to the learned leisure of 
 Athens ; to dismiss a pompous train of slaves for 
 the delight of assembling under his roof a lite- 
 rary society of readers and transcribers ; and 
 there having collected the portraits or busts of 
 the illustrious men of his country, he caught 
 their spirit, and was influenced by their virtues 
 or their genius, as he inscribed under them, in 
 concise verses, the characters of their mind. 
 Valuing wealth only for its use, a dignified econ- 
 omy enabled him to be profuse, and a moderate 
 expenditure allowed him to be generous. 
 
 * Ad Atticum, Lib. i. Ep. 17. 
 
THE MAN OF LETTERS. 255 
 
 The result of this literary life was the strong 
 affections of the Athenians ; at the first oppor- 
 tunity, the absence of the man of letters offered, 
 they raised a statue to him, conferring on our 
 Pomponius the fond surname of Atticus. To 
 have received a name from the voice of the 
 city they inhabited, has happened to more than 
 one man of letters. Pinelli, born a Neapolitan, 
 but residing at Venice, among other peculiar hon- 
 ours received from the senate, was there distin- 
 guished by the affectionate title of "the Venetian." 
 
 Yet such a character as Atticus could not es- 
 cape censure from " men of the world ;" they 
 want the heart and the imagination to conceive 
 something better than themselves. The happy 
 indifference, perhaps the contempt, of our Atticus 
 for rival factions, they have stigmatised as a cold 
 neutrality, and a timid cowardly hypocrisy. Yet 
 Atticus could not have been a mutual friend, had 
 both not alike held the man of letters as a sacred 
 being amidst their disguised ambition ; and the 
 urbanity of Atticus, while it balanced the fierce- 
 ness of two heroes, Pompey and Caesar, could 
 even temper the rivalry of genius in the orators 
 Hortensius and Cicero. A great man of our own 
 country widely differed from the accusers of Atti- 
 cus; Sir Matthew Hale lived in times distracted, 
 and took the character of our man of letters 
 for his model, adopting two principles in 
 
250 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 the conduct of Atticus; engaging with no party 
 or public business, arid affording a constant 
 relief to the unfortunate of whatever party, he 
 was thus preserved amidst the contests of the 
 times. Even Cicero himself, in his happier 
 moments, in addressing his friend, exclaims " I 
 had much rather be sitting on your little bench 
 under Aristotle's picture, than in the curule 
 chairs of our great ones." This wish was pro- 
 bably sincere, and reminds us of another great 
 politician in his secession from public affairs, 
 retreating to a literary life, when he appears 
 suddenly to have discovered a new-found world. 
 Fox's favourite line, which he often repeated, was, 
 
 il How various his employments whom the world 
 Calls idle." 
 
 Cowper. 
 
 If the personal interests of the man of letters 
 are not too deeply involved in society, his indi- 
 vidual prosperity however is never contrary to 
 public happiness. Other professions necessa- 
 rily exist by the conflict and the calamities of the 
 community ; the politician is great by hatching 
 an intrigue ; the lawyer in counting his briefs ; 
 the physician his sick-list; the soldier is clamo- 
 rous for war, and the merchant riots on the 
 public calamity of high prices. But the man of 
 letters only calls for peace and books, to unite 
 himself with, his brothers scattered over Europe ; 
 
THE MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 and his usefulness can only be felt, when, after 
 a long interchange of destruction, men during 
 short intervals, recovering their senses, discover 
 that " knowledge is power." 
 
 Of those eminent men of letters, who were 
 not authors, the history of Peiresc opens the 
 most enlarged view of their activity. This 
 moving picture of a literary life had been lost 
 for us, had not Peiresc found in Gassendi a twin- 
 spirit ; so intimate was that biographer with the 
 very thoughts, so closely united in the same 
 pursuits, and so perpetual an observer of the 
 remarkable man whom he has immortalized, 
 that when employed on this elaborate resem- 
 blance of his friend, he was only painting him- 
 self with all the identifying strokes of self-love. 
 
 It was in the vast library of Pinelli, the 
 founder of the most magnificent one in Europe, 
 that Peiresc, then a youth, felt the remote hope 
 of emulating the man of letters before his eyes. 
 His life was not without preparation, not with- 
 out fortunate coincidences, but there was a 
 grandeur of design in the execution, which ori- 
 ginated in the genius of the man himself. 
 
 y 
 
 The curious genius of Peiresc was marked 
 by its precocity, as usually are strong passions 
 
 x 2 
 
258 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 in strong minds ; this was the germ of all those 
 studies which seemed mature in his youth. He 
 resolved on a personal intercourse with the great 
 literary characters of Europe ; and his friend 
 has thrown over these literary travels, that charm 
 of detail by which we accompany Peiresc into 
 the libraries of the learned ; there with the his- 
 torian opening new sources of history, or with 
 the critic correcting manuscripts, and settling 
 points of erudition ; or by the opened cabinet of 
 the antiquary, decyphering obscure inscriptions, 
 and explaining medals ; in the galleries of the 
 curious in art, among their marbles, their pictures 
 and their prints, he has often revealed to the 
 artist some secret in his own art. In the museum 
 of the naturalist, or among the plants of the 
 botanist, there was no rarity of nature, and no 
 work of art on which he had not to communi- 
 cate ; his mind toiled with that impatience of 
 knowledge, that becomes a pain only in the 
 cessation of rest. In England Peiresc was the 
 associate of Camden and Selden, and had more 
 than one interview with that friend to literary 
 men, our calumniated James I. ; one may judge 
 by these who were the men whom he first sought, 
 and by whom he himself ever after was sought. 
 Such indeed were immortal friendships ! immortal 
 they may be justly called, from the objects in 
 which they concerned themselves, and fiom the 
 permanent results of their combined studies. 
 
THE MAN OF LETTERS. 259 
 
 Another peculiar greatness in this literary 
 character was his enlarged devotion to literature 
 for itself; he made his own universal curiosity 
 the source of knowledge to other men ; consi- 
 dering the studious as forming but one great 
 family wherever they were, the national reposi- 
 tories of knowledge in Europe, for Peiresc, 
 formed but one collection for the world. This 
 man of letters had possessed himself of their 
 contents, that he might have manuscripts col- 
 lated, unedited pieces explored, extracts supplied, 
 and even draughtsmen employed in remote parts 
 of the world, to furnish views and plans, and to 
 copy antiquities for the student, who in some 
 distant retirement discovered that the literary 
 treasures of the world were unfailingly opened 
 to him by the secret devotion of this man of 
 letters. 
 
 Carrying on the same grandeur in his views, 
 Europe could not limit his inextinguishable 
 curiosity; his universal mind busied itself in 
 every part of the habitable globe. He kept up 
 a noble traffic with all travellers, supplying 
 them with philosophical instruments and recent 
 inventions, by which he facilitated their dis- 
 coveries, and secured their reception even in 
 barbarous realms; in return he claimed, at his 
 own cost, for he was " born rather to give than 
 to receive," Says Gassendi, fresh importations 
 
260 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 of oriental literature, curious antiquities, or bo- 
 tanic rarities, and it was the curiosity of Peiresc 
 which first embellished his own garden, and 
 thence the gardens of Europe, with a rich 
 variety of exotic flowers and fruits. Whenever 
 he was presented with a medal, a vase, or a 
 manuscript, he never slept over the gift till, he 
 had discovered what the, donor delighted in; 
 and a book, a picture, or a plant, when money 
 could not be offered, fed their mutual passion 
 and sustained the general cause of science. 
 The correspondence of Peiresc branched out to 
 the farthest bounds of Ethiopia, connected both 
 Americas, and had touched the newly discovered 
 extremities of the universe, when this intrepid 
 mind closed in a premature death. 
 
 I have drawn this imperfect view of Peiresc's 
 character, that men of letters may be reminded 
 of the capacities they possess. There still re- 
 mains another peculiar feature. With all these 
 vast views the fortune of Peiresc was not great ; 
 and when he sometimes endured the reproach 
 of those whose sordidness was startled at this 
 prodigality of mind, and the great objects which 
 were the result, Peiresc replied that " a small 
 matter suffices for the natural wants of a literary 
 man, whose true wealth consists in the monu- 
 ments of arts, the treasures of his library, and 
 the brotherly affections of the ingenious," He 
 
THE MAN OF LETTERS. 261 
 
 was a French judge, but supported the dignity 
 more by his own. character than by luxury or 
 parade. He would not wear silk, and no tapestry 
 hangings ornamented his apartments; but the 
 walls were covered with the portraits of his 
 literary friends : and in the unadorned simpli- 
 city of his study, his books, his papers, and 
 his letters were scattered about him on the 
 tables, the seats, and the floor. There, stealing 
 from the world, he would sometimes admit to 
 his spare supper his friend Gassendi, " content," 
 says that amiable philosopher, " to have me. for 
 his guest." 
 
 Peiresc, like Pinelli, never published any work. 
 Few days, indeed, passed without Peiresc writing 
 a letter on the most curious inquiries ; epistles 
 which might be considered as so many little 
 books, observes Gassendi.* These men of letters 
 derived their pleasure, and perhaps their pride, 
 
 * The history of the letters of Peiresc is remarkable. He 
 preserved copies of his entire correspondence ; but it has been 
 recorded that many of these epistles were consumed, to save 
 fuel, by the obstinate avarice of a niece. This would not have 
 been a solitary instance of eminent men leaving their collec- 
 tions to unworthy descendants. However, after the silence of 
 more than a century, some of these letters have been recovered, 
 and may be found in some French journals of A. Millin. They 
 descended from the gentleman who married this very niece, 
 probably the remains of the collection. The letters answer to 
 the description of Gassendi, full of curious knowledge and obser 
 vation . 
 
262 THE MAN OF BETTERS. 
 
 from those vast strata of knowledge which their 
 curiosity had heaped together in their mighty 
 collections. They either were not endowed 
 with that faculty of genius which strikes out 
 aggregrate views, or with the talent of compo- 
 sition which embellishes minute ones. This 
 deficiency in the minds of such may be attri- 
 buted to a thirst of learning, which the very 
 means to allay can only inflame. From all 
 sides they are gathering information ; and that 
 knowledge seems never perfect to which every 
 day brings new acquisitions. With these men, 
 to compose is to hesitate ; and to revise is to be 
 mortified by fresh doubts and unsupplied omis- 
 sions. Peiresc was employed all his life in a 
 history of Provence ; and day after day he was 
 adding to the splendid mass. But " Peiresc," 
 observes Gassendi, " could not mature the birth 
 of his literary offspring, or lick it into any shape 
 of elegant form ; he was therefore content to 
 take the midwife's part, by helping the happier 
 labours of others." 
 
 Such are the silent cultivators of knowledge, 
 who are rarely authors, but who are often, how- 
 ever, contributing to the works of authors : 
 without their secret labours, the public would 
 not have possessed many valued works. That 
 curious knowledge of books which, since Europe 
 has become literary, is both the beginning and 
 
THE MAN OF LETTERS. 263 
 
 the result of knowledge ; and literary history 
 itself, which is the history of the age, of the 
 nation and of the individual, one of the im- 
 portant consequences of these vast collections 
 of books, has almost been created in our own 
 times. These sources, which offer so much de- 
 lightful instruction to the author and the artist, 
 are separate studies from the cultivation of 
 literature and the arts, and constitute more par- 
 ticularly the province of these men of letters. 
 
 The philosophical writer, who can adorn the 
 page of history, is not always equal to form it. 
 Robertson, after his successful history of Scot- 
 land, was long irresolute in his designs, and so 
 unpractised in researches of the sort he was 
 desirous of attempting, that his admirers had 
 nearly lost his popular productions, had not a 
 fortunate introduction to Dr. Birch enabled him 
 to open the clasped books, and to drink of the 
 sealed fountains. Robertson has confessed his 
 inadequate knowledge and his overflowing gra- 
 titude, in letters which I have elsewhere printed. 
 A suggestion by a man of letters has opened the 
 career of many an aspirant ; a hint from Walsh 
 conveyed a new conception of English poetry 
 to one of its masters. The celebrated treatise 
 of Grotius, on u Peace and War," was projected 
 by Peiresc. It was said of Magliabechi, who 
 knew all books and never wrote one, that by 
 
264 THE MAN OP LETTERS 
 
 his diffusive communications he was in some 
 respect concerned in all the great works of 
 his times. Sir Robert Cotton greatly assisted 
 Camden and Speed ; and that hermit of litera- 
 ture, Baker o r Cambridge, was still supplying 
 with his invaluable researches, Burnet, Kennet, 
 Hearne, of Middleton. Such is the concealed 
 aid which these men of letters afford our authors, 
 and which we may compare to those subterra- 
 neous streams, which flowing into spacious lakes, 
 are still, unobserved, enlarging the waters which 
 attract the public eye. 
 
 Such are these men of letters ! but the last 
 touches of their picture, given with all the 
 delicacy and warmth of a self-painter, may come 
 from the Count de Caylus, celebrated for his col- 
 lections and for his generous patronage of artists. 
 
 " His glory is confined to the mere power 
 which he has ,of being one day useful to letters 
 and to the arts ; for his whole life is employed 
 in collecting materials of which learned men and 
 artists make no use till after the death of him 
 who amassed them. It affords him a very sen- 
 sible pleasure to labour in hopes of being useful 
 to those who pursue the same course of studies, 
 while there are so great a number who die with-* 
 out discharging the debt which they incur to 
 society." 
 
( 265 ') 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 LITERARY OLD AGE. 
 
 THE old age of the literary character retains its 
 enjoyments, and usually its powers, a happi- 
 ness which accompanies no other. The old age 
 of coquetry with extinct beauty ; that of the 
 used idler left without a sensation ; that of a 
 grasping Croesus, who envies his heir ; or that 
 of the Machiavel who has no longer a voice in 
 the cabinet, makes all these persons resemble un- 
 happy spirits who cannot find their graves. But 
 for the aged man of letters memory returns to 
 her stores, and imagination is still on the wing, 
 amidst fresh discoveries and new designs. The 
 others fall like dry leaves, but he like ripe fruit, 
 and is valued when no longer on the tree. 
 
 The intellectual faculties, the latest to decline, 
 are often vigorous in the decrepitude of age. 
 The curious mind is still striking out into new 
 pursuits ; and the mind of genius is still creating. 
 ANCORA IMPARO ! " Yet I am learning !" Such 
 was the concise inscription of an ingenious de- 
 vice of an old man placed in a child's go-cart, 
 with an hour-glass upon it, which Michael Ange- 
 
266 LITERARY OLD AGE. 
 
 lo applied to his own vast genius in his ninetieth 
 
 year.* 
 
 Time, the great destroyer of other men's hap- 
 piness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature 
 to its possessor. A learned and highly intel- 
 lectual friend once said to me, " If 1 have ac- 
 quired more knowledge these last four years 
 than I had hitherto, I shall add materially to 
 my stores in the next four years ; and so at every 
 subsequent period of my life, should I acquire 
 only in the same proportion, the general mass of 
 my knowledge will greatly accumulate. If we 
 are not deprived by nature or misfortune, of the 
 means to pursue this perpetual augmentation of 
 knowledge, I do not see but we may be still 
 fully occupied and deeply interested even to 
 the last day of our earthly term." In such pur- 
 suits, where life is rather wearing out, than rust- 
 ing out, as Bishop Cumberland expressed it, 
 death scarcely can take us by surprise ; and much 
 less by those continued menaces which shake the 
 old age of men, of no intellectual pursuits, who 
 are dying so many years. 
 
 * This characteristic form closes the lectures of Mr. Fuseil, who 
 ^hus indirectly reminds us of the last words of Reynolds ; and 
 the graver of Blake, vital as the pencil of Fuseli, has raised the 
 person of Michael Angelo with its admirable portrait, breath- 
 ing inspiration. 
 
LITERARY OLD AGE. 267 
 
 Active enjoyments in the decline of life, then, 
 constitute the happiness of literary men ; the 
 study of the arts and literature spread a sun- 
 shine in the winter of their days ; and their own 
 works may be as delightful to themselves, as 
 roses plucked by the Norwegian amidst his 
 snows; and they will discover that unregarded 
 kindness of nature, who has given flowers that 
 only open in the evening, and flower through the 
 night-time. Necker offers a beautiful instance 
 even of the influence of late studies in life ; for 
 he tells us, that " the era of three-score and ten 
 is an agreeable age for writing ; your mind has 
 not lost its vigour, and envy leaves you in peace." 
 The opening of one of La Mothe le Vayer's 
 Treatises is striking : " I should but ill return 
 the favours God has granted me in the eightieth 
 year of my age, should I allow myself to give 
 way to that shameless want of occupation which 
 I have condemned all my life $" and the old 
 man proceeds with his " observations on the 
 composition and reading of books." The lite- 
 rary character has been fully occupied in the 
 eightieth and the ninetieth year of life. Isaac 
 Walton still glowed while writing some of the 
 most interesting biographies in his eighty-fifth 
 year, and in his ninetieth enriched the poetical 
 world with the first publication of a romantic 
 tale by Chalkhill, " the friend of Spenser." Bod- 
 mer, beyond eighty, was occupied on Homer, 
 
268 LITERARY OLD AGE. 
 
 and Wieland on Cicero's Letters.^ But the 
 delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course 
 of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of 
 youth even to old age ; the revolutions of mo- 
 dern chemistry kindled the curiosity of Dr. Reid 
 to his latest days ; and a deservedly popular au- 
 thor, now advanced in life, at this moment, has 
 discovered, in a class of reading to which be had 
 never been accustomed, what will probably sup- 
 ply him with fresh furniture for his mind during 
 life. Even the steps of time are retraced, and 
 what has passed away again becomes ours ; for 
 in advanced life a return to our early studies re- 
 freshes and reno votes the spirits ; we open the 
 poets who made us enthusiasts, and the philoso- 
 phers who taught us to tbink, with a new source 
 of feeling in our own experience. Adam Smith 
 confessed his satisfaction at this pleasure to pro- 
 fessor Dugald Stewart, while " he was rppprucing, 
 with the enthusiasm of a student, the tragic po- 
 ets of ancient Greece, and Sophocles and Euri- 
 pides lay open on his table." 
 
 Dans ses veines toujours un jeune sang bouillone, 
 Et Sophocle a cent ans peint encore Antigone. 
 
 The calm philosophic Hume found death only 
 could interrupt the keen pleasure he was again 
 receiving from Luc i an, and which could inspire 
 
 * See Curiosities of Literature on " The progress of old age 
 in new studies," Vol. i. 170. Sixth Edition. 
 
LITERARY OLD AGE. 269 
 
 him at the moment with a humorous self-dia- 
 logue with Charon. 
 
 Not without a sense of exultation has the lite- 
 rary character felt this happiness, in the unbroken 
 chain of his habits and his feelings. Hobbes ex- 
 ulted that he had outlived his enemies, and was 
 still the same Hobbes; and to demonstrate the 
 reality of this existence, published, in the eighty- 
 seventh year of his age, his version of the Odys- 
 sey, and the following year, his Iliad. Of the 
 happy results of literary habits in advanced life, 
 the Count de Tressan, the elegant abridger of the 
 old French romances, in his " literary advice to 
 his children," has drawn a most pleasing picture. 
 With a taste for study, which he found rather in- 
 convenient in the moveable existence of a man of 
 the world, and a military wanderer, he had however 
 contrived to reserve an hour or two every day for 
 literary pursuits ; the men of science, with whom 
 he had chiefly associated, appear to have turned 
 his passion to observation and knowledge, rather 
 than towards imagination and feeling ; the com- 
 bination formed a wreath for his grey hairs. 
 When Count de Tressan retired from a brilliant 
 to an affectionate circle, amidst his family, he 
 pursued his literary tastes, with the vivacity of 
 a young author inspired by the illusion of fame. 
 At the age of seventy-five, with the imagination 
 
270 LITERARY OLD AGE. 
 
 of a poet, he abridged, he translated, he recom- 
 posed his old Chivalric Romances, and his rean- 
 imated fancy struck fire in the veins of the 
 old man. Among the first designs of his retire- 
 ment was a singular philosophical legacy for his 
 children ; it was a view of the history and pro- 
 gress of the human mind of its principles, its 
 errors, and its advantages, as these were reflected 
 in himself; in the dawnings of his taste, the 
 secret inclinations of his mind, which the men 
 of genius of the age with whom he associated 
 had developed ; in expatiating on their memory, 
 he calls on his children to witness the happiness 
 of study, in those pleasures which were soothing 
 and adorning his old age. " Without know- 
 ledge, without literature," exclaims the venera- 
 ble enthusiast, " in whatever rank we are bom, 
 we can only resemble the vulgar." To the Cen- 
 tenary Fontenelle the Count de Tressan was 
 chiefly indebted for the happy life he derived 
 from the cultivation of literature ; and when this 
 man of a hundred years died, Tressan, himself 
 on the borders of the grave, would offer the last 
 fruits of his mind in an eloge to his ancient 
 master ; it was the voice of the dying to the 
 dead, a last moment of the love and sensibility 
 of genius, which feeble life could not extinguish. 
 
LITERARY OLD AGE. 271 
 
 If the genius of Cicero, inspired by the love 
 of litenxiure, has thrown something delightful 
 over this latest season of life, in his de Senectute; 
 and if to have written on old age, in old age, 
 is to have obtained a triumph over time,* the 
 literary character, when he shall discover him- 
 self like a stranger in a new world, when all 
 that he loved has not life, and all that lives has 
 no love for old age ; when he shall find himself 
 grown obsolete, when his ear shall cease to 
 listen, and nature has locked up the man entirely 
 within himself, even then the votary of literature 
 shall not feel the decline of life ; preserving the 
 flame alive on the altar, and even at his last 
 moments, in the act of sacrifice. Such was the 
 fate, perhaps now told for the first time, of the 
 great Lord Clarendon ; it was in the midst of 
 composition that his pen suddenly fell from his 
 hand on the paper, he took it up again, and 
 again it fell ; deprived of the sense of touch, he 
 found his hand without motion ; the earl per- 
 ceived himself struck by palsy and thus was 
 the life of the noble exile closed amidst the 
 warmth of a literary work, unfinished. 
 
 * Spurinna, or the Comforts of Old Age, by Sir Thomas 
 Bernard. 
 
(272) 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 LITERARY HONOURS. 
 
 LITERATURE is an avenue to glory, ever open 
 for those ingenious men who are deprived of 
 honours or of wealth. Like that illustrious Ro- 
 i I man who owed nothing to his ancestors, videtur 
 ex se natus, they seem self-born ; and in the 
 baptism of fame, they have given themselves 
 their name. The sons of a sword-maker, a pot- 
 ter, and a tax-gatherer, were the greatest of 
 Orators, the most majestic of poets, and the most 
 graceful of the satirists of antiquity. The elo- 
 quent Massillon, the brilliant Flechier, Rousse.au 
 and Diderot ; Johnson, Akenside, and Franklin, 
 arose amidst the most humble avocations. 
 
 It is the prerogative of genius to elevate ob- 
 scure men to the higher class of society 5 if the 
 influence of wealth in the present day has been 
 justly said to have created a new aristocracy of 
 its own, and where they already begin to be 
 jealous of their ranks, we may assert that genius 
 creates a sort of intellectual nobility, which is 
 conferred on some Literary Characters by the 
 involuntary feelings of the public ; and were 
 
LITERARY HONOURS. 273 
 
 men of genius to bear arms, they might consist 
 not of imaginary things, of griffins and chime- 
 ras, but of deeds performed and of public works 
 in existence. When Dondi raised the great as- 
 tronomical clock at the University of Padua 
 which was long the admiration of Europe, it 
 gave a name and nobility to its maker and all 
 his descendants ; there still lives a Marquis Dondi 
 dal' Horologio. Sir Hugh Middleton, in memory 
 of his vast enterprise, changed his former arms 
 to bear three piles, by which instruments he had 
 strengthened the works he had invented, when 
 his genius poured forth the waters through our 
 metropolis, distinguishing it from all others in 
 the world. Should not Evelyn have inserted 
 an oak-tree in his bearings ? for our author's 
 " Sylva" occasioned the plantation of " many 
 millions of timber-trees," and the present navy 
 of Great Britain has been constructed with the 
 oaks which the genius of Evelyn planted. If 
 the public have borrowed the names of some 
 Lords to grace a Sandwich and a Spencer, we 
 may be allowed to raise into titles of literary 
 nobility those distinctions which the public voice 
 has attached to some authors; JEschylus Potter, 
 Athenian Stuart, and Anacreon Moore. 
 
 This intellectual nobility is not chimerical ; 
 does it not separate a man from the crowd ? When- 
 
274 LITERARY HONOURS. 
 
 ever the rightful possessor appears, will not the 
 eyes of all spectators be fixed on him ? I allude 
 to scenes which I have witnessed. Will not 
 even literary honours add a nobility to nobility ? 
 and teach the nation to esteem a name which 
 might otherwise be hidden under its rank, and 
 remain unknown ? Our illustrious list of literary 
 noblemen is far more glorious than the satirical 
 " Catalogue of Noble Authors," drawn up by a 
 polished and heartless cynic, who has pointed 
 his brilliant shafts at all who were chivalrous in 
 spirit, or appertained to the family of genius. 
 One may presume on the existence of this in- 
 tellectual nobility, from the extraordinary cir- 
 cumstance that the Great have actually felt a 
 jealousy of the literary rank. But no rivality 
 can exist in the solitary honour conferred on an 
 author ; an honour not derived from birth, nor 
 creation, but from PUBLIC OPINION ; and as in- 
 separable from his name, as an essential quality 
 is from its object ; for the diamond will sparkle 
 and the rose will be fragrant, otherwise, it is 
 no diamond nor rose. The great may well 
 condescend to be humble to Genius, since genius 
 pays its homage in becoming proud of that hu- 
 mility. Cardinal Richelieu was mortified at the 
 celebrity of the unbending Corneille ; several 
 noblemen were at Pope's indifference to their 
 rank ; and Magliabechi, the book-prodigy of his 
 age, whom every literary stranger visited at 
 
LITERARY HONOURS. 275 
 
 Florence, assured Lord Raley, that the Duke 
 of Tuscany had become jealous of the attention 
 he was receiving from foreigners, as they usu- 
 ally went first to see Magliabechi before the 
 Grand Duke. A confession by Montesquieu 
 states, with open caudour, a fact in his life, which 
 confirms this jealousy of the Great with the Li- 
 terary Character. " On my entering into life, 
 I was spoken of as a man of talents, and people 
 of condition gave me a favourable reception; 
 but when the success of my Persian Letters 
 proved perhaps that I was not unworthy of my 
 reputation, and the public began to esteem me, 
 my reception with the great was discouraging, 
 and I experienced innumerable mortifications." 
 Montesquieu subjoins a reflection sufficiently 
 humiliating for the mere nobleman : " The v 
 Great, inwardly wounded with the glory of a 
 celebrated name, seek to humble it. In general 
 he only can patiently endure the fame of others, 
 who deserves fame himself." This sort of jea- 
 lousy unquestionably prevailed in the late Lord 
 Orford ; a wit, a man of the world, and a man 
 of rank, but while he considered literature as a 
 mere amusement, he was mortified at not ob- 
 taining literary celebrity ; he felt his authorial, 
 always beneath his personal character ; he broke 
 with every literary man who looked up to him 
 as their friend j and how he has delivered his 
 
276 LITERARY HONOURS. 
 
 feelings on Johnson, Goldsmith and Gray, whom 
 unfortunately for him he personally knew, it fell 
 to my lot to discover ; I could add, but not dimi- 
 nish, what has been called the severity of that 
 delineation-* 
 
 Who was the dignified character, Lord Ches- 
 terfield or Samuel Johnson, when the great au- 
 thor, proud of his labour, rejected his lordship's 
 sneaking patronage ? " I Talue myself," says 
 Swift, " upon making the ministry desire to be 
 acquainted with Parnell, and not Parnell with 
 the ministry." Piron would not suffer the Lite- 
 rary Character to be lowered in his presence. 
 Entering the apartment of a nobleman, who was 
 conducting another peer to the stairs head, the 
 latter stopped to make way for Piron. " Pass 
 on my lord," said the noble master, u pass, he 
 is only a poet." Piron replied, " since our qual- 
 ities are declared, I shall take my rank," and 
 placed himself before thd lord. Nor is this 
 pride, the true source of elevated character, re- 
 fused to the great artist as well as the great au- 
 thor. Michael Angelo, invited by Julius II. to 
 the Court of Rome, found that intrigue had in- 
 disposed his Holiness towards him, and more than 
 once, the great artist was suffered to linger in at- 
 
 * Calamities of Authors, vol. i. 
 
LITERARY HONOURS. 277 
 
 tendance in the anti-chamber. One day the in- 
 dignant man of genius exclaimed, " tell his 
 holiness, if he wants me, he must look for me 
 elsewhere." He flew back to his beloved Flo- 
 rence, to proceed with that celebrated cartoon, 
 which afterwards became a favourite study with 
 all artists. Thrice the Pope wrote for his return, 
 and at length menaced the little state of Tuscany 
 with war, if Michael Angelo prolonged his ab- 
 sence. He returned. The sublime artist knelt 
 at the feet of the Father of the Church, turning 
 aside his troubled countenance in silence ; an in- 
 termeddling Bishop offered himself as a mediator, 
 apologising for our artist by observing, that " of 
 this proud humour are these painters made !" Ju- 
 lius turned to this pitiable mediator, and, as Vasari 
 tells used a switch on this occasion, observing, 
 " you speak injuriously of him, while I am silent. 
 It is you who are ignorant." Raising Michael 
 Angelo, Julius II. embraced the man of genius. 
 " I can make lords of you every day, but I can- 
 not create a Titian," said the Emperor Charles 
 V. to his courtiers, who had become jealous of 
 the hours, and the half-hours, which that mon- 
 arch managed, that he might converse with the 
 man of genius at his work. There is an elevated 
 intercourse between Power and Genius ; and if 
 they are deficient in reciprocal esteem, neither 
 are great. The intellectual nobility seems to 
 
278 LITERARY HONOURS. 
 
 have been asserted by De Harlay, a great French 
 statesman, for when the academy was once not 
 received with royal honours, he complained to 
 the French monarch, observing, that when " a 
 man of letters was presented to Francis I. for the 
 first time, the king always advanced three steps 
 from the throne to receive him." 
 
 If ever the voice of individuals can recom- 
 pense a life of literary labour it is in speaking a 
 foreign accent it sounds like the distant plau- 
 dit of posterity. The distance of space between 
 the literary character and the inquirer in some 
 respects represents the distance of time which 
 separates the author from the next age. Fon- 
 tenelle was never more gratified than when a 
 Swede, arriving at the gates of Paris, inquired of 
 the custom-house officers where Fontenelle re- 
 sided, and expressed his indignation that not 
 one of them bad ever heard of his name. Hobbes 
 expresses his proud delight that his portrait was 
 sought after by foreigners, and that the Great 
 Duke of Tuscany made the philosopher the ob- 
 ject of his first inquiries. Camden was not in- 
 sensible to the visits of German noblemen, who 
 were desirous of seeing the British Pliny; and 
 Pocock, while he received no aid from patronage 
 at home for his Oriental studies, never relaxed 
 in those unrequited labours, from the warm per- 
 
LITERARY HONOURS. 27$ 
 
 sonal testimonies of learned foreigners, who has- 
 tened to see and converse with this prodigy of 
 eastern learning. 
 
 Yes ! to the very presence of the man of genius 
 will the world spontaneously pay their tribute of 
 respect, of admiration, or of love ; many a pil- 
 grimage has he lived to receive, and many a 
 crowd has followed his footsteps. There are 
 days in the life of genius which repay its suffer- 
 ings. Demosthenes confessed he was pleased 
 when even a fish-woman of Athens pointed him 
 out. Corneille had his particular seat in the 
 theatre, and the audience would rise to salute 
 him when he entered. At the presence of Raynal 
 in the House of Commons, the speaker was re- 
 quested to suspend the debate till that illustrious 
 foreigner, who had written on the English parlia- 
 ment, was there placed and distinguished, to his 
 honour. Spinosa, when he gained a humble 
 livelihood by grinding optical glasses, at an ob- 
 scure village in Holland, was visited by the first 
 General in Europe, who, for the sake of this 
 philosophical conference, suspended his march. 
 
 In all ages, and in all countries, has this feeling 
 been created ; nor is it a temporary ebullition, 
 nor an individual honour ; it comes out of the 
 heart of man. In Spain, whatever was most beau- 
 tiful in its kind was described by the name of the 
 
280 LITERARY HONOURS. 
 
 great Spanish bard ; every thing excellent was 
 called a Lope. Italy would furnish a volume of 
 the public honours decreed to literary men, nor 
 is that spirit extinct, though the national character 
 has fallen by the chance of fortune; and Metas- 
 tasio and Tiraboschi received what had been 
 accorded to Petrarch and to Poggio. Germany, 
 patriotic to its literary characters, is the land of 
 the enthusiasm of genius. On the borders of the 
 Linnet, in the public walk of Zurich, the monu- 
 ment of Gesner, erected by the votes of his fellow- 
 citizens, attests their sensibility ; and a solemn 
 funeral honoured the remains of Klopstock, led 
 by the senate of Hamburgh, with fifty thousand 
 votaries, so penetrated by one universal sentiment, 
 that this multitude preserved a mournful silence, 
 and the interference of the police ceased to be 
 necessary through the city at the solemn burial 
 of the man of genius. Has even Holland proved 
 insensible ? The statue of Erasmus, in Rotter- 
 dam, still animates her young students, and offers 
 a noble example to her neighbours of the influ- 
 ence even of the sight of the statue of a man of 
 genius ; nor must it be forgotten that the senate 
 of Rotterdam declared of the emigrant Bayle, 
 that " such a man should not be considered as a 
 foreigner." In France, since Francis I. created 
 genius, and Louis XIV. knew to be liberal to it, 
 the impulse was communicated to the French 
 people. There the statues of their illustrious 
 
LITERARY HONOURS. 281 
 
 men spread inspiration on the spots which living 
 they would have haunted in their theatres the 
 great dramatists ; in their Institute their illus- 
 trious authors ; in their public edifices their other 
 men of genius.* This is worthy of the country 
 which privileged the family of La Fontaine to 
 be for ever exempt from taxes, and decreed that 
 the productions of the mind were not seizable, 
 when the creditors of Crebillon would have at- 
 tached the produce of his tragedies. These dis- 
 tinctive honours accorded to genius were in 
 unison with their decree respecting the will of 
 Bayle. It was the subject of a lawsuit between 
 the heir of the will, and the inheritor by blood. 
 The latter contested that this great literary cha- 
 racter, being a fugitive for religion and dying in 
 a prohibited country, was without the power of 
 disposing of his property, and that our author, 
 
 * We cannot bury the Fame of our English worthies that 
 exists before us, independent of ourselves ; but we bury the 
 influence of their inspiring presence in those immortal memo- 
 rials of genius easy to be read by all men, their statues and their 
 busts, consigning them to spots seldom visited, and often too 
 obscure to be viewed. Count Algarotti has ingeniously said, 
 " L'argent que nous employons en tabatieres et en pompons 
 servoit aux anciens a celebrer la memoire des grands hommes 
 par des monumens dignes $e passer a la posterite ; et la ou Ton 
 brule des feux de joie pour urie victoire lemportee, ils eleverent 
 des arcs de triornphe de porphyre et de marbre." May we 
 not, for our honour, and for the advantage of our artists, pre- 
 dict better times for ourselves ? 
 z 2 
 
282 LITERARY HONOURS. 
 
 when he resided in Holland, was civilly dead. 
 In the parliament of Toulouse the judge decided 
 that learned men are free in all countries ; that 
 he who had sought in a foreign land an asylum 
 from his love of letters, was no fugitive ; that it 
 was unworthy of France to treat as a stranger 
 a son in whom she gloried ; and he protested 
 against the notion of a civil death to such a man 
 as Bayle, whose name was living throughout Eu- 
 rope. 
 
 Even the most common objects are conse- 
 crated when associated with the memory of the 
 man of genius. We still seek for his tomb on 
 the spot where it has vanished ; the enthusiasts 
 of genius still wander on the hills of Pausilippe, 
 and muse on Virgil to retrace his landscape ; or 
 as Sir William Jones ascended Forest-hill, with 
 the Allegro in his hand, and step by step, seemed 
 in his fancy to have trodden in the foot-path of 
 Milton ; there is a grove at Magdalen College 
 which retains the name of Addisou's walk, where 
 still the student will linger ; and there is a cave 
 at Macao, which is still visited by the Portugueze 
 from a national feeling, where Camoens is said 
 to have composed his Lusiad. When Petrarch 
 was passing by his native town, he was received 
 with the honours of his fame ; but when the 
 heads of the town, unawares to Petrarch, con- 
 
LITERARY HONOURS. 
 
 ducted him to the house where the poet was 
 born, and informed him that the proprietor 
 had often wished to make alterations, but that 
 the towns-people had risen to insist that the 
 house which has consecrated by the birth of 
 Petrarch should be preserved unchanged ; this 
 was a triumph more affecting to Petrarch than 
 his coronation at Rome. In the village of Cer- 
 taldo is still shown the house of Boccaccio ; and 
 on a turret are seen the arms of the Medici, which 
 they had sculptured there, with an inscription al- 
 luding to a small house and a name which filled 
 the world. " Foreigners," says Anthony Wood of 
 Milton, " have, out of pure devotion, gone to 
 Bread-street to see the house and chamber where 
 he was born ;" and at Paris the house which 
 Voltaire inhabited, and at Femey his study, are 
 both preserved inviolate. Thus is the very 
 apartment of a man of genius, the chair he 
 studied in, the table he wrote on, contemplated 
 with curiosity; the spot is full of local im- 
 pressions. And all this happens from an unsatis- 
 fied desire to see and hear him whom we never 
 can see nor hear ; yet in a moment of illusion, 
 if we listen to a traditional conversation, if we 
 can revive one of his feelings, if we can catch, 
 but a dim image of his person, we reproduce 
 this man of genius before us, on whose features 
 we so often dwell. Even the rage of the mill- 
 
294 LITERARY HONOURS. 
 
 tary spirit has taught itself to respect the abode 
 of genius; and Caesar and Sylla, who never 
 spared their own Roman blood, alike felt their 
 spirit rebuked, and saved the literary city of 
 Athens. The house of the man of genius has 
 been spared amidst contending empires, from 
 the days of Pindar to those of Buffon ; and the 
 recent letter of Prince fchwartzenberg to the 
 Countess, for the preservation of the philoso- 
 pher's chateau, is a memorial of this elevated 
 feeling.* 
 
 And the meanest things, the very household 
 stuff, associated with the memory of the man of 
 genius, become the objects of our affections. At 
 
 * In the grandeur of Milton's verse we perceive the feeling 
 he associated with this literary honour. 
 
 " The great Emathian conqueror bid spare 
 The house of Pindarus when temple and tower 
 Went to the ground ." Sonnet VIII. 
 
 " To the Countess of Buffon, in Montbard. 
 
 " THE Emperor, my Sovereign, having ordered me to pro- 
 vide for the security of all places dedicated to the sciences, 
 and of such as recall the remembrance of men who have done 
 honour to the age in which they lived, I have the honour to 
 send to your ladyship a safeguard for your chateau of Mont- 
 bard. 
 
 " The residence of the Historian of Nature must be sacred 
 in the eyes of all the friends of science. It is a domain 
 which belongs to all mankind. I have the honour, &c. 
 
 " SCHWARTZENBERG." 
 
LITERARY HONOURS. 285 
 
 a festival in honour of Thomson the poet, the 
 chair in which he composed part of his Seasons 
 was produced, and appears to have communicat- 
 ed some of the raptures to which he was liable 
 who had sat in that chair ; Rabelais, among his 
 drollest inventions, could not have imagined that 
 his old cloak would have been preserved in the 
 University of Montpellier for future doctors to 
 wear on the day they took their degree ; nor 
 could Shakespeare, that the mulberry tree which 
 he planted would have been multiplied into re- 
 lics. But in such instances the feeling is right 
 with a wrong direction ; and while the populace 
 are exhausting their emotions on an old tree, an 
 old chair, and an old cloak, they are paying that 
 involuntary tribute to genius which forms its pride, 
 and will generate the race. 
 
( 286 ) 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 
 
 WHEREFORE should not the literary character 
 be associated in utility or glory with the other 
 professional classes of society ? These indeed 
 press more immediately on the attention of men; 
 they are stimulated by personal interests, and 
 they are remunerated by honours; while the 
 literary character, from its habits, is secluded ; 
 producing its usefulness in concealment, and 
 often at a late period in life ; not always too of 
 immediate application, and often even unvalued 
 by the passing generation. 
 
 It is curious to observe of the characters of the 
 other classes in society, how each rises or falls in 
 public esteem, according to the exigencies of the 
 times. Ere we had swept from the seas all the 
 fleets of our rivals, the naval hero was the popu- 
 lar character ; while the military, from the poli- 
 tical panic occasioned by standing armies, was 
 invariably lowered in public regard; the extra- 
 ordinary change of circumstances, and the genius 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 287 
 
 of one man, have entirely reversed the public 
 feeling.* 
 
 The commercial character was long, even in 
 this country, placed very low in the scale of 
 honour ; the merchant was considered merely as 
 a money-trader, profiting by the individual dis- 
 tress of the nobleman, and afterwards was viewed 
 with jealous eyes by the country gentleman. A 
 Dutch monarch, who initiated us into the myste- 
 ries of banks and loans, by combining commercial 
 influence with political power, raised the mercan- 
 tile character. 
 
 But the commercial prosperity of a nation 
 inspires no veneration in mankind ; nor will its 
 military power win their affection. There is an 
 interchange of opinions, as well as of spices and 
 specie, which induces nations to esteem each 
 other y and there is a glorious succession of au- 
 
 * Mr. Gifford, in his notes to his recent Translation of Per- 
 sius, with his accustomed keenness of spirit, has detected this 
 fact in our popular manners. le Persius, whenever he has oc- 
 casion for a more worthless character than ordinary, common- 
 ly repairs to the camp for him. Fielding and Smollet, in com- 
 pliance with the cant of their times, manifested a patriotic 
 abhorrence of the military ; and seldom went farther for a 
 blockhead, a parasite, or an adept in low villainy, than the Ar- 
 mylist. We have outlived this stupid piece of injustice, and a 
 1 led-captain' is no longer considered as the indispensable rice 
 of every novel .' ' 
 
288 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 
 
 thors, as well as of seamen and soldiers, for ever 
 standing before the eyes of the universe. 
 
 It is by our authors that foreigners have been 
 taught to subdue their own prejudices. About 
 the year 1700, the Italian Gemelli told all Eu- 
 rope that he could find nothing among us but 
 our writings to distinguish us from the worst of 
 barbarians. Our civil wars, and our great revo- 
 lution, had probably disturbed the Italian's ima- 
 gination. Too long we appeared a people whose 
 genius partook of the density and variableness of 
 our climate, incapacitated even by situation, from 
 the enjoyment of arts which had not yet travel- 
 led to us ; and as if Nature herself had designed 
 to disjoin us from more polished neighbours and 
 brighter skies. We now arbitrate among the 
 nations of the world ; we possess their involunta- 
 ry esteem ; nor is there a man of genius among 
 them who stands unconnected with our intellec- 
 tual sovereignty. 
 
 t: We conquered France, but felt our captive's charms, 
 Her arts victorious triumphed o'er our arms." 
 
 At the moment Pope was writing these lines, 
 that silent operation of genius had commenced, 
 which changes the fate of nations. The first 
 writers of France were passing over into England 
 to learn to think and write, or thought and wrote 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 89 
 
 like Englishmen in France.* This singular revo- 
 lution in the human mind, and, by its re-action, 
 in human affairs, was not effected by merchants 
 profiting over them by superior capital ; or by ad- 
 mirals and generals humiliating them by victories ; 
 but by our authors, whose works are now printed 
 at foreign presses, a circumstance which proves, 
 as much as the commerce and prowess of Eng- 
 land, the ascendancy of her genius. Even had 
 our nation displayed more limited resources than 
 its awful powers have opened ; had the sphere of 
 
 * Voltaire borrowed all the genius of our country ; ou? 
 poetry and our philosophy. Buffon began by translating 
 Hales's " Vegetable Static's;" and before Linnaeus classed his 
 plants, and Buffon began his Natural History, our own na- 
 turalist Ray had opened their road to Nature. Bacon, JNew- 
 ton, and Boyle, reduced the fanciful philosophy of France 
 into experiment and demonstration. Helvetius, Diderot, and 
 their brothers, gleaned their pretended discoveries from our 
 Shaftesbury, Mandeville, and Toland, whom sometimes they 
 only translated. Even our novelists were closely imitated. 
 Our great compilations of voyages and travels, Hackluyt, 
 Churchill, &c. furnished Montesquieu with the moral facts he 
 required for his large picture of his "Esprit des Loix." The 
 Cyclopaedia of Chambers was the parent of the French work. 
 Even historical compilers existed in our country before the 
 race appeared in France. Our Universal History, and Stan- 
 ley, Echard, and Hooke, preceded Rollin and other French 
 abridgers of history ; while Hume and our philosophical his- 
 torians set them a nobler example, which remains for them 
 yet to rival. 
 
 A a 
 
90 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 
 
 its dominion been only its island boundaries, 
 could the same literary character have predomi- 
 nated, we might have attained to the same emi- 
 nence and admiration in the hearts of our conti- 
 nental neighbours. The small cities of Athens 
 and of Florence will perpetually attest the influ- 
 ence of the literary character over other nations ; 
 the one received the tributes of the mistress of 
 the universe, when the Romans sent their youth 
 to be educated at Athens ; while the other, at the 
 revival of letters, beheld every polished European 
 crowding to its little court. 
 
 There is a small portion of men, who appear 
 marked out by nature and habit, for the purpose 
 of cultivating their thoughts in peace, and giving 
 activity to their sentiments, by disclosing them 
 to the people. Those who govern a nation can- 
 not at the same time enlighten them ; authors 
 stand between the governors and the governed. 
 
 Important discoveries are often obtained by ac- 
 cident ; but the single thought of a man of genius, 
 which has sometimes changed the dispositions of 
 a people, and even of an age, is slowly matured 
 in meditation. Even the mechanical inventions 
 of genius must first become perfect in its own so- 
 litary abode, ere the world can possess them. 
 The people are a vast body, of which men of 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 291 
 
 genius are the eyes and the hands ; and the pub- 
 lic mind is the creation of the philosophical wri- 
 ter ; these are axioms as demonstrable as any in 
 Euclid, and as sure in their operation, as any 
 principle in mechanics. When Epicurus publish- 
 ed his doctrines, men immediately began to ex- 
 press themselves with freedom on the established 
 religion ; the dark and fearful superstitions of pa- 
 ganism fell into neglect, and mouldered away, 
 the inevitable fate of established falsehood. 
 When Machiavel, living amidst the principalities 
 of Italy, where stratagem and assassination were 
 the politics of those wretched rivals, by lifting 
 the veil from these cabinets of banditti, that ca- 
 lumniated men of genius, alarmed the world by 
 exposing a system subversive of all human virtue 
 and happiness, and led the way to political free- 
 dom. When Locke and Montesquieu appeared, 
 the old systems of government were reviewed ; 
 the principles of legislation were developed : 
 and many changes have succeeded, and are still 
 to succeed. Politicians affect to disbelieve that 
 abstract principles possess any considerable influ- 
 ence on the conduct of the subject. " In times 
 of tranquillity," they say, " they are not wanted, 
 and in times of confusion they are never heard." 
 But this has been their error ; it is in leisure, 
 when they are not wanted, that they are studied 
 by the speculative part of mankind ; and when 
 
292 raE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 
 
 they are wanted, they are already prepared for 
 the active multitude, who come like a phalanx, 
 pressing each other with an unity of feeling and 
 an integrity of force. Paley would not close his 
 eyes on what was passing before him ; and he has 
 observed, that during the convulsive troubles at 
 Geneva, the political theory of Rousseau was 
 prevalent in their contests ; while in the political 
 disputes of our country, those ideas of civil au- 
 thority displayed in the works of Locke, recurred 
 in every form. How, therefore, can the charac- 
 ter of an author be considered as subordinate in 
 society ? Politicians do not secretly think so, at 
 the moment they are proclaiming it to the world ; 
 nor do they fancy, as they would have us ima- 
 gine, that paper and pens are only rags and fea- 
 thers ; whatever they affect, the truth is, that 
 they consider the worst actions of men, as of far 
 less consequence than the propagation of their 
 opinions. They well know, as Sophocles de- 
 clared, that " opinion is ever stronger than truth." 
 Have politicians not often exposed their disguis- 
 ed terrors? Books, and sometimes their authors, 
 have been burnt ; but burning books is no part of 
 their refutation. Cromwell was alarmed when 
 he saw the Oceana of Harrington, and dreaded 
 the effects of that volume more than the plots of 
 the royalists; while Charles II. trembled at an 
 author, only in his manuscript state ; and in the 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 93 
 
 height of terror, and to the honour of genius, it 
 was decreed, that " Scribere est agere."^ 
 
 Observe the influence of authors in forming 
 the character of men, where the solitary man of 
 genius stamps his own on a people. The par- 
 simonious habits, the money-getting precepts, 
 the wary cunning, and not the most scrupulous 
 means to obtain the end, of Dr. Franklin, im- 
 printed themselves on his Americans ; loftier 
 feelings could not elevate a man of genius, who 
 became the founder of a trading people, retain- 
 ing the habits of a journeyman printer : while 
 the elegant tastes of Sir William Jones could 
 inspire the servants of a commercial corporation 
 to open new and vast sources of knowledge ; a 
 mere company of traders, influenced by the lite- 
 rary character, enlarge the stores of the imagina- 
 
 * Algernon Sydney was condemned to death for certain 
 manuscripts found in his library ; and the reason alleged was, 
 that scribere est agere that to write is to act. The papers which 
 served to condemn Sydney, it appears, were only answers to 
 Filmer's obsolete Defence of Monarchical Tyracny. The 
 metaphysical inference drawn by the crown lawyers is not a 
 necessary consequence. Authors may write that which they 
 may not afterwards approve ; their manuscript opinions are 
 very liable to be changed, and authors even change those 
 opinions they have published. A man ought only to lost his 
 head for his opinions, in the metaphysical sense ; opinions 
 against opinions ; but not an axe against a pen. 
 
 A a 2 
 
294 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 
 
 tion, and collect fresh materials for the history of 
 human nature. 
 
 I have said that authors produce their useful- 
 ness in privacy, and that their good is not of 
 immediate application, and often unvalued by 
 their own generation. On this occasion the 
 name of Evelyn always occurs to me. This 
 author supplied the public with nearly thirty 
 works, at a time when taste and curiosity were 
 not yet domiciliated in our country; his patriot- 
 ism warmed beyond the eightieth year of his age ; 
 and in his dying hand he held another legacy for 
 his nation. Whether his enthusiasm was intro- 
 ducing to us a taste for medals and prints ; or 
 intent on purifying the city of smoke and smells, 
 and to sweeten it by plantations of native plants; 
 or having enriched our orchards and our gardens ; 
 placed summer-ices on our tables, and varied 
 even the sallads of our country ; furnishing " a 
 Gardener's Kalendar," which, as Cowly said, was 
 to last as long " as months and years," and the 
 horticulturist will not forget Father Evelyn in the 
 heir of his fame, Millar ; whether the philosopher 
 of the Royal Society, or the lighter satirist of the 
 toilette, or the fine moralist for active as well as 
 co itemplative life ; yet in all these changes of a 
 studious life, the better part of his history has 
 not been told. While Britain retains her awful 
 
THE INFLUENCE OP AUTHORS. 295 
 
 situation among the nations of Europe, the 
 " Sylva" of Evelyn will endure with her tri- 
 umphant oaks. In the third edition of that 
 work the heart of the patriot exults at its result : 
 he tells Charles I. " how many millions of tim- 
 ber trees, besides infinite others, have been 
 propagated and planted at the instigation, and 
 by the sole direction of this work." It was an 
 author in his studious retreat, who casting a 
 prophetic eye on the age we live in, secured the 
 late victories of our naval sovereignty. Inquire 
 at the Admiralty how the fleets of Nelson have 
 been constructed ? and they can tell you that it 
 was with the oaks which the genius of Evelyn 
 planted.* 
 
 The same character existed in France, where 
 De Serres in 1599 composed a work on the cul- 
 tivation of mulberry trees in reference to the art 
 of raising silk-worms. He taught his fellow 
 citizens to convert a leaf into silk, and silk to 
 become the representative of gold. Our author 
 encountered the hostility of the prejudices of his 
 times in giving his country one of her staple 
 commodities ; but I lately received a medal re- 
 
 * Since this has been written, the Diary of Evelyn is pub- 
 lished : it cannot add to his general character, whatever it 
 may be : but we may anticipate much curious amusement 
 from the diary of a literary character whose studies formed the 
 business of life, 
 
296 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 
 
 cently struck in honour of De Serres, by the 
 Agricultural Society of the department of the 
 Seine. We are too slow in commemorating the 
 genius of our own country ; and our authors 
 are defrauded even in the debt we are daily in- 
 curring of their posthumous fame. 
 
 When an author writes on a national subject, 
 he awakens all the knowledge which lies buried 
 in the sleep of nations ; he calls around him, as 
 it were, every man of talents ; and though his 
 own fame should be eclipsed by his successors, 
 yet the emanation, the morning light, broke from 
 his source. Our naturalist Ray, though no man 
 was more modest in his claims, delighted to tell a 
 friend that " since the publication of his catalogue 
 of Cambridge Plants, many were prompted to 
 botanical studies, and to herbalise in their walks 
 in the fields." A work in France, under the title 
 of " L'Ami des Hommes," first spread there a 
 general passion for agricultural pursuits ; and al- 
 though the national ardour carried all to excess, 
 yet marshes were drained and waste lands en- 
 closed. The Emilius of Rousseau, whatever 
 errors and extravagancies a system which would 
 bring us back to nature may contain, operated 
 a complete revolution in modern Europe, by 
 changing the education of men ; and the bold- 
 ness and novelty of some of its principles com- 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 97 
 
 munieated a new spring to the human intellect. 
 The commercial world owes to two retired phi- 
 losophers, in the solitude of their study, Locke 
 and Smith, those principles which dignify Trade 
 into a liberal pursuit, and connect it with the hap- 
 piness of a people. 
 
 Beccaria> who dared to raise his voice in favour 
 of humanity, against the prejudices of many cen- 
 turies, by his work on " Crimes and Punishments, 3 * 
 at length abolished torture ; and Locke and Vol- 
 taire, on u Toleration," have long made us tole- 
 rant. But the principles of many works of this 
 stamp have become so incorporated in our minds 
 and feelings, that we can scarcely at this day con- 
 ceive the fervour they excited at the time, or the 
 magnanimity of their authors in the decision of 
 their opinions. 
 
 And to whom does the world owe more than 
 to the founders of miscellaneous writing, or the 
 creators of new and elegant tastes in European 
 nations? We possess one peculiar to ourselves. 
 To Granger our nation is indebted for that 
 visionary delight of recalling from their graves 
 the illustrious dead ; and, as it were, of living 
 with them, as far as a familiarity with their fea- 
 tures and their very looks forms a part of life. 
 This pleasing taste for portraits seems peculiar 
 
298 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 
 
 to our nation, and was created by the ingenuity 
 of a solitary author, who had very nearly aban- 
 doned those many delightful associations which 
 a collection of fine portraits affords, by the want 
 of a due comprehension of their nature [among 
 his friends, and even at first in the public. Be- 
 fore the miscellanists rose, learning was the soli- 
 tary enjoyment of the insulated learned; they 
 spoke a language of their own ; and they lived 
 in a desert, separated from the world : but the 
 miscellanies became their interpreters, opening 
 a communication between two spots, close to 
 each other, yet which were so long separated, 
 the closet and the world. These authors were 
 not Bacons, Newtons, and Leibnitzes ; but they 
 were Addison, Fontenelle, and Feyjoo, the first 
 popular authors in their nations who taught En- 
 gland, France, and Spain to become a reading 
 people ; while their fugitive page imbues with 
 intellectual sweetness an uncultivated mind, like 
 the performed mould which the swimmer in the 
 Persian Sadi took up ; it was a piece of common 
 earth, but astonished at its fragrance, he asked 
 whether it were musk or amber f " I am nothing 
 but earth ; but roses were planted on my soil, 
 and their odorous virtues have deliciously pene- 
 trated through all my pores ; I have retained the 
 infusion of sweetness ; otherwise I had been but 
 a lump of earth." 
 
THE INFLUENCE OP AUTHORS. 299 
 
 There is a singleness and unity in the pursuits 
 of genius, through all ages, which produces a 
 sort of consanguinity in the characters of authors. 
 Men of genius, in their different classes, living at * J 
 distinct periods, or in remote countries, seem to 
 be the same persons with another name : and 
 thus the literary character who has long depart- 
 ed, seems only to have transmigrated. In the 
 great march of the human intellect he is still oc- 
 cupying the same place, and he is still carrying 
 on, with the same powers, his great work, 
 through a line of centuries. 
 
 In the history of genius there is no chronology, 
 for to us every thing it has done is present ; and 
 the earliest attempt is connected with the most 
 recent. Many men of genius must arise before a 
 particular man of genius can appear. Before 
 Homer there were other bards \ve have a ca- 
 talogue of their names and works. Corneille 
 could not have been the chief dramatist of 
 France, had not the founders of the French 
 drama preceded him ; and Pope could not have 
 appeared before Dryden. Whether the works of 
 genius are those of pure imagination, or searches 
 after truth, they are alike tinctured by the feelings 
 and the events of their times ; but the man of 
 genius must be placed in the line of his descent. 
 
300 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 
 
 Aristotle, flobbes, and Locke, Descartes and 
 Newton, approximate more than we imagine. 
 The same chain of intellect Aristotle holds, 
 through the intervals of time, is held by them ; 
 and links will only be added by their successors. 
 The naturalists, Pliny, Gesner, Aldrovandus, and 
 Buffon, derive differences in their characters, 
 from the spirit of the times ; but each only made 
 an accession to the family estate, while each was 
 the legitimate representative of the family of the 
 naturalists. Aristophanes, Moliere, and Foote, 
 are brothers of the family of national wits : the 
 wit of Aristophanes was a part of the, common 
 property, and Moliere and Foote were Aristo- 
 phanic. Plutarch, La Mothe le Vayer, and 
 Bayle, alike busied in amassing the materials of 
 human thought and human action, with the same 
 vigorous and vagrant curiosity, must have had the 
 same habits of life. If Plutarch was credulous, 
 La Mothe le Vayer sceptical, and Bayle philoso- 
 phical, the heirs of the family may differ in their 
 dispositions, but no one will arraign the integrity 
 of the lineal descent. My learned and reflecting 
 friend, whose original researches have enriched 
 our national history, has thus observed on the 
 character of Wickliffe : " To complete our idea 
 of the importance of Wickliffe, it is only neces- 
 sary to add, that as his writings made John Huss 
 the reformer of Bohemia, so the writings of 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 3QJ 
 
 John Huss led Martin Luther to be the reformer 
 of Germany ; so extensive and so incalculable 
 are the consequences which sometimes follow 
 from human actions."* Our historian has accom- 
 panied this by giving the very feelings of Luther 
 in early life on his first perusal of the works of 
 John Huss : we see the spark of creation caught 
 at the moment ; a striking influence of the gener- 
 ation of character ! Thus a father spirit has 
 many sons ; and several of the great revolutions 
 in the history of man have been opened by such, 
 and carried on by that secret creation of minds 
 visibly operating on human affairs. In the history 
 of the human mind, he takes an imperfect view, 
 who is confined to contemporary knowledge, as 
 well as he who stops short with the Ancients, 
 and has not advanced with their descendants. 
 Those who do not carry their researches through 
 the genealogical lines of genius, will mutilate 
 their minds, and want the perfect strength of an 
 entire man. 
 
 Such are " the great lights of the world," by 
 whom the torch of knowledge has been succes- 
 sively seized and transmitted from one to the 
 other. This is that noble image borrowed from 
 a Grecian game, which Plato has applied to the 
 
 * Turner's History of England, vol. ii, p. 432. 
 
 B b 
 
 /* 
 
302 raE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS, 
 
 rapid generations of man, to mark how the con- 
 tinuity of human affairs is maintained from age to 
 age. The torch of genius is perpetually trans- 
 ferred from hand to hand amidst this fleeting 
 scene. 
 
 THE END. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter. Page. 
 
 I. On Literary Characters .... 7 
 
 II. Youth of Genius ....... 18 
 
 III. The First Studies ...... 47 
 
 IV. The Irritability of Genius ... 69 
 
 V. The Spirit of Literature, and the 
 
 Spirit of Society ..... 91 
 
 VI. Literary Solitude ...... Ill 
 
 VII. The Meditations of Genius ... 121 
 
 VIII. The Enthusiasm of Genius . . . 142 
 
 IX. Literary Jealousy ...... 165 
 
 X. Want of Mutual Esteem . - . . 170 
 
 XL Self-praise ......... 175 
 
 XII. The Domestic Life of Genius . . . 191 
 
 XIII. The Matrimonial State ..... 212 
 
 XIV. Literary Friendships ..... 230 
 XV. The Literary and the Personal Cha- 
 
 racter ......... 236 
 
 XVI. The Man of Letters ..... 247 
 
 XVII. Literary Old Age ...... 265 
 
 XVIII. Literary Honours . ..... 272 
 
 XIX. The Influence of Authors .... 286 
 
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