[Footnote A: He was represented as an ill-made monkey in the frontispiece to a satire noted in "Quarrels of Authors," p. 286 (last edition).—ED.]

[Footnote B: Johnson was displeased at the portrait Reynolds painted of him which dwelt on his nearsightedness; declaring that "a man's defects should never be painted." The same defect was made the subject of a caricature particularly allusive to critical prejudices in his "Lives of the Poets," in which he is pictured as an owl "blinking at the stars." —ED.]

Those who give so many sensations to others must themselves possess an excess and a variety of feelings. We find, indeed, that they are censured for their extreme irritability; and that happy equality of temper so prevalent among MEN OF LETTERS, and which is conveniently acquired by men of the world, has been usually refused to great mental powers, or to fervid dispositions—authors and artists. The man of wit becomes petulant, the profound thinker morose, and the vivacious ridiculously thoughtless.

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, I have never known ennui, even when perfectly unoccupied: my imagination, 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 support. 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 authors and artists is for the greater part of their lives of an ambiguous nature. They become whatever the minds or knowledge of others make them; they are the creatures of the prejudices and the predispositions of others, and must suffer from those precipitate judgments which are the result of such prejudices and such predispositions. Time only is the certain friend of literary worth, for time makes the world disagree among themselves; and when those who condemn discover that there are others who approve, the weaker party loses itself in the stronger, and at length they learn that the author was far more reasonable than their prejudices had allowed them to conceive. It is thus, however, that the regard which men of genius find in one place they lose in another. We may often smile at the local gradations of genius; the fervid esteem in which an author is held here, and the cold indifference, if not contempt, he encounters in another place; here the man of learning is condemned as a heavy drone, and there the man of wit annoys the unwitty listener.

And are not the anxieties of even the most successful men of genius 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 dissatisfaction, the same querulous languishment after excellence? Is the man of genius an INVENTOR? the discovery is contested, or it is not comprehended for ten years after, perhaps not during his whole life; even men of science are as children before him. Sir Thomas Bodley wrote to Lord Bacon, remonstrating with him on his new mode of philosophising. It seems the fate of all originality of thinking to be immediately opposed; a contemporary is not prepared for its comprehension, and too often cautiously avoids it, from the prudential motive which turns away from a new and solitary path. BACON was not at all understood at home in his own day; his reputation—for it was not celebrity—was confined to his history of Henry VII., and his Essays; it was long after his death before English writers ventured to quote Bacon as an authority; and with equal simplicity and grandeur, BACON called himself "the servant of posterity." MONTESQUIEU gave his Esprit des Loix to be read by that man in France, whom he conceived to be the best judge, and in return received the most mortifying remarks. The great philosopher exclaimed in despair, "I see my own age is not ripe enough to understand my work; however, it shall be published!" When KEPLER published the first rational work on comets, it was condemned, even by the learned, as a wild dream. COPERNICUS so much dreaded the prejudice of mankind against his treatise on "The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies," that, by a species of continence of all others most difficult to a philosopher, says Adam Smith, he detained it in his closet for thirty years together. LINNAEUS once in despair abandoned his beloved studies, from a too irritable feeling of the ridicule in which, as it appeared to him, a professor Siegesbeck had involved his famous system. Penury, neglect, and labour LINNAEUS could endure, but that his botany should become the object of ridicule for all Stockholm, shook the nerves of this great inventor in his science. Let him speak for himself. "No one cared how many sleepless nights and toilsome hours I had passed, while all with one voice declared, that Siegesbeck had annihilated me. I took my leave of Flora, who bestows on me nothing but Siegesbecks; and condemned my too numerous observations a thousand times over to eternal oblivion. What a fool have I been to waste so much time, to spend my days in a study which yields no better fruit, and makes me the laughing stock of the world." Such are the cries of the irritability of genius, and such are often the causes. The world was in danger of losing a new science, had not LINNAEUS returned to the discoveries which he had forsaken in the madness of the mind! The great SYDENHAM, who, like our HARVEY and our HUNTER, effected a revolution in the science of medicine, and led on alone by the independence of his genius, attacked the most prevailing prejudices, so highly provoked the malignant emulation of his rivals, that a conspiracy was raised against the father of our modern practice to banish him out of the college, as "guilty of medical heresy." JOHN HUNTER was a great discoverer in his own science; but one who well knew him has told us, that few of his contemporaries perceived the ultimate object of his pursuits; and his strong and solitary genius laboured to perfect his designs without the solace of sympathy, without one cheering approbation. "We bees do not provide honey for ourselves," exclaimed VAN HELMONT, when worn out by the toils of chemistry, and still contemplating, amidst tribulation and persecution, and approaching death, his "Tree of Life," which he imagined he had discovered in the cedar. But with a sublime melancholy his spirit breaks out; "My mind breathes some unheard-of thing within; though I, as unprofitable for this life, shall be buried!" Such were the mighty but indistinct anticipations of this visionary inventor, the father of modern chemistry!

I cannot quit this short record of the fates of the inventors in science, without adverting to another cause of that irritability of genius which is so closely connected with their pursuits. If we look into the history of theories, we shall be surprised at the vast number which have "not left a rack behind." And do we suppose that the inventors themselves were not at times alarmed by secret doubts of their soundness and stability? They felt, too often for their repose, that the noble architecture which they had raised might be built on moveable sands, and be found only in the dust of libraries; a cloudy day, or a fit of indigestion, would deprive an inventor of his theory all at once; and as one of them said, "after dinner, all that I have written in the morning appears to me dark, incongruous, nonsensical." At such moments we should find this man of genius in no pleasant mood. The true cause of this nervous state cannot, nay, must not, be confided to the world: the honour of his darling theory will always be dearer to his pride than the confession of even slight doubts which may shake its truth. It is a curious fact which we have but recently discovered, that ROUSSEAU was disturbed by a terror he experienced, and which we well know was not unfounded, that his theories of education were false and absurd. He could not endure to read a page in his own "Emile"[A] without disgust after the work had been published! He acknowledged that there were more suffrages against his notions than for them. "I am not displeased," says he, "with myself on the style and eloquence, but I still dread that my writings are good for nothing at the bottom, and that all my theories are full of extravagance." [Je crains toujours que je peche par le fond, et que tous mes systemes ne sont que des extravagances.] HARTLEY with his "Vibrations and Vibrationeles," LEIBNITZ with his "Monads," CUDWORTH with his "Plastic Natures," MALEBRANCHE with his paradoxical doctrine of "Seeing all things in God," and BURNET with his heretical "Theory of the Earth," must unquestionably at times have betrayed an irritability which those about them may have attributed to temper, rather than to genius.

[Footnote A: In a letter by Hume to Blair, written in 1766, apparently first published in the Literary Gazette, Nov. 17, 1821.]

Is our man of genius—not the victim of fancy, but the slave of truth—a learned author? Of the living waters of human knowledge it cannot be said that "If a man drink thereof, he shall never thirst again." What volumes remain to open! what manuscript but makes his heart palpitate! There is no term in researches which new facts may not alter, and a single date may not dissolve. Truth! thou fascinating, but severe mistress, thy adorers are often broken down in thy servitude, performing a thousand unregarded task-works! Now winding thee through thy labyrinth with a single thread, often unravelling—now feeling their way in darkness, doubtful if it be thyself they are touching. How much of the real labour of genius and erudition must remain concealed from the world, and never be reached by their penetration! MONTESQUIEU has described this feeling after its agony: "I thought I should have killed myself these three months to finish a morceau (for his great work), which I wished to insert, on the origin and revolutions of the civil laws in France. You will read it in three hours; but I do assure you that it cost me so much labour that it has whitened my hair." Mr. Hallam, stopping to admire the genius of GIBBON, exclaims, "In this, as in many other places, the masterly boldness and precision of his outline, which astonish those who have trodden parts of the same field, is apt to escape an uninformed reader." Thrice has my learned friend, SHARON TURNER, recomposed, with renewed researches, the history of our ancestors, of which Milton and Hume had despaired—thrice, amidst the self-contests of ill-health and professional duties!

The man of erudition in closing his elaborate work is still exposed to the fatal omissions of wearied vigilance, or the accidental knowledge of some inferior mind, and always to the reigning taste, whatever it chance to be, of the public. Burnet criticised VARILLAS unsparingly;[A] but when he wrote history himself, Harmer's "Specimen of Errors in Burnet's History," returned Burnet the pangs which he had inflicted on another. NEWTON'S favourite work was his "Chronology," which he had written over fifteen times, yet he desisted from its publication during his life-time, from the ill-usage of which he complained. Even the "Optics" of Newton had no character at home till noticed in France. The calm temper of our great philosopher was of so fearful a nature in regard to criticism, that Whiston declares that he would not publish his attack on the "Chronology," lest it might have killed our philosopher; and thus Bishop STILLINGFLEET'S end was hastened by LOCKE's confutation of his metaphysics. The feelings of Sir JOHN MARSHAM could hardly be less irritable when he found his great work tainted by an accusation that it was not friendly to revelation.[B] When the learned POCOCK published a specimen of his translation of Abulpharagias, an Arabian historian, in 1649, it excited great interest; but in 1663, when he gave the world the complete version, it met with no encouragement: in the course of those thirteen years, the genius of the times had changed, and Oriental studies were no longer in request.

[Footnote A: For an account of this work, and Burnet's expose of it, see "Curiosities of Literature," vol. i. p. 132.—ED.]

[Footnote B: This great work the Canon Chronicus, was published in 1672, and was the first attempt to make the Egyptian chronology clear and intelligible, and to reconcile the whole to the Scripture chronology; a labour he had commenced in Diatriba Chronologica, published in 1649. —ED.]

The great VERULAM profoundly felt the retardment of his fame; for he has pathetically expressed this sentiment in his testament, where he bequeaths his name to posterity, AFTER SOME GENERATIONS SHALL BE past. BRUCE sunk into his grave defrauded of that just fame which his pride and vivacity perhaps too keenly prized, at least for his happiness, and which he authoritatively exacted from an unwilling public. Mortified and indignant at the reception of his great labour by the cold-hearted scepticism of little minds, and the maliciousness of idling wits, he, whose fortitude had toiled through a life of difficulty and danger, could not endure the laugh and scorn of public opinion; for BRUCE there was a simoon more dreadful than the Arabian, and from which genius cannot hide its head. Yet BRUCE only met with the fate which MARCO POLO had before encountered; whose faithful narrative had been contemned by his contemporaries, and who was long thrown aside among legendary writers.[A]

[Footnote A: His stories of the wealth and population of China, which he described as consisting of millions obtained for him the nickname of Marco Milione among the Venetians and other small Italian states, who were unable to comprehend the greatness of his truthful narratives of Eastern travel. Upon his death-bed he was adjured by his friends to retract his statements, which he indignantly refused. It was long after ere his truthfulness was established by other travellers; the Venetian populace gave his house the name La Corte di Milioni: and a vulgar caricature of the great traveller was always introduced in their carnivals, who was termed Marco Milione; and delighted them with the most absurd stories, in, which everything was computed by millions.—ED.]

HARVEY, though his life was prolonged to his eightieth year, hardly lived to see his great discovery of the circulation of the blood established: no physician adopted it; and when at length it was received, one party attempted to rob Harvey of the honour of the discovery, while another asserted that it was so obvious, that they could only express their astonishment that it had ever escaped observation. Incredulity and envy are the evil spirits which have often dogged great inventors to their tomb, and there only have vanished.—But I seem writing the "calamities of authors," and have only begun the catalogue.

The reputation of a writer of taste is subject to more difficulties than any other. Similar was the fate of the finest ode-writers in our poetry. On their publication, the odes of COLLINS could find no readers; and those of GRAY, though ushered into the reading world by the fashionable press of Walpole, were condemned as failures. When RACINE produced his "Athalie," it was not at all relished: Boileau indeed declared that he understood these matters better than the public, and prophesied that the public would return to it: they did so; but it was sixty years afterwards; and Racine died without suspecting that "Athalie" was his masterpiece. I have heard one of our great poets regret that he had devoted so much of his life to the cultivation of his art, which arose from a project made in the golden vision of his youth: "at a time," said he, "when I thought that the fountain could never be dried up."—"Your baggage will reach posterity," was observed.—"There is much to spare," was the answer.

Every day we may observe, of a work of genius, that those parts which have all the raciness of the soil, and as such are most liked by its admirers, are those which are the most criticised. Modest critics shelter themselves under that general amnesty too freely granted, that tastes are allowed to differ; but we should approximate much nearer to the truth, if we were to say, that but few of mankind are prepared to relish the beautiful with that enlarged taste which comprehends all the forms of feeling which genius may assume; forms which may be necessarily associated with defects. A man of genius composes in a state of intellectual emotion, and the magic of his style consists in the movements of his soul; but the art of conveying those movements is far separated from the feeling which inspires them. The idea in the mind is not always found under the pen, any more than the artist's conception can always breathe in his pencil. Like FIAMINGO'S image, which he kept polishing till his friend exclaimed, "What perfection would you have?"—"Alas!" exclaimed the sculptor, "the original I am labouring to come up to is in my head, but not yet in my hand."

The writer toils, and repeatedly toils, to throw into our minds that sympathy with which we hang over the illusion of his pages, and become himself. ARIOSTO wrote sixteen different ways the celebrated stanza descriptive of a tempest, as appears by his MSS. at Ferrara; and the version he preferred was the last of the sixteen. We know that PETRARCH made forty-four alterations of a single verse: "whether for the thought, the expression, or the harmony, it is evident that as many operations in the heart, the head, or the ear of the poet occurred," observes a man of genius, Ugo Foscolo. Quintilian and Horace dread the over-fondness of an author for his compositions: alteration is not always improvement. A picture over-finished fails in its effect. If the hand of the artist cannot leave it, how much beauty may it 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 the minds of others, while often, as it once happened, the dash of despair hangs the foam on the horse's nostrils. I have known a great sculptor, who for twenty years delighted himself with forming in his mind the nymph his hand was always creating. How rapturously he beheld her! what inspiration! what illusion! Alas! the last five years spoiled the beautiful which he had once reached, and could not stop and finish!

The art of composition, indeed, is of such slow attainment, that a man of genius, late in life, may discover how its secret conceals itself in the habit; how discipline consists in exercise, how perfection comes from experience, and how unity is the last effort of judgment. 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 historians of every great people; he complained, while he mourned over the fragment of genius which, after such zealous preparation, he dared not complete. CURRAN, an orator of vehement eloquence, often strikingly original, when late in life he was desirous of cultivating literary composition, unaccustomed to its more gradual march, found a pen cold, and destitute of every grace. 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. The existing manuscripts of ROUSSEAU display as many erasures as those of Ariosto or Petrarch; they show his eagerness to dash down his first thoughts, and the art by which he raised them to the impassioned style of his imagination. The memoir of GIBBON was composed seven or nine times, and, after all, was left unfinished; and BUFFON tells us that he wrote his "Epoques de la Nature" eighteen times before it satisfied his taste. BURNS'S anxiety in finishing his poems was great; "all my poetry," said 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 experienced often such literary agonies, witness his description of the depressions and elevations of genius:

Who pants for glory, finds but short repose; A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows!

When ROMNEY undertook to commence the first subject for the Shakspeare Gallery, in the rapture of enthusiasm, amidst the sublime and pathetic labouring in his whole mind, arose the terror of failure. The subject chosen was "The Tempest;" and, as Hayley truly observes, it created many a tempest in the fluctuating spirits of Romney. The vehement desire of that perfection which genius conceives, and cannot always execute, held a perpetual contest with that dejection of spirits which degrades the unhappy sufferer, and casts him, grovelling among the mean of his class. In a national work, a man of genius pledges his honour to the world for its performance; but to redeem that pledge, there is a darkness in the uncertain issue, and he is risking his honour for ever. By that work he will always be judged, for public failures are never forgotten, and it is not then a party, but the public itself, who become his adversaries. With ROMNEY it was "a fever of the mad;" and his friends could scarcely inspire him with sufficient courage to proceed with his arduous picture, which exercised his imagination and his pencil for several years. I have heard that he built a painting-room purposely for this picture; and never did an anchorite pour fourth a more fervent orison to Heaven, than Romney when this labour was complete. He had a fine genius, with all its solitary feelings, but he was uneducated, and incompetent even to write a letter; yet on this occasion, relieved from his intense anxiety under so long a work, he wrote one of the most eloquent. It is a document in the history of genius, and reveals all those feelings which are here too faintly described.[A] I once heard an amiable author, whose literary career has perhaps not answered the fond hopes of his youth, half in anger and in love, declare that he would retire to some solitude, where, if any one would follow him, he would found a new order—the order of THE DISAPPOINTED.

[Footnote A: "My DEAR FRIEND,—Your kindness in rejoicing so heartily at the birth of my picture has given me great satisfaction.

"There has been an anxiety labouring in my mind the greater part of the last twelvemonth. At times it had nearly overwhelmed me. I thought I should absolutely have sunk into despair. O! what a kind friend is in those times! I thank God, whatever my picture may be, I can say thus much, I am a greater philosopher and a better Christian."]

Thus the days of a man of genius are passed in labours as unremitting and exhausting as those of the artisan. The world is 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 society, it was observed, that in the evening he was dissatisfied and distressed; and JOHN HUNTER, in a mixed company, found that conversation fatigued, instead of amusing him. HAWKESWORTH, in the second paper of the "Adventurer," has drawn, from his own feelings, an eloquent comparative estimate of intellectual with corporeal labour; it may console the humble mechanic; and Plato, in his work on "Laws," seems to have been aware of this analogy, for he consecrates all working men or artisans to Vulcan and Minerva, because both those deities alike are hard labourers. Yet with genius all does not terminate, even with the most skilful labour. What the toiling Vulcan and the thoughtful Minerva may want, will too often be absent—the presence of the Graces. In the allegorical picture of the School of Design, by Carlo Maratti, where the students are led through their various studies, in the opening clouds above the academy are seen the Graces, hovering over their pupils, with an inscription they must often recollect—Senza di noi ogni fatica e vana.

The anxious uncertainty of an author for his compositions resembles the anxiety of a lover when he has written to a mistress who has 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 and genius, has distinguished them in this; that while "ambition perseveres in the desire of acquiring 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."—"Athenians! what troubles have you not cost me," exclaimed DEMOSTHENES, "that I may be talked of by you!"

These moments of anxiety often darken the brightest hours of genius. RACINE had extreme sensibility; the pain inflicted by a severe criticism outweighed all the applause he received. He seems to have felt, what he was often reproached with, that his Greeks, his Jews, and his Turks, were all inmates of Versailles. He had two critics, who, like our Dennis with Pope and Addison, regularly dogged his pieces as they appeared[A]. Corneille's objections he would attribute to jealousy—at his pieces when burlesqued at the Italian theatre[B] 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 hardly sheathed its bitterness, sunk more deeply into his heart than the burlesques at the Italian theatre, the protest of Corneille, and the iteration of the two Dennises. More than once MOLIERE and Racine, in vexation of spirit, resolved to abandon their dramatic career; it was BOILEAU who ceaselessly animated their languor: "Posterity," he cried, "will avenge the injustice of our age!" And CONGREVE'S comedies met with such moderate success, that it appears the author was extremely mortified, and on the ill reception of The Way of the World, determined to write no more for the stage. When he told Voltaire, on the French wit's visit, that Voltaire must consider him as a private gentleman, and not as an author,—which apparent affectation called down on Congreve the sarcastic severity of the French author,[C] —more of mortification and humility might have been in Congreve's language than of affectation or pride.

[Footnote A: See the article "On the Influence of a bad temper in Criticism" in "Calamities of Authors," for a notice of Dennis and his career.—ED.]

[Footnote B: See the article on "The Sensibility of Racine" in "Literary Miscellanies," (in the present volume) and that on "Parody," in "Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii. p. 459.—ED.]

[Footnote C: Voltaire quietly said he should not have troubled himself to visit him if he had been merely a private gentleman.—ED.]

The life of TASSO abounds with pictures of a complete exhaustion of this kind. His contradictory critics had perplexed him with the most intricate literary discussions, and either occasioned or increased a mental alienation. In one of his letters, we find that he repents the composition of his great poem, for although his own taste approved of that marvellous, which still forms a noble part of its creation, yet he confesses that his cold reasoning critics have decided that the history of his hero, Godfrey, required another species of conduct. "Hence," cries the unhappy bard, "doubts torment 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—"Did not the circumstances of my situation compel me, I would not print it, even perhaps during my life, I so much doubt of its success." Such was the 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, in which none are more liable to participate than the true sensitive artist. We may now inspect the severe correction of Tasso's muse, in the fac-simile of a page of his manuscripts in Mr. Dibdin's late "Tour." She seems to have inflicted tortures on his pen, surpassing even those which may be seen in the fac-simile page which, thirty years ago, I gave of Pope's Homer.[A] 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. These works are not always to be considered as failures of the chisel; they appear rather to have been rejected for coming short of the artist's first conceptions: yet, in a strain of sublime poetry, he has preserved his sentiments on the force of intellectual labour; he thought that there was nothing which the imagination conceived, that could not be made visible in marble, if the hand were made to obey the mind:—

Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto, Ch' un marmo solo in se non circoseriva Col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva La man che obbedisce all' intelletto.

IMITATED.

The sculptor never yet conceived a thought That yielding marble has refused to aid; But never with a mastery he wrought— Save when the hand the intellect obeyed.

[Footnote A: It now forms the frontispiece to vol. ii. of the last edition of the "Curiosities of Literature."—ED.]

An interesting domestic story has been preserved of GESNER, who so zealously devoted his graver and his pencil to the arts. His sensibility was ever struggling after that ideal excellence which 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 soothe 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 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 apostrophe—"Ah! see those playful children, they always dance!" This was the moment of gaiety 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 artisans[A]—there are also some sorrows peculiar to them, and which the world can neither pity nor soften, because they do not enter into their experience. The querulous language of so many men of genius has been sometimes attributed to causes very different from the real ones—the most fortunate live to see their talents contested and their best works decried. Assuredly many an author has sunk into his grave without the consciousness of having obtained that fame for which he had sacrificed an arduous life. The too feeling SMOLLETT 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 author, I should, in all probability, have spared myself the incredible labour and chagrin I have since undergone." And Smollett was a popular writer! POPE'S solemn declaration in the preface to his collected works comes by no means short of Smollett's avowal. HUME'S philosophical indifference could often suppress that irritability which Pope and Smollett fully indulged.

[Footnote A: See Ramazini, "De Morbis Artificium Diatriba," which Dr. James translated in 1750. It is a sad reflection, resulting from this curious treatise, that the arts entail no small mischief upon their respective workmen; so that the means by which they live are too often the occasion of their being hurried out of the world.]

But were the feelings of HUME more obtuse, or did his temper, gentle as it was by constitution, bear, with a saintly patience, the mortifications his literary life so long endured? After recomposing two of his works, which incurred the same neglect in their altered form, he raised the most sanguine hopes of his History, but he tells us, "miserable was my disappointment!" Although he never deigned to reply to his opponents, yet they haunted him; and an eye-witness has thus described the irritated author discovering in conversation 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! HOGARTH, in a fit of the spleen, advertised that he had determined not to give the world any more original works, and intended to pass the rest of his days in painting portraits. The same advertisement is marked by farther irritability. He contemptuously offers the purchasers of his "Analysis of Beauty," to present them gratis with "an eighteenpenny pamphlet," published by Ramsay the painter, written in opposition to Hogarth's principles. So untameable was the irritability of this great inventor in art, that he attempts to conceal his irritation by offering to dispose gratuitously of the criticism which had disturbed his nights.[A]

[Footnote A: Hogarth was not without reason for exasperation. He was severely attacked for his theories about the curved line of beauty, which was branded as a foolish attempt to prove crookedness elegant, and himself vulgarly caricatured. It was even asserted that the theory was stolen from Lomazzo. ED.]

Parties confederate against a man of genius,—as happened to Corneille, to D'Avenant,[A] 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." 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 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 acquaintances of the poet COLLINS probably complained of his wayward humours and irritability; but how could they sympathise with the secret mortification of the poet, who imagined that he had composed his Pastorals on wrong principles, or when, in the agony of his soul, he consigned to the flames with his own hands his unsold, but immortal odes? Can we forget the dignified complaint of the Rambler, with which he awfully closes his work, appealing to posterity?

[Footnote A: See "Quarrels of Authors," p. 403, on the confederacy of several wits against D'Avenant, a great genius; where I discovered that a volume of poems, said "to be written by the author's friends," which had hitherto been referred to as a volume of panegyrics, contains nothing but irony and satire, which had escaped the discovery of so many transcribers of title-pages, frequently miscalled literary historians.]

Genius contracts those peculiarities of which it is so loudly accused in its solitary occupations—that loftiness of spirit, those quick jealousies, those excessive affections and aversions which view everything as it passes in its own ideal world, and rarely as it exists in the mediocrity of reality. If this irritability of genius be a malady which has raged even among philosophers, we must not be surprised at the temperament of poets. These last have abandoned their country; they have changed their name; they have punished themselves with exile in the rage of their disorder. No! not poets only. DESCARTES sought in vain, even in his secreted life, for a refuge for his genius; 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. Even the reasoning HUME once proposed to change his name and his country; and I believe did. The great poetical genius of our own times has openly alienated himself from the land of his brothers. He becomes immortal in the language of a people whom he would contemn.[A] Does he accept with ingratitude the fame he loves more than life?

[Footnote A: I shall preserve a manuscript note of Lord BYRON on this passage; not without a hope that we shall never receive from him the genius of Italian poetry, otherwise than in the language of his "father land"; an expressive term, which I adopted from the Dutch language some years past, and which I have seen since sanctioned by the pens of Lord Byron and of Mr. Southey.

His lordship has here observed, "It is not my fault that I am obliged to write in English. If I understood my present language equally well, I would write in it; but this will require ten years at least to form a style: no tongue so easy to acquire a little of, or so difficult to master thoroughly, as Italian." On the same page I find the following note: "What was rumoured of me in that language? If true, I was unfit for England: if false, England was unfit for me:—'There is a world elsewhere.' I have never regretted for a moment that country, but often that I ever returned to it at all."]

Such, then, is that state of irritability in which men of genius participate, whether they be inventors, men of learning, fine writers, or artists. It is a state not friendly to equality of temper. In the various humours incidental to it, when they are often deeply affected, the cause escapes all perception of sympathy. The intellectual malady eludes even the tenderness of friendship. At those moments, the lightest injury to the feelings, which at another time would make no impression, may produce a perturbed state of feeling in the warm temper, or the corroding chagrin of a self-wounded spirit. These are moments which claim the encouragements of a friendship animated by a high esteem for the intellectual excellence of the 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—intellectual 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 VIII.

The spirit of literature and the spirit of society.—The Inventors. —Society offers seduction and not reward to men of genius.—The notions of persons of fashion of men of genius.—The habitudes of the man of genius distinct from those of the man of society.—Study, meditation, and enthusiasm, the progress of genius.—The disagreement between the men of the world and the literary character.

The Inventors, who inherited little or nothing from their predecessors, appear to have pursued their insulated studies in the full independence of their mind and development of their inventive faculty; they stood apart, in seclusion, the solitary lights of their age. Such were the founders of our literature—Bacon and Hobbes, Newton and Milton. Even so late as the days of Dryden, Addison, and Pope, the man of genius drew his circle round his intimates; his day was uniform, his habits unbroken; and he was never too far removed, nor too long estranged from meditation and reverie: his works were the sources of his pleasure ere they became the labours of his pride.

But when a more uniform light of knowledge illuminates from all sides, the genius of society, made up of so many sorts of genius, becomes greater than the genius of the individual who has entirely yielded himself up to his solitary art. Hence the character of a man of genius becomes subordinate. A conversation age succeeds a studious one; and the family of genius, the poet, the painter, and the student, are no longer recluses. They mix with their rivals, who are jealous of equality, or with others who, incapable of valuing them for themselves alone, rate them but as parts of an integral.

The man of genius is now trammelled with the artificial and mechanical forms of life; and in too close an intercourse with society, the loneliness and raciness of thinking is modified away in its seductive conventions. An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opulent age; but of late, while the arts of assembling in large societies have been practised, varied by all forms, and pushed on to all excesses, it may become a question whether by them our happiness is as much improved, or our individual character as well formed as in a society not so heterogeneous and unsocial as that crowd termed, with the sort of modesty peculiar to our times, "a small party:" the simplicity of parade, the humility of pride engendered by the egotism which multiplies itself in proportion to the numbers it assembles.

It may, too, be a question whether the literary man and the artist are not immolating their genius to society when, in the shadowiness of assumed talents—that counterfeiting of all shapes—they lose their real form, with the mockery of Proteus. But nets of roses catch their feet, and a path, where all the senses are flattered, is now opened to win an Epictetus from his hut. The art of multiplying the enjoyments of society is discovered in the morning lounge, the evening dinner, and the midnight coterie. In frivolous fatigues, and vigils without meditation, perish the unvalued hours which, true genius knows, are always too brief for art, and too rare to catch its inspirations. Hence so many of our contemporaries, whose card-racks are crowded, have produced only flashy fragments. Efforts, but not works—they seem to be effects without causes; and as a great author, who is not one of them, once observed to me, "They waste a barrel of gunpowder in squibs."

And yet it is seduction, and not reward, which mere fashionable society offers the man of true genius. He will be sought for with enthusiasm, but he cannot escape from his certain fate—that of becoming tiresome to his pretended admirers.

At first the idol—shortly he is changed into a victim. He forms, indeed, a figure in their little pageant, and is invited as a sort of improvisatore; but the esteem they concede to him is only a part of the system of politeness; and should he be dull in discovering the favourite quality of their self-love, or in participating in their volatile tastes, he will find frequent opportunities of observing, with the sage at the court of Cyprus, that "what he knows is not proper for this place, and what is proper for this place he knows not." This society takes little personal interest in the literary character. HORACE WALPOLE lets us into this secret when writing to another man of fashion, on such a man of genius as GRAY—"I agree with you most absolutely in your opinion about Gray; he is the worst company in the world. From a melancholy turn, from living reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily; all his words are measured and chosen, and formed into sentences: his writings are admirable—he himself is not agreeable." This volatile being in himself personified the quintessence of that society which is called "the world," and could not endure that equality of intellect which genius exacts. He rejected Chatterton, and quarrelled with every literary man and every artist whom he first invited to familiarity—and then hated. Witness the fates of Bentley, of Muntz, of Gray, of Cole, and others. Such a mind was incapable of appreciating the literary glory on which the mighty mind of BURKE was meditating. WALPOLE knew BURKE at a critical moment of his life, and he has recorded his own feelings:—"There was a young Mr. BURKE who wrote a book, in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, that was much admired. He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his authorism yet, and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and to be one: he will know better one of these days" GRAY and BURKE! What mighty men must be submitted to the petrifying sneer—that indifference of selfism for great sympathies—of this volatile and heartless man of literature and rank!

That thing of silk, Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk!

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, but he consoled himself when, at his entrance into the theatre, the audience usually rose to salute him. The great comic genius of France, who indeed was a very thoughtful and serious man, addressed a poem to the painter MIONARD, expressing his conviction that "the court," by which a Frenchman of the court of Louis XIV. meant the society we call "fashionable," is fatal to the perfection of art—

Qui se donne a la cour se derobe a son art; Un esprit partage rarement se consomme, Et les emplois de feu demandent tout l'homme.

Has not the fate in society 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 corner of the metropolis, who have long fantastically styled themselves "the world," that more dignified 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." HAYDN would not yield up to society more than those hours which were not devoted to study. These were indeed but few: and such were the uniformity and retiredness of his life, that "He was for a long time the only musical man in Europe who was ignorant of the celebrity of Joseph Haydn." 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 qual chi sua vita consuma Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia Qual fummo in aere, ed in acqua la schiuma

For not on downy plumes, nor under shade Of canopy reposing, Fame is won: Without which, whosoe'er consumes his days, Leaveth such vestige of himself on earth As smoke in air, or foam upon the wave.[A]

[Footnote A: Cary's Dante, Canto xxiv.]

But men of genius, in their intercourse with persons of fashion, have a secret inducement to court that circle. They feel a perpetual want of having the reality of their talents confirmed to themselves, and they often step into society to observe in what degree they are objects of attention; for, though ever accused of vanity, the greater part of men of genius feel that their existence, as such, must depend on the opinion of others. This standard is in truth always problematical and variable; yet they cannot hope to find a more certain one among their rivals, who at all times are adroitly depreciating their brothers, and "dusking" their lustre. They discover among those cultivators of literature and the arts who have recourse to them for their pleasure, impassioned admirers, rather than unmerciful judges—judges who have only time to acquire that degree of illumination which is just sufficient to set at ease the fears of these claimants of genius.

When literary men assemble together, what mimetic friendships, in their mutual corruption! Creatures of intrigue, they borrow other men's eyes, and act by feelings often even contrary to their own: they wear a mask on their face, and only sing a tune they have caught. Some hierophant in their mysteries proclaims their elect whom they have to initiate, and their profane who are to stand apart under their ban. They bend to the spirit of the age, but they do not elevate the public to them; they care not for truth, but only study to produce effect, and they do nothing for fame but what obtains an instant purpose. Yet their fame is not therefore the more real, for everything connected with fashion becomes obsolete. Her ear has a great susceptibility of weariness, and her eye rolls for incessant novelty. Never was she earnest for anything. Men's minds with her become tarnished and old-fashioned as furniture. But the steams of rich dinners, the eye which sparkles with the wines of France, the luxurious night which flames with more heat and brilliancy than God has made the day, this is the world the man of coterie-celebrity has chosen; and the Epicurean, as long as his senses do not cease to act, laughs at the few who retire to the solitary midnight lamp. Posthumous fame is—a nothing! Such men live like unbelievers in a future state, and their narrow calculating spirit coldly dies in their artificial world: but true genius looks at a nobler source of its existence; it catches inspiration in its insulated studies; and to the great genius, who feels how his present is necessarily connected with his future celebrity, posthumous fame is a reality, for the sense acts upon him!

The habitudes of genius, before genius loses 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, will make him a distinct being from the man of society. Those who have assumed the literary character often for purposes very distinct from literary ones, imagine that their circle is the public; but in this factitious public all their interests, their opinions, and even their passions, are temporary, and the admirers with the admired pass away with their season. "It is not sufficient that we speak the same language," says a witty philosopher, "but we must learn their dialect; we must think as they think, and we must echo their opinions, as we act by imitation." Let the man of genius then dread to level himself to the mediocrity of feeling and talent required in such circles of society, lest he become one of themselves; he will soon find that to think like them will in time become to act like them. But he who in solitude adopts no transient feelings, and reflects no artificial lights, who is only himself, possesses an immense advantage: he has not attached importance to what is merely local and fugitive, but listens to interior truths, and fixes on the immutable nature of things. He is the man of every age. Malebranche has observed, that "It is not indeed thought to be charitable to disturb common opinions, because it is not truth which unites society as it exists so much as opinion and custom:" a principle which the world would not, I think, disagree with; but which tends to render folly wisdom itself, and to make error immortal.

Ridicule is the light scourge of society, and the terror of genius. Ridicule surrounds him with her chimeras, which, like the shadowy monsters opposing aeneas, are impalpable to his strokes: but remember when the sibyl bade the hero proceed without noticing them, he found these airy nothings as harmless as they were unreal. The habits of the literary character will, however, be tried by the men and women of the world by their own standard: they have no other; the salt of ridicule gives a poignancy to their deficient comprehension, and their perfect ignorance, of the persons or things which are the subjects of their ingenious animadversions. The habits of the literary character seem inevitably repulsive to persons of the world. VOLTAIRE, and his companion, the scientific Madame DE CHATELET, she who introduced Newton to the French nation, lived entirely devoted to literary pursuits, and their habits were strictly literary. It happened once that this learned pair dropped unexpectedly into a fashionable circle in the chateau of a French nobleman. A Madame de Stael, the persifleur in office of Madame Du Deffand, has copiously narrated the whole affair. They arrived at midnight like two famished spectres, and there was some trouble to put them to supper and bed. They are called apparitions, because they were never visible by day, only at ten at night; for the one is busied in describing great deeds, and the other in commenting on Newton. Like other apparitions, they are uneasy companions: they will neither play nor walk; they will not dissipate their mornings with the charming circle about them, nor allow the charming circle to break into their studies. Voltaire and Madame de Chatelet would have suffered the same pain in being forced to an abstinence of their regular studies, as this circle of "agreables" would have at the loss of their meals and their airings. However, the persifleur declares they were ciphers "en societe," adding no value to the number, and to which their learned writings bear no reference.

But if this literary couple would not play, what was worse, Voltaire poured out a vehement declamation against a fashionable species of gambling, which appears to have made them all stare. But Madame de Chatelet is the more frequent victim of our persifleur. The learned lady would change her apartment—for it was too noisy, and it had smoke without fire—which last was her emblem. "She is reviewing her Principia; an exercise she repeats every year, without which precaution they might escape from her, and get so far away that she might never find them again. I believe that her head in respect to them is a house of imprisonment rather than the place of their birth; so that she is right to watch them closely; and she prefers the fresh air of this occupation to our amusements, and persists in her invisibility till night-time. She has six or seven tables in her apartments, for she wants them of all sizes; immense ones to spread out her papers, solid ones to hold her instruments, lighter ones, &c. Yet with all this she could not escape from the accident which happened to Philip II., after passing the night in writing, when a bottle of ink fell over the despatches; but the lady did not imitate the moderation of the prince; indeed, she had not written on State affairs, and what was spoilt in her room was algebra, much more difficult to copy out." Here is a pair of portraits of a great poet and a great mathematician, whose habits were discordant with the fashionable circle in which they resided—the representation is just, for it is by one of the coterie itself.

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; who, if he bear about him the consciousness of genius, will still be acting 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 who amidst society will not be often breaking out to seek for himself. WILKES, no longer touched by the fervours of literary and patriotic glory, suffered life to melt away as a domestic voluptuary; and then it was that he observed with some surprise of the great Earl of CHATHAM, that he sacrificed every pleasure of social life, even in youth, to his great pursuit of eloquence. That ardent character studied Barrow's Sermons so often as to repeat them from memory, and could even read twice from beginning to end Bailey's Dictionary; these are little facts which belong only to great minds! The earl himself acknowledged an artifice he practised in his intercourse 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, 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 character, in constantly escaping from the processional spectacle of society.[A] It is no trivial observation of another noble writer, Lord SHAFTESBURY, that "it may happen that a person may be so much the worse author, for being the finer gentleman."

[Footnote A: In a note which Lord BYRON has written in a copy of this work his lordship says, "I fear this was not the case; I have been but too much in that circle, especially in 1812-13-14."

To the expression of "one deep loneliness of feeling," his lordship has marked in the margin "True." I am gratified to confirm the theory of my ideas of the man of genius, by the practical experience of the greatest of our age.]

An extraordinary instance of this disagreement 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's ink; and when he resided among the Antiochians, his unalterable character shocked that volatile and luxurious race. He slighted the plaudits of their theatre, he abhorred their dances and their horse-races, he was abstinent even at a festival, and incorrupt himself, perpetually admonished the dissipated citizens of their impious abandonment of the laws of their country. The Antiochians libelled their emperor, and petulantly lampooned his beard, which the philosopher carelessly 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 irony and invective, the literary monarch bestows on himself many exquisite and characteristic touches. All that the persons of fashion alleged against the literary character, Julian unreservedly confesses—his undressed beard and awkwardness, his obstinacy, his unsociable habits, his deficient tastes, while at the same time he represents his good qualities as so many extravagances. But, in this Cervantic pleasantry of self-reprehension, the imperial philosopher has not failed to show this light and corrupt people that the reason he could not possibly resemble them, existed in the unhappy circumstance of having been subject to too strict an education under a family tutor, who had never suffered him to swerve from the one right way, and who (additional misfortune!) had inspired him with such a silly reverence for Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus, that he had been induced to make them 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 difficult, 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. Clip the wings of an eagle that he may roost among domestic fowls,—at some unforeseen moment his pinions will overshadow and terrify his tiny associates, for "the feathered king" will be still musing on the rock and the cloud.

The man of genius will be restive even in his trammelled paces. Too impatient amidst the heartless courtesies of society, and little practised in the minuter attentions, he has rarely sacrificed to the unlaughing graces of Lord Chesterfield. Plato ingeniously compares Socrates to the gallipots of the Athenian apothecaries; the grotesque figures of owls and apes were painted on their exterior, but they contained within precious balsams. The man of genius amidst many a circle may exclaim with Themistocles, "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 certain conventional manners, asserting that "wanting all these things, he was not the less Corneille."

But with the great thinkers and students, their character is still more obdurate. ADAM SMITH could never free himself from the embarrassed manners of a recluse; he was often absent, and his grave and formal conversation made him seem distant and reserved, when in fact no man had warmer feelings for his intimates. One who knew Sir ISAAC NEWTON tells us, that "he would sometimes be silent and thoughtful, and look all the while as if he were saying his prayers." A French princess, desirous of seeing the great moralist NICOLLE, experienced an inconceivable disappointment when the moral instructor, entering with the most perplexing bow imaginable, silently sank into his chair. The interview promoted no conversation, and the retired student, whose elevated spirit might have endured martyrdom, shrunk with timidity in the unaccustomed honour of conversing with a princess and having nothing to say. Observe Hume thrown into a most ridiculous attitude by a woman of talents and coterie celebrity. Our philosopher was called on to perform his part in one of those inventions of the hour to which the fashionable, like children in society, have sometimes resorted to attract their world by the rumour of some new extravagance. In the present, poor HUME was to represent a sultan on a sofa, sitting between two slaves, who were the prettiest and most vivacious of Parisians. Much was anticipated from this literary exhibition. The two slaves were ready at repartee, but the utter simplicity of the sultan displayed a blockishness which blunted all edge. The phlegmatic metaphysician and historian only gave a sign of life by repeating the same awkward gesture, and the same ridiculous exclamation, without end. One of the fair slaves soon discovered the unchangeable nature of the forlorn philosopher, impatiently exclaiming, "I guessed as much, never was there such a calf of a man!"—"Since this affair," adds Madame d'Epinay, "Hume is at present banished to the class of spectators." The philosopher, indeed, had formed a more correct conception of his own character than the volatile sylphs of the Parisian circle, for in writing to the Countess de Boufflers, on an invitation to Paris, he said, "I have rusted on amid books and study; have been little engaged in the active, and not much in the pleasurable, scenes of life; and am more accustomed to a select society than to general companies." If Hume made a ridiculous figure in these circles, the error did not lie on the side of that cheerful and profound philosopher.—This subject leads our inquiries to the nature of the conversations of men of genius.



CHAPTER IX.

Conversations of men of genius.—Their deficient agreeableness may result from qualities which conduce to their greatness.—Slow-minded men not the dullest.—The conversationists not the ablest writers.—Their true excellence in conversation consists of associations with their pursuits.

In conversation the sublime DANTE was taciturn or satirical; BUTLER sullen or caustic; GRAY and ALFIERI seldom talked or smiled; DESCARTES, whose habits had formed him for solitude and meditation, was silent; ROUSSEAU was remarkably trite in conversation, not an idea, not a word of fancy or eloquence warmed him; ADDISON and MOLIERE in society were only observers; and DRYDEN has very honestly 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." POPE had lived among "the great," not only in rank but in intellect, the most delightful conversationists; but the poet felt that he could not contribute to these seductive pleasures, and at last confessed that he could amuse and instruct himself much more by another means: "As much company as I have kept, and as much as I love it, I love reading better, and would rather be employed in reading, than in the most agreeable conversation." Pope's conversation, as preserved by Spence, was sensible; and it would seem that he had never said but one witty thing in his whole life, for only one has been recorded. It was ingeniously said of VAUCANSON, that he was as much an automaton as any which he made. HOGARTH and SWIFT, who looked on the circles of society with eyes of inspiration, were absent in company; but their grossness and asperity did not prevent the one from being the greatest of comic painters, nor the other as much a creator of manners in his way. Genius, even in society, is pursuing its own operations, and it would cease to be itself were it always to act like others.

Men of genius who are habitually eloquent, who have practised conversation as an art, for some, even sacrifice their higher pursuits to this perishable art of acting, have indeed excelled, and in the most opposite manner. HORNE TOOKE finely discriminates the wit in conversation of SHERIDAN and CURRAN, after having passed an evening in their company. "Sheridan's wit was like steel highly polished and sharpened for display and use; Curran's was a mine of virgin gold, incessantly crumbling away from its own richness." CHARLES BUTLER, whose reminiscences of his illustrious contemporaries are derived from personal intercourse, has correctly described the familiar conversations of PITT, FOX, and BURKE: "The most intimate friends of Mr. Fox complained of his too frequent ruminating silence. Mr. Pitt talked, and his talk was fascinating. Mr. Burke's conversation was rambling, but splendid and instructive beyond comparison." Let me add, that the finest genius of our times, is also the most delightful man; he is that rarest among the rare of human beings, whom to have known is nearly to adore; whom to have seen, to have heard, forms an era in our life; whom youth remembers with enthusiasm, and whose presence the men and women of "the world" feel like a dream from which they would not awaken. His bonhomie attaches our hearts to him by its simplicity; his legendary conversation makes us, for a moment, poets like himself.[A]

[Footnote A: This was written under the inspiration of a night's conversation, or rather listening to Sir WALTER SCOTT.—I cannot bring myself to erase what now, alas! has closed in the silence of a swift termination of his glorious existence.]

But that deficient agreeableness in social life with which men of genius have been often reproached, may really result from the nature of those qualities which conduce to the greatness of their public character. A thinker whose mind is saturated with knowledge on a particular subject, will be apt to deliver himself authoritatively; but he will then pass for a dogmatist: should he hesitate, that he may correct an equivocal expression, or bring nearer a remote idea, he is in danger of sinking into pedantry or rising into genius. Even the fulness of knowledge has its tediousness. "It is rare," said MALEBRANCHE, "that those who meditate profoundly can explain well the objects they have meditated on; for they hesitate when they have to speak; they are scrupulous to convey false ideas or use inaccurate terms. They do not choose to speak, like others, merely for the sake of talking." A vivid and sudden perception of truth, or a severe scrutiny after it, may elevate the voice, and burst with an irruptive heat on the subdued tone of conversation. These men are too much in earnest for the weak or the vain. Such seriousness kills their feeble animal spirits. SMEATON, a creative genius of his class, had a warmth of expression which seemed repulsive to many: it arose from an intense application of mind, which impelled him to break out hastily when anything was said that did not accord with his ideas. Persons who are obstinate till they can give up their notions with a safe conscience, are troublesome intimates. Often too the cold tardiness of decision is only the strict balancing of scepticism or candour, while obscurity as frequently may arise from the deficiency of previous knowledge in the listener. It was said that NEWTON in conversation did not seem to understand his own writings, and it was supposed that his memory had decayed. The fact, however, was not so; and Pemberton makes a curious distinction, which accounts for Newton not always being ready to speak on subjects of which he was the sole master. "Inventors seem to treasure up in their own minds what they have found out, after another manner than those do the same things that have not this inventive faculty. The former, when they have occasion to produce their knowledge, in some means are obliged immediately to investigate part of what they want. For this they are not equally fit at all times; and thus it has often happened, that such as retain things chiefly by means of a very strong memory, have appeared off-hand more expert than the discoverers themselves."

A peculiar characteristic in the conversations of men of genius, which has often injured them when the listeners were not intimately acquainted with the men, are those sports of a vacant mind, those sudden impulses to throw out paradoxical opinions, and to take unexpected views of things in some humour of the moment. These fanciful and capricious ideas are the grotesque images of a playful mind, and are at least as frequently misrepresented as they are misunderstood. But thus the cunning Philistines are enabled to triumph over the strong and gifted man, because in the hour of confidence, and in the abandonment of the mind, he had laid his head in the lap of wantonness, and taught them how he might be shorn of his strength. Dr. JOHNSON appears often to have indulged this amusement, both in good and 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 genius; which, perhaps, as often originates in a gentle feeling of contempt for their auditors, as from any other cause. Many years after having written the above, I discovered two recent confessions which confirm the principle. A literary character, the late Dr. LEYDEN, acknowledged, that "in conversation I often verge so nearly on absurdity, that I know it is perfectly easy to misconceive me, as well as to misrepresent me." And Miss Edgeworth, in describing her father's conversation, observes that, "his openness went too far, almost to imprudence; exposing him not only to be misrepresented, but to be misunderstood. Those who did not know him intimately, often took literally what was either said in sport, or spoken with the intention of making a strong impression for some good purpose." CUMBERLAND, whose conversation was delightful, happily describes the species I have noticed. "Nonsense talked by men of wit and understanding in the hour of relaxation is of the very finest essence of conviviality, and a treat delicious to those who have the sense to comprehend it; but it implies a trust in the company not always to be risked." The truth is, that many, eminent for their genius, have been remarkable in society for a simplicity and playfulness almost infantine. Such was the gaiety of Hume, such the bonhomie of Fox; and one who had long lived in a circle of men of genius in the last age, was disposed to consider this infantine simplicity as characteristic of genius. It is a solitary grace, which can never lend its charm to a man of the world, whose purity of mind has long been lost in a hacknied intercourse with everything exterior to himself.

But above all, what most offends, is that freedom of opinion which a man of genius can no more divest himself of, than of the features of his face. But what if this intractable obstinacy be only resistance of character? Burns never could account to himself why, "though when he had a mind he was pretty generally beloved, he could never get the art of commanding respect," and imagined it was owing to his deficiency in what Sterne calls "that understrapping virtue of discretion;" "I am so apt to a lapsus linguae" says this honest sinner. Amidst the stupidity of a formal circle, and the inanity of triflers, however such men may conceal their impatience, one of them has forcibly described the reaction of this suppressed feeling: "The force with which it burst out when the pressure was taken off, gave the measure of the constraint which had been endured." Erasmus, that learned and charming writer, who was blessed with the genius which could enliven a folio, has well described himself, sum natura propensior ad jocos quam fortasse deceat:—more constitutionally inclined to pleasantry than, as he is pleased to add, perhaps became him. We know in his intimacy with Sir Thomas More, that Erasmus was a most exhilarating companion; yet in his intercourse with the great he was not fortunate. At the first glance he saw through affectation and parade, his praise of folly was too ironical, and his freedom carried with it no pleasantry for those who knew not to prize a laughing sage.

In conversation the operations of the intellect with some are habitually slow, but there will be found no difference between the result of their perceptions and those of a quicker nature; and 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 vanquishes me in the drawing-room, but surrenders to me at discretion on the stairs." Many a great wit has thought the wit it was too late to speak, and many a great reasoner has only reasoned when his opponent has disappeared. Conversation with such men is a losing game; and it is often lamentable to observe how men of genius are reduced to a state of helplessness from not commanding their attention, while inferior intellects habitually are found to possess what is called "a ready mind." For this reason some, as it were in despair, have shut themselves up in silence. A lively Frenchman, in describing the distinct sorts of conversation of his literary friends, among whom was Dr. Franklin, energetically hits off that close observer and thinker, wary, even in society, by noting down "the silence of the celebrated Franklin." We learn from Cumberland that Lord Mansfield did not promote that conversation which gave him any pains to carry on. He resorted to society for simple relaxation, and could even find a pleasure in dulness when accompanied with placidity. "It was a kind of cushion to his understanding," observes the wit. CHAUCER, like LA FONTAINE, was more facetious in his tales than in his conversation; for the Countess of Pembroke used to rally him, observing that his silence was more agreeable to her than his talk. TASSO'S conversation, which his friend Manso has attempted to preserve for us, was not agreeable. In company he sat absorbed in thought, with a melancholy air; and it was on one of these occasions that a person present observing that this conduct was indicative of madness, that TASSO, who had heard him, looking on him without emotion, asked whether he was ever acquainted with a madman who knew when to hold his tongue! Malebranche tells us that one of these mere men of learning, who can only venture to praise antiquity, once said, "I have seen DESCARTES; I knew him, and frequently have conversed with him; he was a good sort of man, and was not wanting in sense, but he had nothing extraordinary in him." Had Aristotle spoken French instead of Greek, and had this man frequently conversed with him, unquestionably he would not have discovered, even in this idol of antiquity, anything extraordinary. Two thousand years would have been wanting for our learned critic's perceptions.

It is remarkable that the conversationists have rarely proved 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 impressions, and touching the shadows and outlines of things—with a memory where all lies ready at hand, quickened by habitual associations, and varying with all those extemporary changes and fugitive colours which melt away in the rainbow of conversation; with that wit, which is only wit in one place, and for a time; with that vivacity of animal spirits which often exists separately from the more retired intellectual powers—this man can strike out wit by habit, and pour forth a stream of phrase which has sometimes been imagined to require only to be written down to be read with the same delight with which it was heard; but he cannot print his tone, nor his air and manner, nor the contagion of his hardihood. All the while we were not sensible of the flutter of his ideas, the incoherence of his transitions, his vague notions, his doubtful assertions, and his meagre knowledge. A pen is the extinguisher of this luminary.

A curious contrast occurred between BUFFON and his friend MONTBELLIARD, who was associated in his great work. The one possessed the reverse qualities of the other: BUFFON, whose style in his composition is elaborate and declamatory, was in conversation coarse and careless. Pleading that conversation with him was only a relaxation, he rather sought than avoided the idiom and slang of the mob, when these seemed expressive and facetious; while MONTBELLIARD threw every charm of animation over his delightful talk: but when he took his seat at the rival desk of Buffon, an immense interval separated them; he whose tongue dropped the honey and the music of the bee, handled a pen of iron; while Buffon's was the soft pencil of the philosophical painter of nature. COWLEY and KILLEGREW furnish another instance. COWLEY was embarrassed in conversation, and had no quickness in argument or reply: a mind pensive and elegant could not be struck at to catch fire: while with KILLEGREW the sparkling bubbles of his fancy rose and dropped.[A] When the delightful conversationist wrote, the deception ceased. Denham, who knew them both, hit off the difference between them:

Had Cowley ne'er spoke, Killegrew ne'er writ, Combined in one they had made a matchless wit.

[Footnote A: Killegrew's eight plays, upon which his character as an author rests, have not been republished with one exception—the Parson's Wedding—which is given in Dodsley's collection; and which is sufficient to satisfy curiosity. He was a favourite with Charles the Second, and had great influence with him. Some of his witty court jests are preserved, but are too much imbued with the spirit of the age to be quoted here. He was sometimes useful by devoting his satiric sallies to urge the king to his duties.—ED.]

Not, however, that a man of genius does not throw out many things in conversation which have only been found admirable when the public possessed them. The public often widely differ from the individual, and a century's opinion may intervene between them. The fate of genius is sometimes that of the Athenian sculptor, who submitted his colossal Minerva to a private party for inspection. Before the artist they trembled for his daring chisel, and the man of genius smiled; behind him they calumniated, and the man of genius forgave. Once fixed in a public place, in the eyes of the whole city, the statue was the Divinity! There is a certain distance at which opinions, as well as statues, must be viewed.

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? Must we bend to the artist, who considers us as nothing unless we are canvas or marble under his hands? Are there not men of genius the grace of society and the charm of their circle? 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, "Do his productions not delight and sometimes surprise you?—You are silent! I beg your pardon; 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 historian of his country. Even a good man could not believe in the announcement of the Messiah, from the same sort of prejudice: "Can there anything good come out of Nazareth?"

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 character. AKENSIDE, in conversation with select friends, often touched by a romantic enthusiasm, would pass in review those eminent ancients whom he loved; he imbued with his poetic faculty even the details of their lives; and seemed another Plato while he poured libations to their memory in the language of Plato, among those whose studies and feelings were congenial with his own. ROMNEY, with a fancy entirely his own, would give vent to his effusions, uttered in a hurried accent and elevated tone, and often accompanied by tears, to which by constitution he was prone; thus Cumberland, from personal intimacy, describes the conversation of this man of genius. Even the temperate sensibility of HUME was touched by the bursts of feeling of ROUSSEAU; who, he says, "in conversation kindles often to a degree of heat which looks like inspiration." BARRY, that unhappy genius! was the most repulsive of men in his exterior. The vehemence of his language, the wildness of his glance, his habit of introducing vulgar oaths, which, by some unlucky association of habit, served him as expletives and interjections, communicated even a horror to some. A pious and a learned lady, who had felt intolerable uneasiness in his presence, did not, however, leave this man of genius that very 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 benevolence which pervades Christianity, and on the meekness of the Founder, it gave BARRY an opportunity of opening on the character of Jesus with that copiousness of heart and mind which, once heard, could never be forgotten. That artist indeed had long in his meditations an ideal head of Christ, which he was always talking of executing: "It is here!" he would cry, striking his head. That which baffled the invention, as we are told, of Leonardo da Vinci, who left his Christ headless, having exhausted his creative faculty among the apostles, this imaginative picture of the mysterious union of a divine and human nature, never ceased, even when conversing, to haunt the reveries of BARRY.

There are few authors and artists who are not eloquently instructive on that class of knowledge or that department of art which reveals the mastery of their life. Their conversations of this nature affect the mind to a distant period of life. Who, having listened to such, has forgotten what a man of genius has said at such moments? Who dwells not on the single thought or the glowing expression, stamped in the heat of the moment, which came from its source? Then the mind of genius rises as the melody of the AEolian harp, when the winds suddenly sweep over the strings —it comes and goes—and leaves a sweetness beyond the harmonies of art.

The Miscellanea of POLITIAN are not only the result of his studies in the rich library of Lorenzo de' Medici, but of conversations which had passed in those rides which Lorenzo, accompanied by Politian, preferred to the pomp of cavalcades. When the Cardinal de Cabassolle strayed with PETRARCH about his valley in many a wandering discourse, they sometimes extended their walks to such a distance, that the servant sought them in vain to announce the dinner-hour, and found them returning in the evening. When HELVETIUS enjoyed the social conversation of a literary friend, he described it as "a chase of ideas." Such are the literary conversations which HORNE TOOKE alluded to, when he said "I assure you, we find more difficulty to finish than to begin our conversations."

The natural and congenial conversations of men of letters and of artists must then be those which are associated with their pursuits, and these are of a different complexion with the talk of men of the world, the objects of which are drawn from the temporary passions of party-men, or the variable on dits of triflers—topics studiously rejected from these more tranquillising conversations. Diamonds can only be polished by their own dust, and are only shaped by the friction of other diamonds; and so it happens with literary men and artists.

A meeting of this nature has been recorded by CICERO, which himself and ATTICUS had with VARRO in the country. Varro arriving from Rome in their neighbourhood somewhat fatigued, had sent a messenger to his friends. "As soon as we had heard these tidings," says Cicero, "we could not delay hastening to see one who was attached to us by the same pursuits and by former friendship." They set off, but found Varro half way, urged by the same eager desire to join them. They conducted him to Cicero's villa. Here, while Cicero was inquiring after the news of Rome, Atticus interrupted the political rival of Caesar, observing, "Let us leave off inquiring after things which cannot be heard without pain. Rather ask about what we know, for Varro's muses are longer silent than they used to be, yet surely he has not forsaken them, but rather conceals what he writes."—"By no means!" replied Varro, "for I deem him to be a whimsical man to write what he wishes to suppress. I have indeed a great work in hand (on the Latin language), long designed for Cicero." The conversation then took its natural turn by Atticus having got rid of the political anxiety of Cicero. Such, too, were the conversations which passed at the literary residence of the Medici family, which was described, with as much truth as fancy, as "the Lyceum of philosophy, the Arcadia of poets, and the Academy of painters." We have a pleasing instance of such a meeting of literary friends in those conversations which passed in POPE'S garden, where there was often a remarkable union of nobility and literary men. There Thomson, Mallet, Gay, Hooke, and Glover met Cobham, Bathurst, Chesterfield, Lyttleton, and other lords; there some of these poets found patrons, and POPE himself discovered critics. The contracted views of Spence have unfortunately not preserved these literary conversations, but a curious passage has dropped from the pen of Lord BOLINGBROKE, in what his lordship calls "a letter to Pope," often probably passed over among his political tracts. It breathes the spirit of those delightful conversations. "My thoughts," writes his lordship, "in what order soever they flow, shall be communicated to you just as they pass through my mind—just as they used to be when we conversed together on these or any other subject; when we sauntered alone, or as we have often done with good Arbuthnot, and the jocose Dean of St. Patrick, among the multiplied scenes of your little garden. The theatre is large enough for my ambition." Such a scene opens a beautiful subject for a curious portrait-painter. These literary groups in the garden of Pope, sauntering, or divided in confidential intercourse, would furnish a scene of literary repose and enjoyment among some of the most illustrious names in our literature.



CHAPTER X.

Literary solitude.—Its necessity.—Its pleasures.—Of visitors by profession.—Its inconveniences.

The literary character is reproached with an extreme passion for retirement, cultivating those insulating habits, which, while they are great interruptions, and even weakeners, of domestic happiness, induce at the same time in public life to a secession from its cares, and an avoidance of its active duties. Yet the vacancies of retired men are eagerly filled by the many unemployed men of the world happily framed for its business. We do not hear these accusations raised against the painter who wears away his days by his easel, or the musician by the side of his instrument; 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. The desk is as insulating as the library. Yet the man who is working for his individual interest is more highly estimated than the retired student, whose disinterested pursuits are at least more profitable to the world than to himself. La Bruyere discovered the world's erroneous estimate of literary labour: "There requires a better name," he says, "to be bestowed on the leisure (the idleness he calls it) of the literary character,—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 objects palpable to the observers, that the literary character appears to be denied for his pursuits, what cannot be refused to every other. That unremitting application and unbroken series of their thoughts, admired in every profession, is only complained of in that one whose professors with so much sincerity mourn over the brevity 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—may be found the happiest with the literary character. Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is the true parent of genius. In all ages solitude has been called for—has been flown to. No considerable work was ever composed till 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!

and in themselves; for there only can they indulge in the romances of their soul, and there only can they occupy themselves in their dreams and their vigils, and, with the morning, fly without interruption to the labour they had reluctantly quitted. If there be not periods when they shall allow their days to melt harmoniously into each other, if they do not pass whole weeks together in their study, without intervening absences, they will not be admitted into the last recess of the Muses. Whether their glory come from researches, or from enthusiasm, time, with not a feather ruffled on his wings, time alone opens discoveries and kindles meditation. This desert of solitude, so vast and so dreary to the man of the world, to the man of genius is the magical garden of Armida, whose enchantments arose amidst solitude, while solitude was everywhere among those enchantments.

Whenever MICHAEL ANGELO, that "divine madman," as Richardson once wrote on the back of one of his drawings, 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 artist, "Art is a jealous god; it requires the whole and entire man." During his mighty labour in the Sistine Chapel, he refused to have any communication with any person even at his own house. Such undisturbed and solitary attention is demanded even by undoubted genius as the price of performance. How then shall we deem of that feebler race who exult in occasional excellence, and who so often deceive themselves by mistaking the evanescent flashes of genius for that holier flame which burns on its altar, because the fuel is incessantly supplied?

We observe men of genius, in public situations, sighing for this solitude. Amidst the impediments of the world, they are doomed to view their intellectual banquet often rising before them, like some fairy delusion, never to taste it. The great VERULAM often complained of the disturbances of his public life, and rejoiced in the occasional retirement he stole from public affairs. "And now, because I am in the country, I will send you some of my country fruits, which with me are good meditations; when I am in the city, they are choked with business." Lord CLARENDON, whose life so happily combined the contemplative with the active powers of man, dwells on three periods of retirement which he enjoyed; he always took pleasure in relating the great tranquillity of spirit experienced 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 occasioned a new acquisition; to one he owed the Spanish, to another the French, and to a third the Italian literature. The public are not yet acquainted with the fertility of Lord Clarendon's literary labours. It was not vanity that induced Scipio to declare of solitude, that it had no loneliness for him, since he voluntarily retired amidst a glorious life to his Linternum. CICERO was uneasy amid applauding 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 Carberry's seat in Wales; and the "Diversions of Purley" preserved a man of genius for posterity. VOLTAIRE had talents well adapted for society; but at one period of his life he passed five years in the most secret seclusion, and indeed usually lived in retirement. MONTESQUIEU quitted the brilliant circles of Paris for his books and his meditations, and was ridiculed by the gay triflers he deserted; "but my great work," he observes in triumph, "avance a pas de geant." Harrington, to compose his "Oceana," severed himself from the society of his friends. DESCARTES, inflamed 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, withdrew into a retirement that lasted ten years: even Hume rallies him for separating himself 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. The mind, maturing its speculations, feels the unexpected conversation of cold ceremony chilling as 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 weary because they are wearied, or to seek amusement at the cost of others, belong to that class of society which have affixed no other idea 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, who may be often driven to exclaim, in the words of the Psalmist, "Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency: for all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning."