"I form

An unfavourable position in society is an usual obstruction in the course of this self-education; and a man of genius, through half his life, has held a contest with a bad, or with no education. There is a race of the late-taught, who, with a capacity of leading in the first rank, are mortified to discover themselves only on a level with their contemporaries. Winkleman, who passed his youth in obscure misery as a village schoolmaster, paints feelings which strikingly contrast with his avocations. erly filled the office of a schoolmaster with the greatest punctuality, and I taught the A, B, C, to children with filthy heads; at the moment, I was aspiring after the knowledge of the beautiful, and meditating, low to myself, on the similes of Homer; then I said to myself, as I still say, 'Peace, my soul, thy strength shall surmount thy cares. The obstructions of so unhappy a self-education essentially injured his ardent genius; and his secret sorrow was long, at this want of early patronage and these discordant habits of life. I am unfortunatley one of those whom the Greeks named owiμalers; sero sapientes, the latelearned, for I have appeared too late in the world and in Italy. To have done something, it was necessary that I should have had an education analogous to my pursuits, and this at your age.' This class of the late learned, which Winkleman notices, is a useful distinction; it is so with a sister-art: one of the greatest musicians of our country assures me, that the ear is as latent with many; there are the late-learned even in the musical world. Budæus declared he was both self-taught and late-taught.'

The self-educated are marked by strong peculiarities. If their minds are rich in acquisition, they often want taste and the art of communication; their knowledge, like corn heaped in a granary, for want of ventilation and stirring, perishes in its own masses. They may abound with talent in all shapes, but rarely in its place, and they have to dread a plethora of genius, and a delirium of wit. They sometimes improve amazingly; their source turbid and obscure, works itself clear at last, and the stream runs and even sparkles. These men at first were pushed on by their native energy; at length, they obtain the secret to conduct their genius, which before had conducted them. Sometimes the greater portion of their lives is passed before they can throw themselves out of that world of mediocrity to which they had been confined; their first work has not announced genius, and their last is stamped with it. Men are long judged by their first work: it takes a long while after they have surpassed themselves before it is discovered. This race of the self-educated are apt to consider some of their own insulated feelings those of all; their prejudices are often invincible, and their tastes unsure and capricious: glorying in their strength, while they are betraying their weaknesses, yet mighty even in that enthusiasm which is only disciplined by its own fierce habits. Bunyan is the Spenser of the people. The fire burned towards heaven, although the altar was rude and rustic. Barry, the painter, has left behind him works not to be turned over by the connoisseur by rote, nor the artist who dares not be just and will not suffer even the infirmities of genius to be buried in its grave. That enthusiast, with a temper of mind resembling Rousseau's, the same creature of imagination, consumed by the same passions, with the same fine intellect disordered, and the same fortitude of soul, found his self-taught pen, like his pencil, betray his genius. A vehement enthusiasm breaks through his illcomposed works, throwing the sparke of his bold and rich conceptions, so philosophical and magnificent, into the soul of the youth of genius. When in his character of professor, be delivered his lectures at the academy, he never ceased speaking but his auditors rose in a tumult,

Life of John Hunter, by Dr Adams, p. 59, where the case is curiously illustrated.

while their hands returned to him the proud feelings he adored. The self-educated and gifted man, once listening to the children of genius, whom he had created about him, exclaimed, Go it, go it, my boys! they did so at Athens." Thus high could he throw up his native mud into the very heaven of his invention!

But even the pages of Barry are the aliment of young genius: before we can discern the beautiful, must we not be endowed with the susceptibility of love? Must not the disposition be formed before even the object appears? The uneducated Barry is the higher priest of enthusiasm than the educated Reynolds. I have witnessed the young artist of genius glow and start over the reveries of Barry, but pause and meditate, and inquire over the mature elegance of Reynolds; in the one, he caught the passion for beauty, and in the other, he discovered the beautiful: with the one he was warm and restless, and with the other calm and satisfied.

Of the difficulties overcome in the self-education of genius, we have a remarkable instance in the character of Moses Mendelsohn, on whom literary Germany has bestowed the honourable title of the Jewish Socrates.* Such were the apparent invincible obstructions which barred out Mendelsohn from the world of literature and philosophy, that, in the history of men of genius, it is something like taking in the history of man, the savage of Aveyron from his woods,-who, destitute of a human language, should at length create a model of eloquence; without a faculty of conceiving a figure, should be capable to add to the demonstrations of Euclid; and without a complex idea and with few sensations, should at length, in the sublimest strain of metaphysics, open to the world a new view of the immortality of the soul!

Mendelsohn, the son of a poor rabbin, in a village in Germany, received an education completely rabbinical, and its nature must be comprehended, or the term of education would be misunderstood. The Israelites in Poland and Germany live, with all the restrictions of their ceremonial law, in an insulated state, and are not always instructed in the language of the country of their birth. They employ for their common intercourse a barbarous or patois Hebrew, while the sole studies of the young rabbins are strictly confined to the Talmud, of which the fundamental principle, like the Sonna of the Turks, is a pious rejection of every species of uninspired learning. This ancient jealous spirit, which walls in the understanding and the faith of man, was shutting out what the imitative Catholics afterwards called heresy. It is, then, these numerous folios of the Talmud which the true Hebraic student contemplates through all the seasons of life, as the Patuecos in their low valley imagine their surrounding mountains to be the confines of the universe.

Of such a nature was the plan of Mendelsohn's first studies; but even in his boyhood this conflict of study occasioned an agitation of his spirits, which affected his life ever after; rejecting the Talmudical dreamers he caught a nobler spirit from the celebrated Maimonides; and his native sagacity was already clearing up the darkness around. An enemy not less hostile to the enlargement of mind than voluminous legends, presented itself in the indigence of his father, who was now compelled to send away the youth on foot to Berlin to find labour and bread.

At Berlin he becomes an amanuensis to another poor rabbin, who could only still initiate him into the theology, the jurisprudence and scholastic philosophy of his people. Thus he was no farther advanced in that philosophy of the mind in which he was one day to be the rival of Plato and Locke, nor in that knowledge of literature of which he was to be among the first polished critics of Germany.

Some unexpected event occurs which gives the first great impulse to the mind of genius. Mendelsohn received this from the first companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial, but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the Orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with

* I composed the life of Mendelsohn so far back as in 1778, for a periodical publication, whence our late biographers have drawn their notices; a juvenile production, which happened to excite the attention of the late Barry, then not personally known to me, and he has given all the immortality his poeti cal pencil could bestow on this man of genius, by immediately placing in his elysium of genius, Moses Mendelsohn shaking hands with Addison, who wrote on the truth of the Christian religion, and near Locke, the English master of Mendelsohn's mind.

cultivated by knowledge, so tried by experience, and so practised by converse with the literary world that its pro phetic feeling anticipates the public opinion. When a young writer's first essay is shown, some, through mere inability of censure, see nothing but beauties; others, with equal imbecility, can see none; and others, out of pure malice, see nothing but faults. I was soon disgusted," says Gibbon, with the modest practice of reading the

more sensibility than fortitude. But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist and a mathematician. Mendelsohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into the same situation, they approached each other by the same sympathies, and communicating in the only language which Mendelsohn knew, the Polander voluntarily undertook his literary education. Then was seen one of the most extraordinary spectacles in the history of modern literature. Two houseless He-manuscript to my friends. Of such friends some will praise brew youths might be discovered, in the moonlight streets of Berlin, sitting in retired corners, or on the steps of some porch, the one instructing the other, with an Euclid in his hand; but what is more extraordinary, it was a Hebrew version, composed by himself, for one who knew no other language. Who could then have imagined that the future Plato of Germany was sitting on those steps!

The Polander, whose deep melancholy had settled on his heart, died-yet he had not lived in vain, since the electric spark that lighted up the soul of Mendelsohn had fallen from his own.

Mendelsohn was now left alone; his mind teeming with its chaos, and still master of no other language than that barren idiom which was incapable of expressing the ideas he was meditating on. He had scarcely made a step into the philosophy of his age, and the genius of Mendelsohn had probably been lost to Germany, had not the singularity of his studies and the cast of his mind been detected by the sagacity of Dr Kisch. The aid of this physician was momentous; for he devoted several hours every day to the instruction of a poor youth, whose strong capacity he had the discernment to perceive, and the generous temper to aid. Mendelsohn was soon enabled to read Locke in a Latin version, but with such extreme pain, that, compelled to search for every word, and to arrange their Latin order, and at the same time to combine metaphysical ideas, it was observed that he did not so much translate, as guess by the force of meditation.

This prodigious effort of his intellect retarded his progress, but invigorated his habit, as the racer, by running against the hill, at length courses with facility.

A succeeding effort was to master the living languages, and chiefly the English, that he might read his favourite Locke in his own idiom. Thus a great genius for metaphysics and languages was forming itself by itself.

It is curious to detect, in the character of genius, the effects of local and moral influences. There resulted from Mendelsohn's early situation, certain defects in his intellectual character, derived from his poverty, his Jewish education, and his numerous impediments in literature. Inheriting but one language, too obsolete and naked to serve the purposes of modern philosophy, he perhaps overvalued his new acquisitions, and in his delight of knowing many languages, he with difficulty escaped from remaining a mere philologist; while in his philosophy, having adopted the prevailing principles of Wolf and Baumgarten, his genius was long without the courage or the skill to emancipate itself from their rusty chains. It was more than a step which had brought him into their circle, but a step was yet wanted to escape from it.

At length the mind of Mendelsohn enlarged in literary intercourse; he became a great and original thinker in many beautiful speculations in moral and critical philosophy; while he had gradually been creating a style which the critics of Germany have declared was their first luninous model of precision and elegance. Thus a Hebrew vagrant, first perplexed in the voluminous labyrinth of Judicial learning, in his middle age oppressed by indigence and malady, and in his mature life wrestling with that commercial station whence he derived his humble independence, became one of the masterwriters in the literature of his country. The history of the mind of Mendelsohn is one of the noblest pictures of the self-education of genius. Friends who are so valuable in our youth, are usually prejudicial in the youth of genius. Peculiar and unfortunate in this state, which is put in danger from what in every other it derives security. The greater part of the multitude of authors and artists originate in the ignorant admiration of their early friends; while the real genius has often been disconcerted and thrown into despair, by the ill-judgments of his domestic circle. The productions of taste are more unfortunate than those which depend on a chain of reasoning, or the detail of facts; these are more palpable to the common judgments of men; but taste is of such rarity, that a long life may be passed by some without once obtaining a familiar acquaintance with a mind so

for politeness, and some will criticise for vanity.' Had several of our first writers set their fortunes on the cast of their friends' opinions, we might have lost some precious compositions. The friends of Thomson discovered nothing but faults in his early productions, one of which hap pened to be his noblest, the Winter; they just could discern that these abounded with luxuriances, without be ing aware that they were the luxuriances of a poet. He had created a new school in art-and appealed from his circle to the public. From a manuscript letter of our poet's, written when employed on his Summer,' I transcribe his sentiments on his former literary friends in Sootland-he is writing to Mallet:* Far from defending these two lines, I damn them to the lowest depth of the posti cal Tophet, prepared of old, for Mitchell, Morrice, Rook, Cook, Beckingham, and a long &c. Wherever I have evidence, or think I have evidence, which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as all the mules in Persia.' This poet, of warm affections, so irritably felt the perverse cnticisms of his learned friends, that they were to share alike, nothing less than a damnation to a poetical hell. One of these blasts' broke out in a vindictive epigram on Mitchell, whom he describes with a blasted eye;' but this critic having one literally, the poet, to avoid a personal reflec tion, could only consent to make the blemish more active: 'Why all not faults, injurious Mitchell! why Appears one beauty to thy blasting eye?

He again calls him the planet-blasted Mitchell.' Of another of these critical friends he speaks with more sedateness, but with a strong conviction that the critic, a man's reflections on my writings are very good, but he does very sensible man, had no sympathy with his poet. Aik not in them regard the turn of my genius enough; should I alter my way I would write poorly. I must choose what appears to me the most significant epithet, or I cannot, with any heart, proceed.' The Mirror,' when published in Edinburgh, was fastidiously' received, as all homeproductions' are; but London avenged the cause of the 20thor. When Swift introduced Parnel to Lord Bollingbroke, and to the world, he observes, in his Journal, it is pleas ant to see one who hardly passed for any thing in Ireland, make his way here with a little friendly forwarding." There is nothing more trying to the judgment of the friends of a young man of genius, than the invention of a new manner; without a standard to appeal to, without bladders to swim, the ordinary critic sinks into irretrieva ble distress; but usually pronounces against novelty. When Reynolds returned from Italy, warm with all the excellence of his art, says Mr Northcote, and painted a portrait, his old master, Hudson, viewing it, and perceiv ng no trace of his own manner, exclaimed that he did not paint so well as when he left England; while another, who conceived no higher excellence than Kneller, treated with signal contempt the future Raphael of England.

If it be dangerous for a young writer to resign himself to the opinions of his friends, he also incurs some peri in passing them with inattention. What an embarrassment He wants a Quintilian. One great means to obtain such an invaluable critic, is the cultivation of his own judgment, in a round of meditation and reading; let him at once supply the marble and be himself the sculptor: let the great authors of the world be his gospels, and the best cri tics their expounders; from the one he will draw inspira tion, and from the others he will supply those tardy sco veries in art, which he who solely depends on his own experience may obtain too late in life. Those who do not read criticism will not even merit to be criticised. The more extensive an author's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his powers in knowing what to do. Let him preserve his juvenile compositions,-whatever these may be, they are the spontaneous growth, and, like the plants of the Alps, not always found in other soils; they are his virgin fancies; by contemplating them, he may detect some of his predominant habits,-resume in * In Mr Murray's collection of autographical letera

children before him. There is a curious letter in Sir The reputation of a writer of taste is subjected to more Thomas Bodley's Remains to Lord Bacon, then Sir Fran- difficulties than any other. Every day we observe, of a cis, where he remonstrates with Bacon on his new mode of work of genius, that those parts which have all the raci philosophizing. It seems the fate of all originality of think- ness of the soil, and as such are most liked by its admirers, ing to be immediately opposed; no contemporary seems are the most criticised. Modest critics shelter themselves equal to its comprehension. Bacon was not at all under- under that general amnesty too freely granted, that tastes stood at home in his own day; his celebrity was confined are allowed to differ; but we should approximate much to his History of Henry VII, and to his Essays. In some nearer to the truth if we say that but few of mankind are unpublished letters I find Sir Edward Coke writing very capable of relishing the beautiful, with that enlarged taste, miserable, but very bitter verses, on a copy of the Instau- which comprehends all the forms of feeling which genius ratio presented to him by Bacon, and even James I, de- may assume; forms which may even at times be assoclaring that, like God's power, it passeth beyond all unciated with defects. Would our author dehght with the derstanding.' When Kepler published his work on Comets, style of taste, of imagination, of passion? a path opens the first rational one, it was condemned even by the learned strewed with roses, but his feet bleed on their invisible themselves as extravagant. We see the learned Selden thorns. A man of genius composes in a state of intellecsigning his recantation; and long afterwards the propriety tual emotion, and the magic of his style consists of the of his argument on Tithes fully allowed; the aged Galileo movements of the soul, but the art of conducting these on his knees, with his hand on the Gospels, abjuring, as movements is separate from the feeling which inspires absurdities, errors, and heresies, the philosophical truths them. The idea in the mind is not always to be found he had ascertained. Harvey, in his eightieth year, did under the pen. The artist's conception often breathes not live to witness his great discovery established. Adam not in his pencil. He toils, and repeatedly toils, to throw Smith was reproached by the economists for having bor-into our minds that sympathy with which we hang over rowed his system from them, as if the mind of genius does the illusion of his pages, and become himself. A great not borrow little parts to create its own vast views. The author is a great artist; if the hand cannot leave the picgreat Sydenham, by the independence and force of his ture, how much beauty will be undo! yet still he is linger. genius, so highly provoked the malignant emu'ation of his ing, still strengthening the weak, still subduing the daring, rivals, that they conspired to have him banished out of the still searching for that single idea which awakens so many College as guilty of medicinal heresy.' Such is the fate in others, while often, as it once happened, the dash of of men of genius, who advance a century beyond their con- despair hangs the foam on the horse's nostrils. The art temporaries! of composition is of such slow attainment, that a man of genius, late in life, may discover how its secret conceals itself in the habit. When Fox meditated on a history which should last with the language, he met his evil ge nius 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 com plained, while he mourned over the fragment of genius, which, after such zealous preparation, he dared not com plete! 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

Is our man of genius a learned author? Erudition is a thirst which its fountains have never satiated. What volumes remain to open! What manuscript but makes his heart palpitate! There is no measure, no term in researches, which every new fact may alter, and a date may dissolve. Truth! thou fascinating, but severe mistress! thy adorers are often broken down in thy servitude, performing a thousand unregarded task-works;* or now winding thee through thy labyrinth, with a single thread often unravelling, and now feeling their way in darkness, doubtful if it be thyself they are touching. The man of erudition, after his elaborate work, is exposed to the fatal omissions of wearied vigilance, or the accidental knowledge of some inferior mind, and always to the taste, whatever it chance to be, of the public.

The favourite work of Newton was his Chronology, which he wrote over fifteen times; but desisted from its publication during his life-time, from the ill usage he had received, of which he gave several instances to Pearce, the Bishop of Rochester. The same occurred to Sir John Marsham, who found himself accused as not being friendly to revelation. When the learned Pocock published a specimen of his translation of Abulpharagius, an Arabian historian, in 1649, it excited great interest, but when he published his complete version, in 1663, it met with no encouragement; in the course of those thirteen years, the genius of the times had changed; oriental studies were no longer in request. Thevenot then could not find a book-seller in London or at Amsterdam to print his Abulfeda, nor another, learned in Arabian lore, his history of Saladine.

*Look on a striking picture of these thousand task-works, coloured by his literary pangg, of Le Grand D'Aussy, the li terary antiquary, who could never finish his very curious work, on The History of the private life of the French.'

Endowed with a courage at all proofs, with health, which till then was unaltered, and with excess of labour has greatly changed, I devoted myself to write the lives of the learned, of the sixteenth century. Renouncing all kinds of pleasure, working ten to twelve hours a day, extracting, ceaselessly copying; after this sad life, I now wished to draw breath, turn over what I had amassed, and arrange it. I found myself possessed of many thousands of bulletins, of which the longest did not exceed many lines. At the sight of this frightful chaos, from which I was to form a regular history, I must cor.fess that I shuddered; I felt myself for some time in a stupor and depression of spirits; and now actually that I have finished this work, I cannot endure the recollection of that moment of alarm, without a feeling of involuntary terror. What a business is this, good God, of a compiler! in truth it is too much condemned; it merits some regard. At length I regained courage, I returned to my researches: I have completed my plan, though every day I was forced to add, to correct, to change my facts as well as my ideas: six times has my hand recopied my work, and however fatiguing this may be, it certainly is not that portion of my task which has cost me most.',

may be born, the art of writing is not easily obtained. His existing manuscripts display more erasures than Pope's, and show his eagerness to set down his first thoughts, and his art to raise them to the impassioned style of his imagination. The memoir of Gibbon was composed seven or nine times, and after all, was left unfinished. Buras's anxiety in finishing his poems was great; all my poetry," says he, is the effect of easy composition, but of laborious correction."

Pope, when employed on the Iliad, found it not only c cupy his thoughts by day, but haunting his dreams by night, and once wished himself hanged, to get rid of Ho mer: 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 Thus must the days of a great author be passed in Is bours as unremitting and exhausting as those of the artizan. The world are not always aware, that to some, meditation, composition, and even conversation, may in flict pains undetected by the eye and the tenderness of friendship. Whenever Rousseau passed a morning in company, he tells us it was observed that in the evening he was dissatisfied and distressed; and John Huntor, in a mixed company, found conversation fatigued, instead of amusing him. Hawksworth, in the second paper of the Adventurer, has composed, from his own feelings, an elo quent comparative estimate of intellectual and corporeal labour; may console the humble mechanic.

The anxious uncertainty of an author for his composi tions resembles that of a lover when he has written to a mistress, not yet decided on his claims: he repents his labour, for he thinks he has written too much, while be 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, ma parellel between ambition with genius, bas distinguished them in this, that while ambition perseveres in the desire of acquiring power, genius flags of itself. Gensus 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.'

face to his collected works comes by no means short of Smollet's avowal. Hume's philosophical indifference could often suppress that irritability which Pope and Smollet fully indulged. But were the feelings of Hume more obtuse, or did his temper, gentle as it was constitutionally, 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! The reasoning Hume once proposed changing his name and his country! and 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! Erasmus once resolved to abandon for ever his favourite literary pursuits; if this,' he exclaimed, alluding to his adversaries, if this be the fruits of all my youthful labours!'

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 aften 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. Corneille's objections he would attribute to jealousy-at his burlesqued pieces at the Italian theatre, he would smile outwardly, though sick at heart,-but his son informs us, that a stroke of raillery from his witty friend Chapelle, whose pleasantry scarcely concealed its bitterness, sunk more deeply into his heart than the burlesques at the Italian theatre, the protest of Corneille, and the iteration of the two Dennises. 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 probably occasioned a mental alienation. We find in one of his letters that he repents the composition of his great Parties confederate against a man of genius, as happoem, for although his own taste approved of that marvel-pened to Corneille, to D'Avenant* and Milton, and a PraJoas, which still forms the nobler part of its creation, yet he don and a Settle carry away the meed of a Racine and a confesses that his critics have decided that the history of Dryden. It was to support the drooping spirit of his friend his hero Godfrey required another species of conduct. Racine on the opposition raised against Phædra, that Hence,' cries the unhappy bard, doubts vex me; but Boileau addressed to him an epistle on the utility to be for the past and what is done, I know of no remedy'; and drawn from the jealousy of the envious. It was more to he longs to precipitate the publication that he may be de- the world than to his country, that Lord Bacon appealed, livered from misery and agony. He solemnly swears by a frank and noble conception in his will,- For my that did not the circumstances of my situation compel me, name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, I would not print it, even perhaps during my life, I so and to foreign nations, and the next age. The caim digmuch doubt of its success.' Such was that painful state nity of the historian De Thou, amidst the passions of his of fear and doubt, experienced by the author of the Jeru- times, confidently expected that justice from posterity salem Delivered' when he gave it to the world; a state of which his own age refused to his early and his late labour: suspense, among the children of imagination, of which that great man was, however, compelled, by his injured none are more liable to participate in, than the too sensi- feelings, to compose a poem, under the name of another, tive artist. At Florence may still be viewed the many to serve as his apology against the intolerant Court of works begun and abandoned by the genius of Michael An- Rome, and the factious politicians of France; it was a gelo; they are preserved inviolate; so sacred is the ter- noble subterfuge to which a great genius was forced. The For of Michael Angelo's genius! exclaims Forsyth. Yet acquaintances of the poet Collins probably complained of these works are not always to be considered as failures of his wayward humours and irritability; but how could they the chisel; they appear rather to have been rejected by sympathize with the secret mortification of the poet for coming short of the artist's first conceptions. An interest- having failed in his Pastorals, imagining that they were ing domestic story has been preserved of Gesner, who so composed on wrong principles; or with a secret agony of zealously devoted his graver and his pencil to the arts, but soul, burning with his own hands his unsold, but immortal his sensibility was ever struggling after that ideal excel- Odes? Nor must we forget here the dignified complaint lence he could not attain; often he sunk into fits of mel- of the Rambler, with which he awfully closes his work, in ancholy, and gentle as he was, the tenderness of his wife appealing to posterity. and friends could not sooth his distempered feelings; it was necessary to abandon him to his own thoughts, till after a long abstinence from his neglected works, in a lucid moment, some accident occasioned him to return to them. In one of these hypochondria of genius, after a long interval of despair, one morning at breakfast with his wife, his eve 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 artists, there are also sorrows which are peculiar to them, and which the world can neither pity nor soften, because they do not enter into their experience. The querulons 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. An author with, certain critics seems much in the situation of Benedict, when he exclaimed- Hang me in a bottle, like a cat, and shoot at me; and he that hits me, let him be clapped on the shoulder, and called Adam" Assuredly many an author has sunk into his grave without the consciousness of having obtained that fame for which he had in vain Sacrificed an arduous life. The too feeling Smollet has left this testimony to posterity. Had some of those, who are pleased to call themselves my friends, been at any pains to deserve the character, and told me ingeniously what I bad to expect in the capacity of an author. I should in al probability, have spared myself the incredible labour and chagrin I have since undergone.' And Smollet was a popular writer! Pope's solemn declaration in the preNo. 14.

In its solitary occupations, genius contracts its peculiarities, and in that sensibility which accompanies it, that loftiness of spirit, those quick jealousies, those excessive affections and aversions, which view every thing, as it passes in its own ideal world, and rarely as it exists in the mediocrity of reality. This irritability of genius is a malady which has raged even among philosophers: we must not, therefore, be surprised at the poetical temperament. They have abandoned their country, they have changed their name, they have punished themselves with exile in the rage of their disorder. Descartes sought in vain, even in his secreted life, a refuge for his 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. Hume once proposed to change his name and country, and I believe did. The great poetical genius of our times has openly alienated himself from the land of his brothers; he becomes immortal in the language of a people whom he would contemn; he accepts with ingratitude the fame he loves more than life, an he is only truly great who on that spot of earth, whose genius, when he is no more, will contemplate on his shade in anger and in sorrow.

Thus, the state of authorship is not friendly to equality of temper; and in those various humours incidental to it, when authors are often affected deeply, while the cause escapes all perception of sympathy, at those moments the lightest injury to the feelings, which at another time would make no impression, may produce even fury in the warm temper, or the corroding chagrin of a self wounded spirit. These are moments which claim the tenderness of friendship, animated by a high esteem for the intellectual excellence of this man of genius,-not the general intercourse * See Quarrels of Authors,' Vol. ii, on the confederacy of several wits against D'Avenant, a great genius.