often marked the boundary of the existence of the opulent

owner.

His invisible days flow on in this visionary world of literature and art; all the knowledge, and all the tastes, which genius has ever created are transplanted into his cabinet; there they flourish together in an atmosphere of their own. But tranquillity is essential to his existence; for though his occupations are interrupted without inconvenience, and resumed without effort, yet if the realities of life, with all their unquiet thoughts, are suffered to enter into his ideal world, they will be felt as if something were Hung with violence among the trees where the birds are singing, all would instantly disperse.

Such is that life of self-oblivion of the man of letters, for which so many have voluntarily relinquished a public sta tion; or their rank in society; neglecting even fortune and health. Of the pleasures of the man of letters it may be said, they combine those opposite sources of enjoyment observed in the hunter and the angler. Of a great hunter it was said, that he did not live but hunted; and the man of letters, in his perpetual researches, feels the like heat, and the joy of discovery, in his own chase; while in the deep calm of his spirits, such is the sweetness of his uninterrupted hours, like those of the angler that one may say of him what Colonel Venables, an enthusiastic angler, declared of his favourite pursuit, many have cast off other recreations and embraced this; but I never knew any angler wholly cast off, though occasions might interrupt, their affections to their beloved recreation.'

whom the centuries behind have conveyed no results, and who cannot see how the present time is always full of the future; as Leibnitz has expressed a profound reflection. 'Every thing,' says the lively Burnet, must be brought to the nature of tinder or gunpowder, ready for a spark to set it on fire,' before they discover it. The man of letters is accused of a cold indifference to the interests which divide society. In truth, he knows their miserable beginnings and their certain terminations; he is therefore rarely observed as the head, or the rump, of a party.

Antiquity presents such a man of letters in Atticus, who retreated from a political to a literary life; had his letters accompanied those of Cicero they would have illustrated the ideal character of a man of letters. But the sage Atticus rejected a popular celebrity for a passion not less powerful yielding up his whole soul to study. Cicero, with all his devotion to literature, was still agitated by another kind of glory and the most perfect author in Rome imagined that he was enlarging his honours by the intrigues of the consulship. He has distinctly marked the character of the man of letters in the person of his friend Atticus, and has expressed his respect, although he could not content himself with its imitation. I know,' says this man of genius and ambition, I know the greatness and ingenuousness of your soul, nor have I found any difference between us, but in a different choice of life; a certain sort of ambition has led me earnestly to seek after honours, while other motives, by no means blameable, induced you to adopt an honourable leisure; honestum otium.'* These motives appear in the interesting memoirs of this man of letters a contempt of political intrigues with a desire to escape from the bustle and splendour of Rome to the learned leisure of Athens; to dismiss a pompous train of slaves for the delight of assembling under his roof a literary society of readers and transcribers; and there having col

If the man of letters is less dependent on others for the very perception of his own existence, his solitude is not that of a desert, but of the most cultivated humanity; for all there tends to keep alive those concentrated feelings which cannot be indulged with security, or even without ridicule, in general society. Like the Lucullus of Plutarch, he would not only live among the votaries of literature, but would live for them; he throws open his library, his gallery, and his cabinet, to all the Grecians. Such are the men who father neglected genus, or awaken its infancy by the perpetual legacy of the Prizes' of Literature and science; who project those benevolent institutions where they have poured out the philanthrophy of their hearts in that world which they appear to have forsaken. If Europe is literary, to whom does she owe this, more than to these men of letters? To their noble passion of amassing through life those magnificent collections, which often bear the Dames of their founders from the gratitude of a following age? Venice, Florence, and Copenhagen, Oxford and London, attest the existence of their labours. Our Bodleys and our Harleys, our Cottons and our Sloanes, our Cracherodes and our Townleys, were of this race! In the perpetuity of their own studies, they felt as if they were extending human longevity, by throwing an unbroken light of knowledge into the next age. Each of the public works, for such they become, was the project and the execution of a solitary man of letters during half a century; the generous enthusiasm which inspired their intrepid labours; the difficulties overcome; the voluntary privations of what the world calls its pleasures and its honours would form an interesting history not yet written; their due, yet undischarged.

Living more with books than with men, the man of letters is more tolerant of opinions than they are among themselves, nor are his views of human affairs contracted to the day, as those who in the heat and hurry of life can act only on expedients, and not on principles; who deem themseives politicians because they are not moralists; to * Quarterly Review, No. XXXIII, p. 143.

country, he caught their spirit and was influenced by their virtues or their genius, as he inscribed under them, in concise verses, the characters of their mind. Valuing wealth only for its use, a dignified economy enabled him to be profuse, and a moderate expenditure allowed him to be

generous.

The result of this literary life was the strong affections of the Athenians; at the first opportunity, the absence of the man of letters offered, they raised a statue to him, conferring on our Pomponius the fond surname of Atticus. To have received a name from the voice of the city they inhabited, has happened to more than one man of letters. Pinelli, born a Neapolitan, but residing at Venice, among other peculiar honours received from the senate, was there distinguished by the affectionate title of the Venetian.'

6

Yet such a character as Atticus could not escape censure from men of the world;' they want the heart and the imagination to conceive something better than themselves. The happy indifference, perhaps the contempt, of our Atticus for rival factions, they have stigmatised as a cold neutrality, and a timid cowardly hypocrisy. Yet Atticus could not have been a mutual friend, had both not alike held the man of letters as a sacred being amidst their disguised ambition; and the urbanity of Atticus, while it balanced the fierceness of two heroes, Pompey and Cæsar, could even temper the rivalry of genius in the orators Hortensius and Cicero. A great man of our own country widely differed from the accusers of Atticus; Sir Mat thew Hale lived in times distracted, and took the charac ter of our man of letters for his model, adopting two principles in the conduct of Atticus; engaging with no party or public business, and affording a constant relief to the unfortunate of whatever party, he was thus preserved amidst the contests of times. Even Cicero himself, in his happier moments, in addressing his friend, exclaims-'I had much rather be sitting on your little bench under Aristotle's picture, than in the curule chairs of our great ones.' This wish was probably sincere, and reminds us of another great politician in his secession from public affairs, retreating to a literary life, when he appears suddenly to have discovered a new-found world. Fox's favourite line, which he often repeated, was,

How various his employments whom the world
Calls idle.'
Cowper.

If the personal interests of the man of letters are not too deeply involved in society, his individual prosperity however is never contrary to public happiness. Other

* Ed Atticum, Lib. i. Ep. 17.

professions necessarily exist by the conflict and the calamities of the community; the politician is great by hatching an intrigue; the lawyer is counting his briefs; the physician his sick-list; the soldier is clamorous for war, and the merchant riots on the public calamity of high prices. But the man of letters only calls for peace and books, to unite himself with his brothers scattered over Europe; and his usefulness can only be felt, when, after a long interchange of destruction, men during short intervals, recovering their senses, discover that knowledge is power.'

Of those eminent men of letters, who were not authors, the history of Peiresc opens the most enlarged view of their activity. This moving picture of a literary life had been lost for us, had not Peiresc found in Gassendi a twinspirit; so intimate was that biographer with the very thoughts; so closely united in the same pursuits, and so perpetual an observer of the remarkable man whom he has immortalized, that when employed on this elaborate resemblance of his friend, he was only painting himself with all the identifying strokes of self-love.

It was in the vast library of Pinelli, the founder of the most magnificent one in Europe, that Peiresc, then a youth, felt the remote hope of emulating the man of letters before his eyes. His life was not without preparation, not without fortunate coincidences, but there was a grandeur of design in the execution, which originated in the genius of the man himself.

The curious genius of Peiresc was marked by its precosity, as usually are strong passions in strong minds; this was the germ of all those studies which seemed mature in his youth. He resolved on a personal intercourse with the great literary characters of Europe; and his friend has thrown over these literary travels, that charm of detail by which we accompany Peiresc into the libraries of the learned; there with the historian opening new sources of history, or with the critic correcting manuscripts, and setthing points of erudition; or by the opened cabinet of the antiquary, decyphering obscure inscriptions, and explain ing medals; in the galleries of the curious in art, among their marbles, their pictures and their prints, he has often revealed to the artist some secret in his own art. In the museum of the naturalist, or among the plants of the botanist, there was no rarity of nature, and no work of art on which he had not to communicate; his mind toiled with that impatience of knowledge, that becomes a pain only in the cessation of rest. In England Peiresc was the associate of Camden and Selden, and had more than one interview with that friend to literary men, our calumniated James I; one may judge by these who were the men whom he first sought, and by whom he himself ever after was sought. Such indeed were immortal friendships! immortal they may be justly called, from the objects in which they concerned themselves, and from the permanent results of their combined studies.

Another peculiar greatness in this literary character was his enlarged devotion to literature for itself; he made his own universal curiosity the source of knowledge to other men; considering the studious as forming but one great family wherever they were, the national repositories of knowledge in Europe, for Peiresc, formed but one collection for the world. This man of letters had possessed himself of their contents, that he might have manuscripts collected, unedited pieces explored, extracts supplied, and even draughtsmen employed in remote parts of the world, to furnish views and plans, and to copy antiquities for the student, who in some distant retirement discovered that the literary treasures of the world were unfailingly opened to him by the secret devotion of this man of letters.

Carrying on the same grandeur in his views, Europe could not limit his inextinguishable curiosity; his universal mind busied itself in every part of the habitable globe. He kept up a noble traffic with all travellers, supplying them with philosophical instruments and recent inventions, by which he facilitated their discoveries, and secured their reception even in barbarous realms; in return he claimed, at his own cost, for he was born rather to give than to receive,' Says Gassendi, fresh importations of oriental literature, curious antiquities, or botanic rarities, and it was the curiosity of Peiresc which first embellished his own garden, and thence the gardens of Europe, with a rich variety of exotic flowers and fruits. Whenever he was presented with a medal, a vase, or a manuscript, he never slept over the gift till he had discovered what the donor delighted in ; and a book, a picture, or a plant, when monev could not be offered, fed their mutual passion and

sustained the general cause of science.-The corres pondence of Peiresc branched out to the farthest bounds of Ethiopia, connected both Americas, and had touched the newly discovered extremities of the universe, when this intrepid mind closed in a premature death. I have drawn this imperfect view of Peiresc's character, that men of letters may be reminded of the capacities they possess. There still remains another peculiar feature. With all these vast views the fortune of Peiresc was not great; and when he sometimes endured the reproach of those whose sordidness was startled at this prodigality of mind, and the great objects which were the result, Peiresc replied that a small matter suffices for the natural wants of a literary man, whose true wealth consists in the mo numents of arts, the treasures of his library, and the brotherly affections of the ingenious.' He was a French judge, but he supported the dignity more by his own character than by luxury or parade. He would not wear silk, and no tapestry hangings ornamented his apartments; but the walls were covered with the portraits of his literary friends and in the unadorned simplicity of his study, his books, his papers, and his letters were scattered about him on the tables, the seats, and the floor. There, stealing from the world, he would sometimes admit to his spare supper his friend Gassendi, content,' says that amiable philosopher, to have me for his guest.'

Peiresc, like Pinelli, never published any work. Few days, indeed, passed without Peiresc writing a letter on the most curious inquiries; epistles which might be con sidered as so many little books, observes Gassendi. These men of letters derived their pleasure, and perhaps their pride, from those vast strata of knowledge which their curiosity had heaped together in their mighty collec tions. They either were not endowed with that faculty of genius which strikes out aggregate views, or with the ta lent of composition which embellishes minute ones. Thus deficiency in the minds of such may be attributed to a thirst of learning, which the very means to allay can only inflame. From all sides they are gathering information; and that knowledge seems never perfect to which every day brings new acquisitions. With these men, to com pose is to hesitate and to revise is to be mortified by fresh doubts and unsupplied omissions. Peiresc was enployed all his life in a history of Provence; and day after day he was adding to the splendid mass. But Peiresc,' observes Gassendi, could not mature the birth of his lite rary offspring, or lick it into any shape of elegant form; he was therefore content to take the midwife's part, by help ing the happier labours of others.'

Such are the silent cultivators of knowledge, who are rarely authors, but who are often, however, contributing

to the works of authors: without their secret labours, the public would not have possessed many valued works. That curious knowledge of books which, since Europe has become literary, is both the beginning and the result of knowledge; and literary history itself, which is the history of the age, of the nation and of the individual, one of the important consequences of these vast collections of books, has almost been created in our own times. These sources, which offer so much delightful instruction to the author and the artist, are separate studies from the culti vation of literature and the arts, and constitute more par ticularly the province of these men of letters,

The philosophical writer, who can adorn the page or history, is not always equal to form it. Robertson, after his successful history of Scotland, was long irresolute in his design, and so unpractised in researches of the sort he was desirous of attempting, that his admirers had nearly lost his popular productions, had not a fortunate introduction to Dr Birch enabled him to open the clasped books, and to drink of the sealed fountains. Robertson has confessed his inadequate knowledge and his overflowing gratitude, in letters which I have elsewhere printed. A suggestion by a man of letters has opened the career of

The history of the letters of Peires is remarkable. He preserved copies of his entire correspondence; but it has been recorded that many of these epistles were consumed, to save fuel, by the obstinate avarice of a niece. This would not have been a solitary instance of eminent men leaving their collec tions to unworthy descendants. However, ater the silence of more than a century, some of these letters have been recovered and may be found in some French journals of A. Millm. They descended from the gentleman who married this very niece, probably the remains of the collection. The letters answer to the description of Gassendi, full of curious knowledge and observation.

many an aspirant; a hint from Walsh conveyed a new conception of English poetry to one of its masters. The celebrated treatise of Grotius, on Peace and War,' was projected by Peiresc. It was said of Magliabechi, who knew all books and never wrote one, that by his diffusive communications he was in some respects concerned in all the great works of his times. Sir Robert Cotton greatly assisted Camden and Speed; and that hermit of literature, Baker of Cambridge, was still supplying with his invaluable researches, Burnet, Kennet, Hearne, of Middleton. Such is the concealed aid which these men of letters afford our authors, and which we may compare to those subterraneous streams, which flowing into spacious lakes, are still, unobserved, enlarging the waters which attract the public eye.

Such are these men of letters! but the last touches of their picture, given with all the delicacy and warmth of a self-painter, may come from the Count de Caylus, celebrated for his collections and for his generous patronage of artists.

His glory is confined to the mere power which he has of being one day useful to letters and to the arts; for his whole life is employed in collecting materials of which learned men and artists make no use till after the death of him who amassed them. It affords him a very sensible pleasure to labour in hopes of being useful to those who pursue the same course of studies, while there are so great a number who die without discharging the debt which they incur to society.'

CHAPTER XVII.

LITERARY OLD AGE.

The old age of the literary character retains its enjoyments, and usually its powers, a happiness which accompanies no other. The old age of coquetry with extinct beauty; that of the used idler left without a sensation; that of a grasping Croesus, who envies his heir; or that of the Machiavel who has no longer a voice in the cabinet, makes all these persons resemble unhappy spirits who cannot find their graves, But for the aged man of letters memory returns to her stories, and imagination is still on the wing, amidst fresh discoveries and new designs. The others fall like dry leaves, but he like ripe fruit, and is valued when no longer on the tree.

The intellectual faculties, the latest to decline, are often vigorous in the decrepitude of age. The curious mind is still striking out into new pursuits; and the mind of genius is still creating. ANCORA IMPARO-Yet I am learning! Such was the concise inscription of an ingenious device of an old man placed in a child's go-cart, with an hour-glass upon it, which Michael Angelo applied to his own vast genius in his ninetieth year.*

of no

Time, the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor. A learned and highly intellectual friend once said to me, If I have acquired more knowledge these last four years than I had hitherto, I shall add materially to my stores in the next four years; and so at every subsequent period of my life, should I acquire only in the same proportion, the general mass of my knowledge will greatly accumulate. If we are not deprived by nature or misfortune, of the means to pursue this perpetual augmentation of knowledge, I do not see but we may be still fully occupied and deeply interested even to the last day of our earthly term.' In such pursuits, where life is rather wearing out, than rusting out, as Bishop Cumberland expressed it, death scarcely can take us by surprise: and much less by those continued menaces which shake the old age of men, intellectual pursuits, who are dying so many years. Active enjoyments in the decline of life, then, constitute the happiness of literary men: the study of the arts and literature spread a sunshine in the winter of their days; and their own works may be as delightful to themselves, as roses plucked by the Norwegian amidst his snows; and they will discover that unregarded kindness of nature, who has given flowers that only open in the evening, and flower through the night-time. Necker offers a beautiful instance even of the influence of late studies in life; for he tells us, that the era of three-score and ten is an agreeable age for writing; your mind has not lost its This characteristic form closes the lectures of Mr Fuseil, who thas indirectly reminds us of the last words of Reynolds; and the graver of Blake, vital as the pencil of Fuseli, has raised the person of Michael Angelo with its admirable portrait, breathing inspiration

vigour, and envy leaves you in peace.' The opening of one of La Mothe le Vayer's Treatises is striking: 'I should but ill return the favours God has granted me in the eightieth year of my age, should I allow myself to give way to that shameless want of occupation which I have condemned all my life;' and the old man proceeds with his observations, on the composition and reading of books.' The literary character has been fully occupied in the eightieth and ninetieth year of life. Isaac Walton still glowed while writing some of the most interesting biographies in his eighty-fifth year, and in his ninetieth enriched the poetical world with the first publication of a romantic tale by Chalkhill, the friend of Spenser.' Bodmer, beyond eighty, was occupied on Homer, and Wielland on Cicero's Letters.* But the delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age; the revolutions of modern chemistry kindled the curiosity of Dr Reid to his latest days; and a deservedly popular author, now advanced in life, at this moment, has discovered, in a class of reading to which he had never been accustomed, what will probably supply him with fresh furniture for his mind during life. Even the steps of time are retracea, and what has passed away again becomes ours; for in advanced life a return to our early studies refreshes and renovates the spirits; we open the poets who made us enthusiasts, and the philosophers who taught us to think, with a new source of feeling in our own experience. Adam Smith confessed his satisfaction at this pleasure to professor Dugald Stewart, while he was reperusing, with the enthusiasm of a studemt, the tragic poets of ancient Greece, and Sophocles and Euripides lay open on his table.'

Dans ses veines toujours un jeune sang bouillone, Et Sophocle á cent ans peint encore Antigone. The calm philosophic Hume found death only could interrupt the keen pleasure he was again receiving from Lucian, and which could inspire him at the moment with a humourous self-dialogue with Charon.

Not without a sense of exultation has the literary character felt his happiness, in the unbroken chain of his habits and his feelings. Hobbes exulted that he had outlived his enemies, and was still the same Hobbes; and to demonstrate the reality of this existence, published, in the eighty-seventh year of his age, his version of the Odyssey, and the following year, his Iliad. Of the happy results of literary habits in advanced life, the Count de Tressan, the elegant abridger of the old French romances, in his 'literary advice to his children,' has drawn a most pleasing picture. With a taste for study, which he found rather inconvenient in the moveable existence of a man of the world, and a military wanderer, he had however contrived to reserve an hour or two every day for literary pursuits; the men of science, with whom he had chiefly associated, appear to have turned his passion to observation and knowledge, rather than towards imagination and feeling; the combination formed a wreath for his grey hairs. When Count de Tressan retired from a brilliant to an affectionate circle, amidst his family, he pursued his literary tastes, with the vivacity of a young author inspired by the illusion of fame. At the age of seventy-five, with the imagination of a poet, he abridged, he translated, he recomposed his old Chivalric Romances, and his reanimated fancy struck fire in the veins of the old man. Among the first designs of his retirement was a singular philosophical legacy for his children; it was a view of the history and progress of the human mind-of its principles, its errors, and its advantages, as these were reflected in himself; in the dawnings of his taste, the secret inclinations of his mind, which the men of genius of the age with whom he associated had developed; in expatiating on their memory, he calls on his children to witness the happiness of study, in those pleasures which were soothing and adorning his old age. Without knowledge, without literature, exclaims the venerable enthusiast, in whatever rank we are born, wo can only resemble the vulgar.' To the Centenary Fontenelle the Count de Tressan was chiefly indebted for the happy life be derived from the cultivation of literature; and when this man of a hundred years died, Tressan, himself on the borders of the grave, would offer the last fruits of his mind in an eloge to his ancient master; it was the voice of the dying to the dead, a last moment of the

* See Curiosities of Literature on 'The progress of old age in new studies.'