flexible, may receive whatever impressions you wish. Be careful that your abilities do not inspire in you too much confidence, lest it should happen to you as it has to many others, that they have never possessed any greater merit than that of having good abilities."

One more extract, to preserve an incident which may touch the heart of genius. This extraordinary woman, whose characteristic is that of strong sense combined with delicacy of feeling, would check her German sentimentality at the moment she was betraying those emotions in which the imagination is so powerfully mixed up with the associated feelings. Arriving at their cottage at Sihlwald, she proceeds—“ On entering the parlour three small pictures, painted by you, met my eyes. I passed some time in contemplating them. It is now a year, I thought, since I saw him trace these pleasing forms; he whistled and sang, and I saw them grow under his pencil; now he is far, far from us. In short, I had the weakness to press my lips on one of these pictures. You well know, my dear son, that I am not much addicted to scenes of a sentimental turn; but to-day, while I considered your works, I could not restrain this little impulse of maternal feelings. Do not, however, be apprehensive that the tender affection of a mother will ever lead me too far, or that I shall suffer my mind to be too powerfully impressed with the painful sensations to which your absence gives birth. My reason convinces me that it is for your welfare that you are now in a place where your abilities will have opportunities of unfolding, and where you can become great in your art."

Such was the incomparable wife and mother of the GESNERS! Will it now be a question whether matrimony be incompatible with the cultivation of the arts? A wife who reanimates the drooping genius of her husband, and a mother who is inspired by the ambition of beholding her sons eminent, is she not the real being which the ancients personified in their Muse?

CHAPTER XIX.

Literary friendships.-In early life.-Different from those of men of the world. They suffer an unrestrained communication of their ideas, and bear reprimands and exhortations.-Unity of feelings. --A sympathy not of manners but of feelings.-Admit of dissimilar characters.-Their peculiar glory. Their sorrow.

AMONG the virtues which literature inspires, is often that of the most romantic friendship. The delirium of love, and even its lighter caprices, are incompatible with the pursuits of the student; but to feel friendship like a passion is necessary to the mind of genius alternately elated and depressed, ever prodigal of feeling and excursive in knowledge.

The qualities which constitute literary friendship, compared with those of men of the world, must render it a sentiment as rare as love itself, which it resembles in that intellectual tenderness in which both so deeply participate.

Born "in the dews of their youth," this friendship will not expire on their tomb. In the school or the college this immortality begins; and, engaged in similar studies, should even one excel the other, he will find in him the protector of his fame; as ADDISON did in STEELE, WEST in GRAY, and GRAY in MASON. Thus PETRARCH was the guide of Boccaccio, thus BOCCACCIO became the defender of his master's genius. Perhaps friendship is never more intense than in an intercourse of minds of ready counsels and inspiring ardours. United in the same pursuits, but directed by an unequal experience, the imperceptible superiority interests, without mortifying. It is a counsel, it is an aid; in whatever form it shows itself, it has nothing of the malice of rivalry.

A beautiful picture of such a friendship among men of genius offers itself in the history of MIGNARD, the great French painter, and DU FRESNOY, the great critic of the art itself. DU FRESNOY, abandoned in utter scorn by his stern father, an apothecary, for his entire devotion to his seductive. art, lived at Rome in voluntary poverty, till MIGNARD, his old fellow-student, arrived, when they became known by the name of "the inseparables." The talents of the friends were different, but their studies were the same. Their days melted away together in drawing from the ancient statues and the basso-relievos, in studying in the galleries of paintings, or among the villas which embellish the environs of

P

Rome. One roof sheltered them, and one table supplied their sober meal. Light were the slumbers which closed each day, each the pleasing image of the former. But this remarkable friendship was not a simple sentiment which limited the views of "the Inseparables," for with them it was a perpetual source of mutual usefulness. They gave accounts to each other of whatever they observed, and carefully noted their own defects. DU FRESNOY, so critical in the theory of the art, was unsuccessful in the practical parts. His delight in poetical composition had retarded the progress of his pictorial powers. Not having been taught the handling of his pencil, he worked with difficulty; but MIGNARD succeeded in giving him a freer command and a more skilful touch; while DU FRESNOY, who was the more literary man, enriched the invention of MIGNARD by reading to him an Ode of Anacreon or Horace, a passage from the Iliad or Odyssey, or the Æneid, or the Jerusalem Delivered, which offered subjects for the artist's invention, who would throw out five or six different sketches on the same subject; a habit which so highly improved the inventive powers of MIGNARD, that he could compose a fine picture with playful facility. Thus they lived together, mutually enlightening each other. MIGNARD supplied DU FRESNOY with all that fortune had refused him; and, when he was no more, perpetuated his fame, which he felt was a portion of his own celebrity, by publishing his posthumous poem, De Arte Graphica a poem, which Mason has made readable by his versification, and Reynolds even interesting by his invaluable commentary.

In the poem CoWLEY composed, on the death of his friend HARVEY, this stanza opens a pleasing scene of two young literary friends engaged in their midnight studies :

Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights!
How oft unwearied have we spent the nights,
Till the Ledæan stars, so famed for love,
Wonder'd at us from above.

We spent them not in toys, in lust, or wine;

But search of deep philosophy,

Wit, eloquence, and poetry;

Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine.

Touched by a personal knowledge of this union of genius

*La Vie de Pierre Mignard, par L'Abbé de Monville, the work of an

amateur,

and affection, even MALONE commemorates, with unusual warmth, the literary friendships of Sir Joshua Reynolds; and with a felicity of fancy, not often indulged, has raised an unforced parallel between the bland wisdom of Sir Joshua and the "mitis sapientia Lælî." "What the illustrious Scipio was to Lælius was the all-knowing and all-accomplished BURKE to REYNOLDS;" and what the elegant Lælius was to his master Panatius, whom he gratefully protected, and to his companion the poet Lucilius, whom he patronised, was REYNOLDS to JOHNSON, of whom he was the scholar and friend, and to GOLDSMITH, whom he loved and aided.*

"The

Count AZARA mourns with equal tenderness and force over the memory of the artist and the writer MENGS. most tender friendship would call forth tears in this sad duty of scattering flowers on his tomb; but the shade of my extinct friend warns me not to be satisfied with dropping flowers and tears-they are useless; and I would rather accomplish his wishes, in making known the author and his works."

I am infinitely delighted by a circumstance communicated to me by one who had visited GLEIM, the German poet, who seems to have been a creature made up altogether of sensibility. His many and illustrious friends he had never forgotten, and to the last hour of a life, prolonged beyond his eightieth year, he possessed those interior feelings which can make even an old man an enthusiast. There seemed for GLEIM to be no extinction in friendship when the friend was no more; and he had invented a singular mode of gratifying his feelings of literary friendships. The visitor found the old man in a room of which the wainscot was panelled, as we still see among us in ancient houses. In every panel GLEIM had inserted the portrait of a friend, and the apartment was crowded. "You see," said the grey-haired poet, "that I never have lost a friend, and am sitting always among them."

Such friendship can never be the lot of men of the world; for the source of these lies in the interior affections and the intellectual feelings. FONTENELLE describes with character

* Reynolds's hospitality was unbounded to all literary men, and his evenings were devoted to their society. It was at his house they compared notes; and the President of the Royal Academy obtained that information which gave him a full knowledge of the outward world, which his ceaseless occupation could not else have allowed.-ED.

istic delicacy the conversations of such literary friends: Our days passed like moments; thanks to those pleasures, which, however, are not included in those which are commonly called pleasures." The friendships of the men of society move on the principle of personal interest, but interest can easily separate the interested; or they are cherished to relieve themselves from the listlessness of existence; but, as weariness is contagious, the contact of the propagator is watched. Men of the world may look on each other with the same countenances, but not with the same hearts. In the common mart of life intimacies may be found which terminate in complaint and contempt; the more they know one another, the less is their mutual esteem: the feeble mind quarrels with one still more imbecile than itself; the dissolute riot with the dissolute, and they despise their companions, while they too have themselves become despicable.

Literary friendships are marked by another peculiarity; the true philosophical spirit has learned to bear that shock of contrary opinions which minds less meditative are unequal to encounter. Men of genius live in the unrestrained communication of their ideas, and confide even their caprices with a freedom which sometimes startles ordinary observers. We see literary men, the most opposite in dispositions and opinions, deriving from each other that fulness of knowledge which unfolds the certain, the probable, the doubtful. Topics which break the world into factions and sects, and truths which ordinary men are doomed only to hear from a malignant adversary, they gather from a friend! If neither yields up his opinions to the other, they are at least certain of silence and a hearing; but usually

The wise new wisdom from the wise acquire.

This generous freedom, which spares neither reprimands nor exhortation, has often occurred in the intercourse of literary men. HUME and ROBERTSON were engaged in the same studies, but with very opposite principles; yet Robertson declined writing the English history, which he aspired to do, lest it should injure the plans of Hume; a noble sacrifice!

Politics once divided Boccaccio and Petrarch. The poet of Valchiusa had never forgiven the Florentines for their persecution of his father. By the mediation of BOCCACCIO they now offered to reinstate PETRARCH in his patrimony and his honours. Won over by the tender solicitude of his