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.

*

Parties confederate against a man of Genius,—as happened to Corneille, to D'Avenant, and Milton, and a Pradon and a Settle carry away the meed of a Racine and a Dryden. It was to support the drooping spirit of his friend Racine on the opposition raised against Phædra, 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 feel

* See "Quarrels of Authors," vol. ii., 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.

ings, 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 irratibility; but how could they sympathize 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?

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.*

* 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

Does he accept with ingratitude the fame he loves more than life?

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.

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."

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."

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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