sion of great authors sustains their own genius by a sense of their own glory.

Such, then, are some of the domestic treasons of the literary character against literature-"Et tu, Brute!" But the hero of literature outlives his assassins, and might ad dress them in that language of poetry and affection with which a Mexican king reproached his traitorous counsellors: "You were the feathers of my wings, and the eyelids of my eyes."

CHAPTER III.

Of artists, in the history of men of literary genius-Their habits and pursuits analogous-The nature of their genius is similar in their distinct works-Shown by their parallel eras, and by a common end pursued by both.

ARTISTS and literary men, alike insulated in their studies, pass through the same permanent discipline; and thus it has happened that the same habits and feelings, and the same fortunes, have accompanied men who have sometimes unhappily imagined their pursuits not to be analogous.

Let the artist share

The palm; he shares the peril, and dejected
Faints o'er the labour unapproved-alas!

Despair and genius!

The congenial histories of literature and art describe the same periodical revolutions and parallel eras. After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron. In the history of painting, after the splendid epoch of Raphael, Titian, and Corregio, we meet with pleasure the Carraccis, Domenichino, Guido, and Albano; as we read Paterculus, Quintilian, Seneca, Juvenal, and Silius Italicus, after their immortal masters, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, and Horace.

It is evident that MILTON, MICHAEL ANGELO, and HANDEL,

belong to the same order of minds; the same imaginative powers, and the same sensibility, are only operating with different materials. LANZI, the delightful historian of the Storia Pittorica, is prodigal of his comparisons of the painters with the poets; his delicacy of perception discerned the refined analogies which for ever unite the two sisters, and he fondly dwelt on the transplanted flowers of the two arts: "Chi sente che sia Tibullo nel poetare sente chi sia Andrea (del Sarto) nel dipingere;" He who feels what TIBULLUS is in poetry, feels what ANDREA is in painting. MICHAEL ANGELO, from his profound conception of the terrible and the difficult in art, was called its DANTE; from the Italian poet the Italian sculptor derived the grandeur of his ideas; and indeed the visions of the bard had deeply nourished the artist's imagination; for once he had poured about the margins of his own copy their ethereal inventions, in the rapid designs of his pen. And so Bellori informs us of a very curious volume in manuscript, composed by RUBENS, which contained, among other topics concerning art, descriptions of the passions and actions of men, drawn from the poets, and demonstrated to the eye by the painters. Here were battles, shipwrecks, sports, groups, and other incidents, which were transcribed from Virgil and other poets, and by their side RUBENS had copied what he had met with on those subjects from Raphael and the antique.

The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle contest. This old family-quarrel for precedence was renewed by our estimable President, in his brilliant" Rhymes on Art;" where he maintains that "the narrative of an action is not comparable to the action itself before the eyes; 19 while the enthusiast BARRY considers painting as "poetry realized." This error of genius, perhaps first caught from Richardson's bewildering pages, was strengthened by the extravagant principle adopted by DARWIN, who, to exalt his solitary talent of descriptive poetry, VOL. III.-3

asserted that "the essence of poetry was picture." The philosophical critic will find no difficulty in assigning to each sister-art her distinct province; and it is only a pleasing delirium, in the enthusiasm of artists, which has confused the boundaries of these arts. The dread pathetic story of Dante's Ugolino, under the plastic hand of Michael Angelo formed the subject of a basso-relievo; and Reynolds, with his highest effort, embodied the terrific conception of the poet as much as his art permitted: but assuredly both these great artists would never have claimed the precedence of the Dantesc genius, and might have hesitated at the rivalry.

Who has not heard of that one common principle which unites the intellectual arts, and who has not felt that the nature of their genius is similar in their distinct works? Hence curious inquiries could never decide whether the group of the Laocoön in sculpture preceded or was borrowed from that in poetry. Lessing conjectures that the sculptor copied the poet. It is evident that the agony of Laocoön was the common end where the sculptor and the poet were to meet and we may observe that the artists in marble and in verse skilfully adapted their variations to their respective art: the one having to prefer the nude, rejected the veiling fillet from the forehead, that he might not conceal its deep expression, and the drapery of the sacrificial robe, that he might display the human form in visible agony; but the other, by the charm of verse, could invest the priest with the pomp of the pontifical robe without hiding from us the interior sufferings of the human victim. We see they obtained by different means, adapted to their respective arts, that common end which each designed; but who will decide which invention preceded the other, or who was the greater artist ?

This approximation of men apparently of opposite pursuits is so natural, that when GESNER, in his inspiring letter on landscape-painting, recommends to the young painter a constant study of poetry and literature, the impatient

artist is made to exclaim, "Must we combine with so many other studies those which belong to literary men? Must we read as well as paint? "It is useless to reply to this question; for some important truths must be instinctively felt, perhaps the fundamental ones in the arts." A truly imaginative artist, whose enthusiasm was never absent when he meditated on the art he loved, BARRY, thus vehemently broke forth: "Go home from the academy, light up your lamps, and exercise yourselves in the creative part of your art, with Homer, with Livy, and all the great characters ancient and modern, for your companions and counsellors." This genial intercouse of literature with art may be proved by painters who have suggested subjects to poets, and poets who have selected them for painters. GOLDSMITH suggested the subject of the tragic and pathetic picture of Ugolino to the pencil of REYNOLDS.

All the classes of men in society have their peculiar sorrows and enjoyments, as they have their peculiar habits and characteristics. In the history of men of genius we may often open the secret story of their minds, for they have above others the privilege of communicating their own feelings; and every life of a man of genius, composed by himself, presents us with the experimental philosophy of the mind. By living with their brothers, and contemplating their masters, they will judge from consciousness less erroneously than from discussion; and in forming comparative views and parallel situations, they will discover certain habits and feelings, and find these reflected in themselves.

SYDENHAM has beautifully said, whoever describes a violet exactly as to its colour, taste, smell, form, and other properties, will find the description agree in most particulars with all the violets in the universe.

CHAPTER IV.

Of natural genius.-Minds constitutionally different cannot have an equal aptítude.-Genius not the result of habit and education.-Originates in peculiar qualities of the mind.-The predisposition of genius.-A substitution for the white paper of Locke.*

THAT faculty in art which individualizes the artist, belonging to him and to no other, and which in a work forms that creative part whose likeness is not found in any other work, is it inherent in the constitutional dispositions of the creator, or can it be formed by patient acquisition?

Astonished at their own silent and obscure progress, some have imagined that they had formed their genius solely by their own studies; when they generated, they conceived that they had acquired; and, losing the distinction between nature and habit, with fatal temerity the idolatry of philosophy substituted something visible and palpable, yet shaped by the most opposite fancies, called a Theory, for nature herself! Men of genius, whose great occupation is to be conversant with the inspirations of nature, made up a factitious one among themselves, and assumed that they could operate without the intervention of the occult original. But Nature would not be mocked; and whenever this race of idolaters have worked without her agency, she has afflicted them with the most stubborn sterility.

Theories of genius are the peculiar constructions of our

In the second edition of this work in 1818, I touched on some points of this inquiry in the second chapter; I almost despaired to find any philosopher sympathize with the subject, so invulnerable, they imagine, are the entrenchments of their theories. I was agree. ably surprised to find these ideas taken up in the Edinburgh Review for August, 1820, in an entertaining article on Reynolds. I have, no doubt, profited by the perusal, though this chapter was prepared before I met with that spirited vindication of "an inherent difference in the organs or faculties to receive impressions of any kind."