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Cornell University Library 
 PN 150.D61 1868 
 
 The literary character; or. The history o 
 
 3 1924 008 814 489 
 
THE 
 
 LITER AKY CHARACTER; 
 
 OB THE HIgTOBT OF 
 
 MEN OF GENIUS. 
 
 33taS»n. from tjitir oton jFttlinss anlt ConftMtoiis. 
 
 LITERARY MISCELLANIES: 
 
 ASD AN DfQUIBT INTO 
 
 THE CHAEACTEK OF JAMES THE FIEST. 
 
 BY 
 
 ISAAC DISEAELI. 
 
 EDITED BT HIS BON, 
 
 THE EIGHT HON. B. DISRAELI. 
 
 NE-W YORK: 
 W. J. WIDDLETON; PUBLISHEIt, 
 
 1868; 
 
AtTTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 Thb following Preface -was prefixed to an Edition of 
 thfi auiiior's MiBcellaneous Works in 1840. They were 
 cotnprised in a thick 6to rolnine, and included the 
 Calamities aito Quaebbls of Authoes, now published 
 separately. This Preface is of interest for the expression 
 of the autlioi*s own view of these works. 
 
 This volame oompriMs my writiags on subjects oW^y of our 
 ▼ernaeular 'literature. Now collected together, they offer an 
 unity of design, and afford to the general reader and to the 
 stndent of classical anUquity some initiation into onr national 
 Literatnre. It is presumed also, that they present materials for 
 thinking not solely on literary topics ; authors and books are 
 not aloue here treated of, — a oomprefa^nsive yiew of human 
 nature necessarily enters into the subject from the diversity of 
 the characters portrayed, through the gradations of their facul' 
 ties, the infiuenoe of their tastes, and those incidents of their 
 lires prompted by their fortunes or their passions. This present 
 volume, with its brother " CtrSiosiwBs of Litebatueb," now 
 constitute a body of reading which may awaken knowledge In 
 minds only seeking amusement, and refresh the deeper studies 
 of the learned by matters not unworthy of their curiosity. 
 
 The LiTBBABT Ohabaoteb has been an old favourite with 
 many of my contemporaries departed or now living, who have 
 found it respond to their own emotions. 
 
 The MisoELLAinES are literary amenities, should they be 
 found to deserve the title, constructed on that principle early 
 adopted by me, of interspersing facts with specalation. 
 
 The Inquiet into the Liteeaet and Political Ohabaoteb 
 OF James the Fibst has surely corrected some general miscon- 
 ceptions, and thrown light on some obscure points in the history 
 of that anomalous personage. It is a satisfaction to me to 
 observe, since the publication of this tract, that while some 
 competent judges have considered the " evidence irresistible," 
 a material change has occurred in the tone of most writers. 
 
4 AUTHOR'S PEEFACE. 
 
 The Bubject presented an occasion to exhibit a minute picture 
 of that age of transition in our national history. 
 
 The titles of Oalamities of Atjthoes and Quaebelb of 
 AuTHOEs do not wholly designate the works, which include a 
 considerable portion of literary history. 
 
 Public favour has encouraged th* republication of these various 
 works, which often referred to, have long been difficult to pro- 
 cure. It has been deferred from time to time with the intention 
 of giving the subjects a more enlarged investigation ; but I have 
 delayed the task till it cannot be performed. One of the Oalami- 
 ties of Authors falls to my lot, the delicate organ of vision 
 with me has suffered a singular disorder,* — a disorder which no 
 oculist by his touch can heal, and no physician by his experi- 
 ence can expound ; so much remains concerning the frame of 
 man unrevealed to man I 
 
 In the midst of my library I am as it were distant from it. 
 My unfinished labours, frustrated designs, remain paralysed. In 
 a joyous heat I wander no longer through the wide cirduit 
 before me. The " strucken deer " has the sad privilege to weep 
 when lie lies down, perhaps no more to course amid those far- 
 distant woods where once he sought to range. 
 
 Although thus compelled to refrain in a great measure from 
 all mental labour, and incapacitated from the use of the pen and 
 the book, these works, notwithstanding, have received many 
 important corrections, having been read over to me with 
 critical precision. 
 
 Amid this partial darkness I am not left without a distant 
 hope, nor a present consolation ; and to Heb who has so often 
 lent to me the light of her eyes, the intelligence of her voice, 
 and the careful work of her hand, the author must ever owe 
 "the debt immense" of paternal gratitude. 
 
 London^ May, 1840. 
 
 • I record my literary calamity as a warnlns to my sedentary tirothera. When 
 my eyes dwell on any object, or whenever they are closed, there appear on a bluiKh 
 film a number of mathematical squares, which are the reflection or the fine network 
 of the retina, suoceeded by blotches which subside into printed characters, appa^ 
 rently forming distinct words, arranged in straight lines as in a printed book ; the 
 monosyllables are often legible. This Is the process of a few seconds. It is re- 
 markable that the usual power of the eye is not injured or diminished for distant 
 objects, while those near are clouded over. 
 
001II"TE3S"TS. 
 
 LITERAKT CHARACTER. 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 pi.ax 
 
 Of literaT7 characters, and of the lovers of literature and art . . 33 
 
 CHAPTER n. 
 Of the adversaries of literary men among themselves. — Uatter-of- 
 fact men, and men of wit. — ^Xhe political economists. — Of those 
 who abandon their studies. — ^Men in ofSce. — The arbiters of 
 publiu opinion. — ^Ihose who treat the pursuits of literature with 
 levity 2T 
 
 CHAPTER ni. 
 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 pai-allel eras, and by 
 a common end pursued by both 35> 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Of natural ^ettius: — Kinds constitutionally different cannot have 
 an equal aptitude. — Genius not the result of habit and educa- 
 tion. — Originates in peculiar qualities -of the mind. — The predis- 
 position of genius. — ^A substitution for the white paper of 
 Locke 39 
 
 CHAPTER T. 
 Youth of genius. — ^Its first impulses may be illustrated by its 
 subsequent actions. — ^Parents have another assooiation of the 
 man of genius than we. — Of gMiius, its first habits. — Its melan- 
 
6 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 oholy. — Its reveries. — Ita love of solitude. — Its dispoaition to 
 repose. — Of a youth distinguished by his equals. — Feebleness 
 of its first attempts. — Of genius not discoverable. even in man- 
 hood. — The education of the youth may not be that of his' 
 genius. — An unsettled impulse, querulous till it finds its true 
 occupation. — With some, curiosity as intense a faculty as in- 
 vention. — ^What the youth first applies to is commonly his 
 delight afterwards. — ^Paots of the decisive character of genius 48 
 
 CHAPTER Yi. 
 
 The first studies.— TSe self-educated are marked by stubborn 
 peculiarities. — Their errors. — Their improvement from the 
 neglect or contempt they i»CBr.— -The hjstory of self-education 
 la Moses Mendelssohn. — Friends usually prejudicial, in the youth 
 of genius. — A remarkable interview between Petrarch ia his 
 first studies, and his literary adviser. — Exhortation . .19 
 
 CHAPTER TH. 
 
 Of the irritability of genius.— Genius in soeJety often in a state of 
 suffering, — ^EijuaJity of temper more prevalent among men of 
 letters. — Of the occupation of making a great name. — Anxieties 
 of the most successful. — Of the inventors. — Writers of learning. 
 — ^Writers of taste. — ^Artists 98 
 
 CHAPTER vm. 
 
 The spirit of literature and the spirit of society. — The inventors.— 
 Society ofifers 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 tha men of the world and the literary 
 character 3:23 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 Conversations of men of genius. — ^Their deficient agreeableness 
 may result from qualities which conduce to their greatness. — 
 Slow-minded men not the dullest.-— The eonTers^tijonists not 
 the ablest writers. — Their true ezosllence in eonveffssittoa 
 consists of associations with their pursuits . , . .136 
 
CONTENTS. 7 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 PASS 
 
 literary solitude.— Its neoeBsity.— Its pleasures. — Of visitors by 
 profession.— Its inconvemences ...... 149 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 The meditations of genius. — A work on the art of meditation not 
 yet produced. — Predisposing the mind. — Imagination awakens 
 imagination. — Greuerating feelings by music. — Slight habits.- 
 Darkness and silence, by suspending the exercise of our senses, 
 increase the vivacity of our conceptions. — The arts of memory. 
 — Memory the foundation of genius. — Inventions by several 
 to preserve their own moral and literary character. — And to 
 assist their studies. — The meditations of genius depend on 
 habit. — Of the night-time. — A day of meditation should precede 
 a day of composition. — Works of magnitude from slight concep- 
 tions. — Of thoughts never written. — ^The art of meditation exer- 
 cised at all hours and places. — Continuity of attention the 
 source of philosophical discoveries. — Stillness of meditation the 
 first state of existence in genius 167 
 
 CHAPTEE XIL 
 
 The enthusiasm of genius. — ^A state of mind resembling a valdng 
 dream distinct from reverie. — ^The ideal presence distinguished 
 from the real presence. — The senses are really aflfected in the 
 ideal world, proved by a variety of instances. — Of the rapture 
 or sensation of deep study in art, science, and lit^'ature. — Of 
 perturbed feelings, in delirium. — In extreme enduranoe of atten- 
 tion. — ^And in visionary illusions. — Enthusiasts ia literature and 
 •rt. — Of their self-immolations 183 
 
 CHAPTER XIH. 
 
 Of the jealousy of genius. — Jealousy often proportioned to the 
 degree of genius.— A perpetual fever among authors and 
 artists, — Instances of its incredible excess among brothers and 
 benefactors. — Of a peculiar species, where the fever consumes 
 the BufTerer, without its malignancy 207 
 
8 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER XIT. 
 
 Want of mutual esteem among men of genius often originates in 
 a deficiency of analogoua ideas. — It is not always envy or jeal- 
 ousy which induces men of genius to undervalue each other . 213 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 Self-praise of genius. — The love of praise instinctive in the nature 
 of genius. — A high opinion of themselves necessary for their 
 great designs; — The ancients openly claimed their own praise. — 
 And several moderns. — An author knows more of his merits 
 than his readers. — And less of his defects. — ^Authors versatile 
 in their admiration and their malignity . . . . • 217 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 The domestic life of genius. — Defects of great compositions at- 
 tributed to domestic infelicities. — The home of the literary char- 
 acter should be the abode of repose and silence. — Of the father. 
 —Of the mother. — Of family genius. — Men of genius not more 
 respected than other men in their domestic circle. — The culti- 
 vators of science and art do not meet on equal terms with 
 others, in domestic life. — Their neglect of those around them. — 
 Often accused of imaginary crimes .231 
 
 CHAPTER XVU. 
 
 The poverty of literary men. — Poverty, a relative quality. — Of the 
 poverty of hterary men in what degree desirable. — Extreme 
 poverty. — Task-work. — Of gratuitous works. — A project to pro- 
 vide against the worst state of poverty among literary men . 247 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 The matrimonial state of literature. — Matrimony said not to be 
 well-suited to the domestic life of geniiia. — Celibacy a concealed 
 cause of the early qnerulousness of men of genius. — Of unhappy 
 unions.— Not absolutely necessary that the wife should be a 
 literary woman. — Of the docility and susceptibility of the higher 
 female character. — ^A picture of a literary wife . . . 262 
 
CONTENTS. 9 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 -. PAQE 
 
 Literary friendships. — In early life. — ^Different from those of men 
 of the world — They saffer 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. 276 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 The literary and the personal character. — The personal disposi- 
 tions of an author may be the reverse of those which appear in 
 his writings. — Erroneous conceptions of the character of dis- 
 tant authors. — Paradoxical appearances in the history of genius. 
 — Why the cliaracter of the man may be opposite to that of 
 his writings 28t 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 The man of letters. — Occupies an intermediate station between 
 authors and readers. — His solitude described. — Often the father 
 of genius. — Atticus, a man of letters of antiquity. — The perfect 
 character of a modern man of letters exhibited in Peireso. — 
 Their utility to authors and artists 298 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 literary old age still learning. — Influence of late studies in life. — 
 Occupations in advanced age of the literary character. — Of 
 literary men who have died at their studies . . . .313 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 TJaiversality of genius. — Limited notion of genius entertained by 
 the ancients.— Opposite faculties act with diminished force. — 
 Men of genius excel only in a single art . . . . . 320 
 
 CHAPTER XXIT. 
 
 Literature an avenue to glory. — ^An intellectual nobility not chi- 
 merical, but created by public opinion. — Literary honours of va- 
 rious nations. — Local associations with the memory 6f the man 
 of genius - ^26 
 
10 CONTBKTS. 
 
 CSAPTfiR XXV. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 Influence of authors on society, and of society on authors. — 'So- 
 tional tastes a source of literary prejudices. — True genius always 
 the organ of its nation. — Master-writers preserve the distinct 
 national character. — Genius the organ of the state of the age. — 
 Causes of its suppression in a people. — Often invented, but 
 ■ neglected. — The natural gradations of genius. — Men of genius 
 produce their usefulness in privacy.— The public mind is now 
 . "the creation of the public writer. — Politicians aflFect to deny this 
 .principle. — Authors stand between the governors and the gov- 
 erned. — A view of the. solitary author in his study. — They 
 create an epoch in history. — Influence of popular authors. — 
 The immortality of thought. — The family of genius illustrated 
 by their genealogy 339 
 
 LITERARY MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Misoellanists 367 
 
 Frefaces 373 
 
 Style . 380 
 
 Goldsmith and Johnson 383 
 
 Self-characters 385 
 
 On reading' . . . . ^88 
 
 On habituating ourselves to an individual pursuit . , . 394 
 
 On novelty in literature 397 
 
 Ters de Societe . , 401 
 
 The genius of Moliire 404 
 
 The sensibility of Racine 424 
 
 Of Sterne 432 
 
 Hume, Robertson, and Birch . . . . , , . 443 
 Of voluminous works incomplete by the deaths of the authors 456 
 
 Of domestic novelties at first condemned 462 
 
 Domesticity; or, a dissertation on servants .... 474 
 Printed letters in the vernacular idiom 487 
 
CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 Advertisement 495 
 
 Of the first modern assailants of the character of James I., Bumeij 
 
 Bolingbroke and Pope, Harris, Maeaulay, and Walpole 499 
 
 His pedantry 601 
 
 His polemical studies 603 
 
 how these were political 506 
 
 The Hampton-Court conference 60T 
 
 Of some of his writings 514 
 
 Popular superstition of the age , . 516 
 
 The King's habits of life those of a man of letters 519 
 
 Of the facility and copiousness of his composition 622 
 
 Of his eloquence.. 623 
 
 Of his wit , 624 
 
 Specimens of his humour, and observations on human life 525 
 
 Some evidences of his sagacity in the discovery of truth 630 
 
 Ofhis "BasiliconDoron" 633 
 
 Of his idea of a tyrant and a King 534 
 
 Advice to Prince Henry in the choice of his servants and associates 636 
 
 Describes the Kevolutionists of his time 637 
 
 Of the nobility of Scotland 538 
 
 Of colonising . ■ • 539 
 
 Of merchants.... 539 
 
 Eegulations for the Prince's manners and habits 540 
 
 Of his idea of the toyal prerogative .• 643 
 
 The lawyers' idea of the same 544 
 
 Of his elevated conception of the kingly character 648 
 
 His design in issuing "The Book of Sports" for the Sabbath-day 660 
 
 The Sabbatarian controversy 652 
 
 The motives of his aversion to war ....,■ 555 
 
 James acknowledges his dependence on the Commons ; their con- 
 duct • 556 
 
 Of certain scandalous chronicles 660 
 
 A picture of the age from a manuscript of the times 664 
 
 Anecdotes of the manners of the age 569 
 
 James I. discovers the disorders and discontents of a peace of 
 
 more than twenty years 578 
 
 The King's private life in his occasional retirements. ... 680 
 
 A detection of the discrepancies of opinion among the decriers of 
 
 James I ^82 
 
 Summary of his character • 587 
 
THE 
 
 LITERART CHARACTER; 
 
 OS, THE 
 
 HISTORY OF MEN OF GENIUS, 
 
 DEAWN FBOM THEIK OWN FEELINGS AND CONFESSIONS. , 
 
EOBEET SOUTHEY, LL.D., 
 
 &e., &c., Ae. 
 
 In dedicating this work to one of the most eminent literary characters 
 of the age, I am experiencing a peculiar gratification, in which, few, 
 perhaps none, of my contemporaries can partieijpate ; 'for I am addressing 
 him, whose earliest efltasions attracted itiy regard, near half a Cehtury 
 past ; and during that awful interval of time— for fifty years is a trial of 
 life of whatever may be good in us — ^yon have multiplied your talents, 
 and have never lost a virtue. 
 
 WheU I turn from tbeuninteTrupted studies 6^yonT domeetie Aolltude 
 to our metropolitan authors, the contrast, if not encouraging, is at least 
 extraordinary. You are riot nniWftre that the revolutiohs of Society 
 have Operated on our literature, and that new classes of readers have 
 called forth new classes of writers. The causes and the cons(jquences 
 of the present state of this fugitive literature might form fin inquiry which 
 would include some of the important topics which concern the Publio 
 Mind— but an inquiry which might be invidious shall not disturb a 
 page consecrated to the record of excellence. They who draw their in- 
 spiration from the hour most not, however, complain if with that hour 
 they pass away. 
 
 I. DISRAELI. 
 JUaroA, 1889, 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 For the fifth time I revise a subject which has occupied my 
 inquiries from early life, with feelings still delightful, and an 
 enthusiasm not wholly diminished. 
 
 Had not the principle upon which this work is constructed 
 occurred to me in my youth, the materials which illustrate 
 the literary character could never have been brought together. 
 It was in early life that I concdved the idea of pursuing the 
 history of genius by the similar events which had occurred to 
 men of genius. Searching into literary history for the literary 
 character formed a course of experimental philosophy in which 
 every new essay verified a fc^mer trial, and confirmed a forjner 
 truth. By the great philosophical principle of induction, in' 
 ferences were deduced and results established, which, however 
 vague and doubtful, in speculation, are irresistible when the 
 appeal is made to facts as they relate to others, and to 
 feelings which must be decided on as they are passing iq our 
 own breast. 
 
 It is not to be inferred fi'om what I have here stated that 
 I conceive that any single man of genius will resemble every 
 man of genius ; for not only man differs from man, bat varies 
 from himself in the different stages of human lifsu All that 
 ■ I assert is, that every man of genius will discover, sooner or 
 later, that he belongs to the brotherhood of his class, and that 
 he cannot escape from certain habits, and feelings, and disr 
 orders, which arise from the same temperament and sym- 
 pathies, and are the necessary consequence of occupying the 
 
16 PKEFACB. 
 
 same position, and passing through the same moral existence. 
 "Whenever we compare men of genius with each other, the 
 history of those who are no more will serve as a perpetual 
 commentary on our contemporaries. There are, indeed, secret 
 feelings which their prudence conceals, or their fears obscure, 
 or their modesty shrinks from, or their pride rejects ; but I , 
 have sometimes imagined that I have held the clue as they 
 have lost themselves in their own labyrinth. I know that 
 many, and some of great celebrity, have sympathised with the 
 feeUngs which inspired these volumes ; nor, while I have 
 elucidated the idiosyncrasy of genius, have I less studied the 
 habits and characteristics of the lovers of literature. 
 
 It has been considered that the subject of this work might 
 have been treated withmore depth of metaphysical disquisition! 
 and there has since appeared an attempt to combine with this 
 investigation the medical science. A work, however, should 
 be judged by its design, and its execution, and not by any 
 preconceived notion of what it ought to be according to the 
 critic, rather than the author. The nature of this work is 
 dramatic rather than metaphysical. It offers a narration 
 or a description ; a conversation or a monologue ; an incident 
 or a scene. 
 
 Perhaps I have sometimes too warmly apologised for the 
 infirmities of men of genius. From others we may hourly 
 learn to treat with levity the man of genius because he is 
 only such. Perhaps also I may have been too fond of the 
 subject, which has been for me an old and a favourite one— I 
 may have exalted the literary character beyond the scale by 
 which society is willing to fix it. Yet what is this Society, 
 so omnipotent, so all judicial? The society of to-day was 
 not the society of yesterday. Its feelings, its thoughts, its 
 manners, its rights, its wishes, and its wants, are difierent 
 and are changed : alike changed or alike created by those very 
 literary characters whom it rarely comprehends and often 
 would despise. Let us no longer look upon this retired and 
 
PEBPAOE. 17 
 
 peculiar class as useless members of our busy race. There 
 are mental as well as material labourers. The first are not 
 less necessary ; and as they are much rarer, so are they more 
 precious. These are they whose " published labours " have 
 benefited mankind-^these are they whose thoughts can alone 
 rear that beautiful fabric of social life, which it is the object 
 of all good men to elevate or to support. To discover truth 
 and to maintain it, — to develope the powers, to i-fegulate the 
 passions, to ascertain the privileges of man, — such have ever 
 been, and such ever ought to be, the labours of Authors I 
 Whajtever we enjoy of political and private happiness, our 
 most necessary knowledge as well as our most refined plea- 
 sures, are alike owing to this class of men ; and of these, some 
 for glory, and, often from benevolence, have shut themselves 
 Qut from the very beings whom they love, and for whom they 
 labour. 
 
 Upwards of forty years have elapsed since, composed in a 
 4istant county, and printed at a provincial press, I published 
 " An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Char- 
 acter,"- To my own habitual and inherent defects were' 
 superadded those of ray youth. "The crude production was,' 
 however, not ill received, for the edition disappeared, and the 
 subject was found more interesting than the writer. 
 
 During a long interval of twenty years, this little work was 
 often recalled to my recollection by several, and by some who 
 have since p,bta,ined celebrity. , They imagined that their at- 
 tachment to literary pursuits had been strengthened even by 
 so weak an effort. An extraordinary circumstance concurred 
 with these opinions. A copy accidentally fell into my hands 
 wh\ch had formerly belonged to the great poetical genius of ' 
 our times ; and the singular fact, that it had been mare than 
 once read by him, and twice in two subsequent years at 
 Athens, in 1810 and 18J1, instantly convincedme that, the 
 volume deserved my renewed attention. 
 
 It was with these feelings that I was agaia strongly at- 
 
18 PREFACE. 
 
 tracted to a subject from ■wiich, indeed, during the course of 
 a studious life, it had never been long diverted. The conse- 
 quence of my labours was the publication, in 1818, of an 
 octavo volume, tinder the title of *' The Literary Character, 
 illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, drawn from their 
 own feelings and confessions." 
 
 In the preface to this edition, in mentioning the fact 
 respecting l/ord Byron, which had been the immediate cause 
 of its publication, I added these words : " I tell this fact 
 assuredly not from any little vanity which it may appear to 
 betray ; — ^for the truth is, were I not as liberal and as candid 
 in respect to my own productions, as I hope I am to others, 
 I could not have been gratified by the present circumstance ; 
 for the marginal notes of the n-oble author convey no flattery ; 
 — but amidst their pungency, and sometimes their truth, the 
 circumstance that a man of genius could reperuse this slight 
 effusion at two difierent periods of his life, was a sufficient 
 authority, at least for an author, to return it once more to 
 the anvil." 
 
 Some time after the publication of this edition of " The 
 ■Literary Character," which' was in fact a new work, I was 
 shown, through the Hndness of an English gentleman lately 
 returned from Italy, a copy of it, which had been given to 
 him by Lord Byron, and which again contained marginal 
 notes by the noble author. These were peculiarly interesting, 
 and were chiefly occasioned by observations on his character, 
 which appeared in the work. 
 
 In 1822 I published a new edition of this work, greatly 
 enlarged, and in two volumes. I took this opportunity of 
 inserting the manuscript Notes of Lord Byron, with the ex- 
 ception of one, which, however characteristic of the amiable 
 feelings of the noble poet, and however gratifying to my 
 own, I had no wish to obtrude on the notice of the public* 
 
 * A» everything connected with the reading of a mind lik« Lord Bykos'b ia 
 Interesting to the phflosophlcal inquirer, this note may now be preserved. On 
 
PREFACE. 1Q 
 
 Soon after tlie publication of this third edition, 1 received 
 the. following letter from his lordship : 
 
 " MoifXEOTBO, "Vn,iA DupuT, JTEAB Lbohoeit, June 10, 1822. 
 
 " Deab Sie, — If yo« will permit me to call you so,— T 
 had some time ago taken up my pen at Pisa, to thank you fot 
 the present of your new edition of the ' Literary Character,' 
 which has often heen to me a consolation, and always a 
 pleasure. I was interrupted, however, partly by business, 
 and partly by vexation of different kinds, — for I have not very 
 long ago lost a child by fever, and I have had a good deal 
 of petty trouble with the laws of this lawless country, on 
 account of the prosecution of a servant for an attack upon a 
 cowardly scoundrel of a dragoon, who drew his sword upon 
 some unarmed Englishmen, and whom I had done the honour 
 to mistake for an oflBoer, and to treat like a gentleman. Ho 
 turned out to, be neither, — like many other with medals, and in 
 uniform ; but he paid for his brutaUty with a severe and danger- 
 ous wound, inflicted by nobody knows whoim, for, of threie 
 suspected, and two arrested, they have been able to identify 
 neither ; which is strange, since he was wounded in the pres- 
 ence of thousands, in a public street, during a feast-day and full 
 promenade. But to return to things more analogous to the 
 * Literary Character,' I wish to say, that bad I iaown that the 
 book was to fall into your hands, or that the MS. notes you 
 have thought worthy of publication would have attracted your 
 attention, I would have made them more copious, and perhaps 
 not 80 careless. 
 
 " I really cannot know whether I am, or am not, the genius 
 you are pleased to call me,— but I am very willing to put up 
 with the mistake, if it be one. It is a title dearly enough 
 bought by most men, to render it endurable, even when not 
 quite clearly made out, which it never can be, till tiie Posterity, 
 
 that passage of the Preface of the second Edition which I have already quoted, his 
 Lordship was thus pleased to write : 
 
 "I was wrong, but I was young and petulant, and probably wrote down 
 any thing, little thinking that those observations would be betrayed to the author, 
 whose abilities I bmt always respected, and whose works in general X have read 
 oftener than perhaps those of any English author yhatever, efiixpt Bach as treat 
 of Turkey." 
 
20' PEEFACB. 
 
 whose decisions, are merely dreams to ourselves, have sanotioiied 
 or denied it, while it can touch us no further. 
 
 " Mr. Murray is in possession of a MS. memoir of mine (not 
 to be published till I am in my grave), which, strange as it may 
 saem, I never read over since it was written, and have no desire to 
 read over again. In it I have told what, as far as I know, is the 
 truth-^not the whole truth^-for if I had done so, I must have 
 involved much private, and some dissipated history : but, never- 
 theless, nothing but truth, as far as regard for others permitted 
 it to appear. 
 
 "I do not know whether you have seen those MSS. ; but, as 
 you are curious m such things as relate to the human mind, I 
 should feel gratified if you had. I also sent him (Murray), a 
 few days since, a Oommon-plaee Book, by my friend Lord Clare, 
 containing a few things, which may perhaps aid his publi'cation 
 in case of his surviving me. If there are any questions which 
 you would like to ask me, as connected with your philosophy 
 of the literary mind («/mine be a literary mind), I will answer 
 them fairly, or give a reason for not, good — bad — or indifferent. 
 At present, I am paying the penalty of having helped to spoil 
 the public taste ; for, as long as I wrote in the false exaggerated 
 style of youth, and the times in which we live, they applauded 
 me to the very eeho ; and within these few years, when I have 
 endeavoured at better things, and written what I suspect to have 
 the principle of duration in it: the Church, the Chancellor, and 
 all men, even to my grand patron, Francis Jeffrey, Esq., of the 
 Edinburgh Beview, have risen up against me, and ray later 
 publications. Such is Truth I men dare not look her in the face, 
 except by degrees ; they mistake her for a Gorgon, instead of 
 knowing her to be Minerva. I do not mean to apply this 
 mythological simile to my own endeavours, but I have only to 
 turn over a few pages of your volumes to find innumerable and 
 far more illustrious instances. It is lucky that I am of a temper 
 not to be easily turned aside, though by no means diflBcult to 
 irritate. But I am making a dissertation, instead of writing a 
 letter. I write to you from the Villa Dnpuy, near Leghorn, 
 with the islands of Elba and Corsica visible from my balcony, 
 and my old friepd the Mediterranean rolling blue at my feet. 
 As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can 
 
PEEFACB. 21 
 
 partly soften or subdue my other passions, and resist or endure 
 those of others. 
 
 " I have the honour to be, truly, 
 
 " Tour obliged and faithful servant, 
 
 " Noel ByEoif. 
 "Tol. D'Ibbaeli, Esq." 
 
 The ill-starred expedition to Greece followed this letter. 
 
 This work, conceived in youth, executed by the research of 
 manhood, and associated with the noblest feelings of our 
 nature, is an humble but fervent tribute, offered to the 
 memory of those Master Spirits from whose labours, as Buekb 
 eloquently describes, " their country receives permanent 
 service : those who know how to make the silence of their 
 closets more beneficial to ,the world than all the noise and 
 bustle of courts, senates, and camps.''' 
 
THE 
 
 LITEEARY OHAEAOTEE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Of Literary Characters, and of the Lovers of Literature and Art. 
 
 T\IFFUSED over enlightened Europe, an order of men 
 -^ has arisen, who, uninfluenced by the interests or the 
 passions which give an impulse to the other classes of 
 society, are connected by the secret links of congenial 
 pursuits, and, insensibly to themselves, are combining in 
 the same common labours, and participating in the same 
 divided glory. In the metropolitan cities of Europe the 
 same authors are now read, and the same opinions 
 become established: the Englishman is familiar with 
 Machiavel and Montesquieu; the Italian and the French- 
 man with Bacon and Locke ; and the same smiles and 
 tears are awakened on the banks of the Thames, of the 
 Seine, or of the Guadalquivir, by Shakspeare, Moli&re, 
 and Cervantes — 
 
 Contemporains de tous les bommes, 
 Bt eitoyens de tous les lieur. 
 
 A khan of Tartary admired the wit of Molifere, and 
 discovered the TartuflFe in the Crimea; and had this 
 ingenious sovereign survived the translation which he 
 ordered, the immortal labour of the comic satirist of 
 France might have laid the foundation of good taste 
 
24 LITEEART CHARACTER. 
 
 even among the Turks and the Tartars. "We see the 
 ■Italian Pignotti referring to the opinion of an English 
 Critic, Lord Bolinghroke, for decisive authority on the 
 peculiar characteristics of the historian Guicciardini : the 
 German Schlegel writes on our Shakspeare like a patriot ; 
 and while the Italians admire the noble scenes which our 
 Flaxman has drawn from their great poet, they have 
 rejected the feeble attempts of their native artists. Such 
 is the wide and the perpetual influence of this living 
 intercourse of literary minds. 
 
 Scarcely have two centuries elapsed since the litera- 
 ture of every nation was limited to its fatherland, and 
 men of genius long could only hope for the spread of 
 their fame in the single language of ancient Rome; 
 which for them had ceased to be natural, and could 
 never be popular. It was in the intercourse of the 
 wealth, the power, and the novel arts of the nations of 
 Europe, that they learned each other's languages; and 
 they discovered that, however their manners varied as 
 they arose from their different customs, they participated 
 in the same intellectual faculties, suffered from the same 
 wants, and were alive to the same pleasures ; they per- 
 ceived that there were no conventional fashions, nor 
 national distinctions, in abstract truths and fundamental 
 knowledge. A new spirit seems to bring them nearer to 
 each other: and, as if literary Europe were intent to 
 form but one people out of the populace of mankind, 
 they offer their reciprocal labours ; they pledge to each 
 other the same opinions; and that knowledge which, 
 like a small river, takes its source from one spot, at 
 length mingles with the ocean-stream common to them 
 all. 
 
 But those who stand connected with this literary com- 
 munity are not always sensible of the kindred alliance ; 
 even a genius of the first order has not always been 
 aware that he is the founder of a; society, and that there 
 
SIMILARITY OF MTBRABT MBIT. 25 
 
 will ever be a brotherhood where there is a fatber- 
 genius. 
 
 These literary characters are partially, and with a 
 melancholy colouring, exhibited by Johnson. " To talk 
 in private, to think in solitude, to inquire or to answer 
 inquiries, is the business of a scholar. He wanders about 
 the world without pomp or terror ; and is neither known 
 nor valued but by men like himself." Thus thought this 
 great writer during those sad probationary years of 
 genius when 
 
 Slow rises worth, hy poverty depress'd; 
 
 not yet conscious that he himself was devoting his days 
 to cast the minds of his contemporaries and of the suc- 
 ceeding age in the mighty mould of his own ; Johnson 
 was of that order of men whose individual genius 
 becomes that of a people. A prouder conception rose 
 in the majestic mind of Milton, of "that lasting fame 
 and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have 
 consented shall be the reward of those whose published 
 LABOURS advanced the good of mankind." 
 
 The LiTBKAET CHAEACTEE is a denomination which, 
 however vague, defines the .pursuits of the individual, 
 and separates him from other professions, although it 
 frequently occurs that he is himself a member of one. 
 Professional characters are modified by the change of 
 manners, and , are usually national ; while, the literary 
 character, from the objects in which it concerns itself, 
 retains a more permanent, and necessarily a more 
 independent nature. 
 
 Formed by the same habits, and influenced by the 
 same motives, notwithstanding the contrast of talent^ 
 and tempers, and the remoteness of times and places, the 
 literary character h^s ever preserved among its followers 
 the most striking family resemblance. The passion for 
 study, the delight in books, the, desire of solitude and 
 
26 IITEEART CHARACTER. 
 
 celebrity, the obstructions of human life, the charactei 
 of their pursuits, the uniformity of their habits, the 
 triumphs and the disappointments of literary glory, were 
 as truly described by Cicero and the younger Plinj 
 as by Petrai-ch and Erasmus, and as they have beer 
 by Hume and Gibbon. And this similarity, too, may 
 equally be remarked with respect to that noble passior 
 of the lovers of literature and of art for collecting together 
 their mingled treasures ; a thirst which was as insatiable in 
 Atticus and Peiresc as in our Cracherode and Townley.* 
 We trace the feelings of our literary contemporaries Id 
 all ages, and among every people who have ranked with 
 nations far advanced in civilization ; for among these may 
 be equally observed both the great artificers of knowl- 
 edge and those who preserve unbroken the va^t chain of 
 human acquisitions. The one have stamped the images 
 of their minds on their works, and the others havd 
 preserved the circulation of this intellectual coinage, this 
 
 Gold of the dead, 
 Which Time does still disperse, but not devour. 
 
 * The Rer. C. M. Cracherode bequeathed at hia death, in 1799, to 
 the British Museum, the large ooUeotion of literature, art, and virtu he 
 had employed an industrious life in colleoting. His books numbered 
 nearly 4590 volumes, many of great rarity and value. His drawings, 
 many by early Italian masters, and all rare or curious, were de- 
 posited in the print-room of the same establishment; his antiquities, 
 &c., were in a similar way added to the other departments. The 
 "Townley Gallery " of olasaio sculpture was purchased of his executors 
 by Government for 28,2'OOt It had been collected with singular taste 
 and judgment, as well as some amount of good fortune also ; Townley 
 resided at Rome during the researches on the site of Hadrian's "Villa at 
 Tivoli ; and he had for aids and advisers Sjr William Hamilton, Gavin 
 ffimilton, and other active collectors ; and was the friend and corre- 
 6pondent of D'Hancarville and Winckelmann. Ed. 
 
ADYEESABIES OF LITERATURE. £7 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Of the Adversaries of Literary Men among themselves. — If atter-of-faot 
 ,Men, and Men of "Wit. — The Political Economists. — Of those who 
 abandon their studies. — Men in office. — The arbiters of public opin- 
 ion. — Those who treat the pursuits of literature with levity. 
 
 rpHE pursuits of literature have been openly or insidi- 
 •*• ously lowered by those literary men who, from 
 motives not always difficult to penetrate, are eager to 
 confound the ranks in the republic of letters, maliciously 
 conferring the honours of authorship on that "Ten 
 Thousand " whose recent list is not so much a muster-roll 
 of heroes as a table of population.* 
 
 Matter-of-fact men, or men of knowledge, and men of 
 wit and taste, were long inimical to each other's pursuits. f" 
 The Royal Society in its origin could hardly support 
 itself against the ludicrous attacks of literary men,J and 
 
 * "We have a Dictionary of "Ten Thousand living Authors" of 
 our own nation. The alphabet is fatal by its juxtapositions. In 
 France, before the Revolution, they counted about twenty thousand 
 writers. When David would have his people numbered, Joab asked, 
 "Why doth my lord delight in this?" In political economy, the 
 population returns may be useful, provided they be correct ; but iu, 
 the literary republic, its oumerioal force diminishes the strength of 
 the empire. "There you are numbered, we had rather you were 
 weighed." Put aside the puling infants of literature, of whom such 
 a mortality occurs in its nurseries; such as the writers of the single 
 sermon, the single law-tract, the single medical dissertation, &c. ; all 
 writers whose subject is single. Without being singular; count for 
 nothing the inefficient mob of mediocrists ; and strike out our literary 
 charlatans; and then our alphabet of men of genius will not consist, as 
 it now does, of the four-and-twenty letters. 
 
 ■f The cause is developed in the chapter on "Want of Mutual 
 Esteem." 
 
 X See Butler, in his " Elephant in the Moon." South, in his oration 
 at the opening of the theatre at Oxford, passed this bitter sarcasm 
 on the naturalists, — " Mirantur mhit nisi pulices, pediados — el se ipsos;" 
 
2S LITERART CHARACTER. 
 
 the Antiquarian Society has afforded them amusemeit.* 
 Such partial views have ceased to contract the under- 
 standing. Science yields a new substance to literature ; 
 literature comhines new associations for the votarie^ of 
 knowledge. There is no subject in nature, and iii the 
 history of man, which will not associate with our feelings 
 and our curiosity, whenever genius extends its awaken- 
 ing hand. The antiquary, the naturalist, the architect, 
 the chemist, and even writers on medical topics, have in 
 our days asserted their claims, and discovered their long- 
 interrupted relationship with the great family of genius 
 and literature. 
 
 A new race of jargonists, the barbarous metaphysi- 
 cians of political economy, have struck at the essential 
 existence of the productions of genius in literature and 
 art ; for, appreciating them by their own standard, they 
 have miserably degraded the professors. Absorbed in 
 the contemplation of material objects^ and rejecting 
 whatever does not enter into their own restricted notion 
 of " utility," these cold arithmetical seers, with nothing 
 but millions in their imagination, and whose choicest 
 works of art are spinning-jennies, have valued the intel- 
 lectual tasks of the library and the studio by " the de- 
 
 — nothing they admire but fleas, lice, and themselves I The illustrious 
 Sloane endured a long persecution from the bantering humour of Dr. 
 King. One of the most amusing deelaimers against what he calls les 
 Sciences des fawn Sfavwm is Father Malebranche; he is far more 
 severe than Cornelius Agrippa, and he long preceded Rousseau, so 
 famous for his invective against the sciences. The seventh chapter 
 of his fourth book is an inimitable satire. "The principal excuse," 
 says he, "which engages men va false studies, is, that they have at- 
 tached the idea of learned where they should not." Astronomy, anti- 
 quarianism, history, ancient poetry, and natural history, are all mowed 
 down by his metaphysical scythe. When we become aoqiiainted with 
 the idea Father Malebranche attaches to the term learned, we under- 
 stand him — and we smile. 
 
 * See the chapter On " Puck the Commentator," in the " Curiosities 
 of Literature," vol. iii. ; also p. 304 of the same volume. 
 
ADVEBSAEIES OF LITERATURE. 29 
 
 mand and the supply." They have sunk these pursuits 
 into the class of what they term " unproductive labour ;" 
 and by another result of their line and level system, men 
 of letters, with feome other important characters, are forced 
 down into the class " of buffoons, singers, opera-dancers," 
 &c. In a system of political economy it has been dis- 
 covered that " that unprosperous race of men, called men 
 of letters, must necessa/rily occupy their present forlorn 
 state in society much as formerly, when a scholar and a beg- 
 gar seem to have been terms very nearly synonymous."* 
 In their commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing view 
 of human nature, addressing society by its most pressing 
 wants and its coarsest feelings, these theorists limit the 
 moral and physical existence of man by speculative 
 tables of population, planing and levelling society down 
 in their carpentry of human nature. They would yoke 
 and harness the loftier spirits to one common and vulgar 
 destination. Man is considered only as he wheels on the 
 the wharf, or as he spins in the fectory ; but man, as a 
 recluse being of meditation, or impelled to action by 
 more generous passions, has been struck out of the 
 system of our political- economists. It is, however, only 
 among their " unproductive labourers " that we shall find 
 those men of leisure, whose habitual pursuits are con- 
 sumed in the development of thought and the gradual 
 ascessions of knowledge ; those men of whom the sage 
 of Judea declares, that " It is he who hath little business 
 who shall become wise : how can, he get wisdom that 
 holdeth the plough, and whose talk is of bullocks ? But 
 THEY," — the men of leisure and study, — " will maintain 
 THE STATE OF THE VTOELD !" The prosperity and the hap- 
 piness of a people include something more evident and 
 more permanent than " the Wealth of a Nation." f 
 
 * " -Wealth of Nations," i. 182. 
 
 \ Since this murmur has been uttered against the degrading views 
 of some of those theoristsj it afforded me pleasure to observe that, Mr. 
 
30 UTERAET CHA.RAOTBB. 
 
 There is a more formidable class of men of genius who 
 are heartless to the interests of literature. Like Corne- 
 lius Agrippa, who wrote on " the vanity of the arts and 
 sciences," many of these are only tracing in the arts 
 which they have abandoned their own inconstant 
 tempers, their feeble tastes, and their disordered judg^ 
 ments. But, with others of this class, study has usually 
 served as the instrument, not as the object, of their 
 ascent 5 it was the ladder which they once climbed, but 
 it was not the eastern star which guided and inspired. 
 Such literary characters,were Warburton,* Watson, and 
 Wilkes, who abandoned their studies when their studies 
 had served a purpose. 
 
 Watson gave up his pursuits in chemistry the instant 
 he obtained their limited reward, and the laboratory 
 closed when the professorship was instituted. Such was 
 the penurious love he bore for the science which he had 
 
 Malthus bas fully sanctioned its justness. On this head, at least, Mr. 
 ifalthus has amply confuted his stubborn and tasteless brothers. 
 Alluding to the productions of genius, this writer observes, that, "to 
 estimate the value of Newton's discoveries, or the d^ight oommuni^ 
 cated by Shakspeare and Milton, hy the priee at which their works 
 have sold, would be but a poor measure of the degree in which they 
 have elevated and enchanted their country." — Principles of Pol. Econ., 
 p. 48. And henee he acknowledges, that "some wnproclmcMve labour ia 
 ofmiich more we mid importance than productive labour, but is !ncapa« 
 ble of being the subject of the gross calculations which relate to 
 national wealth ; contributing to other sources of happiness besides 
 those which are derived from matter.^' Political economists would 
 have smiled with contempt on the querulous Porson, who once 
 observed, that " it seemed to him very hard, that with all his critical 
 knowledge of Greek, he could not get a hundred pounds." Thoy; 
 would have demonstrated to the learned Grecian, that this was juat as 
 it oiight to be ; the same occurrence had even happened to Homer in 
 his own country, where Greek ought to have fetched a higher price 
 than in England; but, that- both might have obtained this hundred 
 pounds, had the Grecian bard and the Greek professor been employed 
 at the same stocking-frame together, instead of the "Iliad." 
 
 * For a fuU disquisition of the character and career of "Warburton, 
 see the essay in " Quarrels of Authors." 
 
WILKES. 31 
 
 adopted, that tLe extraordinary discoveries of thirty 
 years subsequent to his own first essays could never 
 excite even an idle inquiry. He tells us that he preferred 
 "his larches to his laurels:" the wretched jingle ex- 
 pressed the mere worldliness that dictated it. In the 
 same spirit of calculation with which he had at first 
 embraced science and literature, he abandoned them; 
 and his ingenuous confession is a memorable example of 
 that egotistic pride which betrayed in the literary charac- 
 ter the creature of selfism and political ambition. 
 
 We are accustomed to consider Wilkes merely as a 
 political adventurer, and it may surprise to find this 
 "city chamberlain" ranked among professed literary 
 characters: yet in his variable life there was a period 
 •jrhen he cherished the aspirations of a votary. Once he 
 desired Lloyd to announce the edition of Ohurehillj 
 which he designed to enrich by a commentary; and 
 his correspondence on this subject, which has never 
 appeared, would, as he himself tells us, afford a variety 
 of hints and communications. Wilkes was then warmed 
 by literary glory ; for on his retirement into Italy, he 
 declared, " I mean to give myself entirely to our friend's 
 work, and to my History of England. I wish to equal 
 the dignity of Livy : I am sure the greatness and ma- 
 jesty of our nation demand an historian equal to him." 
 They who have only heard of the intriguing demagogue, 
 and witnessed the last days of the used voluptuary, may 
 hardly imagine that Wilkes had ever cherished such 
 elevated projects ; but mob-politics made this adventur- 
 er's fortune, which fell to the lot of an epicurean : and 
 the literary glory he once sought he lived to ridicule, in 
 the immortal diligence of Lord Chatham and of Gibbon. 
 Dissolving life away, and consuming all his feelings on 
 himself, Wilkes left his nearest relatives what he left the 
 , world — the memory of an anti-social being ! This wit, 
 who has bequeathed to us no wit ; this man of genius, 
 
32 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 who has formed no work of genius ; this hold advocate 
 for popular freedom, who sunk his patriotism in the 
 chamberlainship ; was indeed desirous of leaving hehind 
 him some trace of the life of an escroc in a piece of auto- 
 biography, which, for the benefit of the world, has been 
 thrown to the flames. 
 
 Men who have ascended into office through its gra- 
 dations, or have been thrown, upwards by accident, are 
 apt to view others in a cloud of passions and politics. 
 They who once commanded us by their eloquence, come 
 at length to suspect the eloquent ; and in their " pride of 
 office" would now drive us by that single force of des- 
 potism which is the corruption of political power. Our 
 late great Minister, Pitt, has been reproached even by his 
 friends for the contemptuous indifference with which he 
 treated literary men. Perhaps Burke himself, long a 
 literary character, might incur some portion of this 
 censure, by involving the character itself in the odium of 
 a monstrous political sect. These political characters 
 resemble Adrian VI., who obtaining the tiara as the 
 reward of his studies, aftei"wards persecuted literary 
 men, and, say the Italians, dreaded lest his brothers 
 might shake the Pontificate itself.* 
 
 Worst fares it with authors when minds of this cast 
 become the arbiters of public opinion ; for the greatest 
 of writers may unquestionably be forced into ridiculous 
 
 * It has been suspected that Adrian VI. has been caluminated, for 
 that this pontiff was only too sudden to begin the reform he medi- 
 tated. But Adrian TI. was a scholastic whose austerity turned away 
 with contempt from all ancient art, and was no brother to contemporary 
 genius. He was one of the aid lono race, a branch of our political ' 
 economists. When they showed him the Laocoon, Adrian silenced 
 thoir raptures by the frigid observation, that all such tilings were idola 
 aniiquorum : and ridiculed the amena letteratura till, every man of 
 genius .retreated from his court. Had Adrian's reign extended be- 
 yond its brief period, men of taste in their panic imagined that in his 
 zeal the Pontiff would have calcined the fine statues of ancient art, to 
 expedite the edifice of St Peter. 
 
DEBASED VIEWS OP LITERATURE. 33 
 
 attitudes by the well-known artifices practised by modern 
 criticism. The elephant, no longer in his forest struggling 
 with his hunters, but falling entrapped by a paltry snare, 
 comes at length, in the height of ill-fortune, to dance on 
 heated iron at the bidding of the pantaloon of a fair. 
 Whatever such critics may plead to mortify the vanity 
 of authors, at least it requires as much vanity to give 
 effect to their own polished effrontery.* Scorn, sarcasm, 
 and invective, the egotism of the vain, and the irasci* 
 bility of the petulant, where they succeed in debilitating 
 genius of the consciousness of its powers, are practising 
 the witchery of that ancient superstition of " tying the 
 knot," which threw the youthful bridegroom into utter 
 despair by its ideal forcefulness.f 
 
 * Listen to a confession and a recantation of an illustrious sinner; 
 the Coryphaeus of the amusing and new-found art, or artifice, of 
 modern criticism. In the character of Burns, the Bdinbui-gh Re- 
 viewer, with his peculiar felicity of manner, attaclced the character of 
 the man of genius ; but when Mr. Campbell vindicated his immortal 
 brother with all the inspiration of the family feeling, our critic, who is 
 one of those great artists who acquire at length the utmost indiffer- 
 ence even for their own works, generously avowed that, " a certain 
 tone of exaggeration is incidental ws fear to the sort of writing in which 
 we are engaged. Reckoning a little too much on the dulness of our 
 readers, we are often led to overstate ow senUmeirds : when a little 
 controversial v>armth is added to a little kme of effect, an excess of colour- 
 ing steals over the canvas, which ultimately offends no eye so much as 
 our own." But what if this love of effect in the critic has been too 
 often obtained at the entire cost of the literary characters, the fruits of 
 whose studious days at this moment lie withering in oblivion, or 
 whose genius the critic has deterred from pursuing the career it had 
 opened for itself I To have silenced the learned, and to have terrified 
 the modest, is the barbarous triumph of a Hun or a Vandal ; and the 
 vaunted freedom of the literary republic departed from us when the 
 vacillating public blindly consecrated the edicts of the demagogues 0^ , 
 literature, whoever they may be. 
 
 A reaction appears in the burlesque or bantering spirit. While one 
 faction drives out another, the abuse of extraordinary powers is 
 equally fatal. Thus we are consoled while we are afiaicted, and we 
 are protected while we are degraded. 
 
 f j\53Mfir ^aiguUktte, of which the extraordinary effect is described 
 3 
 
34 ilTEEART qEARAGTEiS, 
 
 That spirit of levity which would shal^e the columns of 
 speiety, by detracting from or burlesquing the elevating 
 principles which have produced so many illustrious naen, 
 has recently attempted to reduce the Ifibours of literature 
 to a mere curious amusement ; a finished p6niposition is 
 likened to a skilful ganie of billiards, or a piece of music 
 finely executed ; and curious reseEjrehes, to charades and 
 other insignificant puzzles. With gviph, ^n author is an 
 idler who will not be idle, amusing or fg,tigviing others 
 ■who are completely so. The result of ^ work of genius 
 i^ contracted to the art of writing ; but this art is only 
 its last perfection. Inspiration is drawn ffom a deeper 
 source ; enthusiasm is diffused through cont^'gious pagesi j 
 and without these movements of the soul, how poor and 
 artificia,l a, thing is that sparkling cornposition which 
 flashes vith the cold vibrations of mere art or artifice 1 
 We have been recently told, on critical authority, that; 
 " a great genius should never allow himself to be sensible 
 to his own celebrity, nor deem, his pursuits of much eon- 
 sequence, however important or successful." A sort of 
 catholic dpctrine, to mgrtify an anthor into a saint, ex- 
 tinguishing the glorious appetite of fame by one Lent all 
 the year, and self-flagellation every day ! Buffon and 
 Gibbon, Voltaire and Pope,* who gave to literature all 
 the cares, the industry, and the glory of their lives, as- 
 suredly were too " sensible to their celebrity, ^nd deenjed 
 their pursuits of much consequence," particularly when 
 " important and successful," The self-possession of great 
 a,uthor8 sustains their own gemus by a. sense of their 
 own glory. 
 
 by Montaigne, is an Oriental custom still practised. — Mr. Hobhmsia 
 J<mmey through Atbcmia, p. 528. 
 
 * The olaiins of Pope to the title of a great paet were denied in the 
 days of Byron ; and oooasiousd a warm and noble defence of him by ' 
 that poet. It has since been found necessary to do the same for Byron, 
 whom some transcendentalists have attacked. — Ed. 
 
.AET iiND UTEBATUKEi. 35 
 
 Such, then, are eome of the domestic treasons of the lit^ 
 erary eharaoter against literature—" Et tu, Brute !" But 
 the hero of literature outlives his assassins, and niight ad- 
 dress them in that language of poetry and affection with 
 which a Mexican king reproached hi« traitorous counsel^ 
 lors — " You were the feathers of my wings, a.iid the eye- 
 lids of my eyes." 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Of artists, in the history of men of literary genius. — ^Thrar habits and 
 pursuits analogous..^The nature of their genius Is similar in their 
 tf stiuQt works,— t^QWij by thfiir parallel eras, and by a qommon end 
 . pwguei} by both, 
 
 ARTISTS and literary men, alike insulated in their 
 studies, pass through the same permanent disciplinfe^ 
 and thus it has happened that the same habits and feel- 
 ings, and the same fortunes, have accompanied men who 
 have sometimes unhappily imagined their pursuits not 
 tb he analogous. 
 
 Let the artist share 
 TTae palm ; he shares the peril, and dejected 
 IPaints V the labour unapproved — alas I 
 P^spair and genius 1 — 
 
 The congenial histories of literature and art descrihe 
 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 Correggio, we meet with pleasure 
 the Carraocis, Domenichino, Guido, and Alhano ; as we 
 read Paterculus, Quintilian, Seneca, Juvenal, and Silius 
 It^lipus, 9,ftei: their inimortal masters, Cicero, Livy, 
 Virgil, and Horace, 
 
 It is evident that Milton, Michael Angelo, and Haodel, 
 
36 LlTEEAET CHAEAOTEH. . 
 
 belong to the same order of minds ; the same imaginatiye 
 powers, and the same sensibility, are only operating with 
 different materials. Lanzi, the delightful historian of 
 the Storia JPiUoriea, is prodigal of his comparisons of the 
 painters with the poets ; his delicacy of perception dis- 
 cerned 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 TibuUus is in poetry, feels what Andr-ea 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 de- 
 rived the grandeur of his ideas ; and indeed the visions 
 of the bard had" deeply nourished the artist's imagina- 
 tion ; for once he had poured about the margins of hia 
 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 con- 
 tained, 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 an- 
 tique.* 
 
 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 esti- 
 mable President, in his brilliant "Rhymes on Art ;" where 
 he maintains that " the narrative of an action is not com- 
 
 * Eubens was an ardent collector of works of antique art ; and in the 
 " Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii., p. 398, will be found an interesting 
 account of his museum at Antwerp. — Ed. 
 
ART AND LITBEATUEE. 37 
 
 parable to the action itself before the eyes ;" while the 
 enthusiast Barry considers painting " as poetry realised."* 
 This error of genius, perhaps first caught from Richard- 
 son's bewildering pages, was strengthened by the extrav- 
 agant principle adopted by Darwin, who, to exalt his 
 solitary talent of descriptive poetry, asserted that " the 
 essence of poetry was picture." The philosophii'al 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 bound- 
 aries of these arts. The dread pathetic story of Dante's 
 " TJgolino," under the plastic hand of Michael Angelo, 
 formed the subject of a basso-relievo; and Reynolds, 
 with his highest efibrt, 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 hesi- 
 tated at the rivalry. 
 
 Who has no't heard of that one common principle, 
 which unites the intellectual arts, and who has not felt 
 that the nature of their genius if dimilar in their distinct 
 works? Hence curious inquiries could never decide 
 whether the group of the Laocoon in sculpture preceded 
 or was borrowed from that in poetry. Lessing conjec- 
 tures that the sculptor copied the poet. It is evident 
 that the agony of Laocoon was the common end where 
 the sculptor and the poet were to meet ; and we may ob- 
 serve that the artists in marble and in verse skilfully 
 
 * The late Sir Martin Archer Shee, P. E. A. This acoorapUshed ar- 
 tist, who possessed a large amount of poetical and literary power, asks, 
 "What is there of inlellectiial in the operations of the poet which the 
 painter does not equal ? What is there of TuerJianicdl, which he doe» 
 jiot surpass ? The advantage which poetry possesses over painting in 
 continued narration and successive impression, cannot be advanced as 
 a peculiar merit of the poet, since it results from the nature of lan- 
 guage, and is common to prose." Poetry he values as the earliest of 
 arts, painting as the latest and most refined. — Ed. 
 
g8 UTERART dHABACTEB. 
 
 adapted their ftoiatlons to their respective art: the one 
 having to prefer the nud4j rejected the veDing fillet from 
 the forehead, that he might not Conceal its deep expres- 
 sion, and, the^ drapery of the sacrificial robe, that h^ 
 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 respect- 
 ive arts, that common end which each designed ; but wh6 
 ■will decide which invention preceded the other, or who 
 ■was, the greater a,rtist ? 
 
 This appro:£ima.tion of men apparently of oppiosite 
 p'ursuits is so natural, that when Gesner, in his inspiring 
 letter on landscape-painting,* recommends to the youn^ 
 painter a constant study erf poetry and literature, the im" 
 patient artist is toade to exclaim, " Must We Combine 
 with so many other studies those which belong to liter- 
 ai-y men ? Must we read as well as paint ?" "It is use- 
 less 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 enthusi- 
 asm 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, 
 withLivy, and all the great characters, ancient and mod- 
 em, for your companions and counsellors." This genial 
 intercourse of literature with art may be proved by 
 painters who have suggested subjects to poets, and poets- 
 who have selected them for painters. Goldsmiith sug- 
 gested the subject of the tragic and pathetic picture of 
 Ugolino to the pencil of Reynolds. 
 
 * Fe-w writers were so competent to instruct in art aS Gesner, -vflio 
 ■was not only an author and a poet, but an artist ■who deootated his 
 poems by designs as graoeml as their Bubject.-»^El». 
 
All the classed di dlefl ih society have theit peealiai* 
 Borrotvs and enjoyments, as they have their pecttliar habits 
 and characteristics. In the history of men Of genius tve 
 inajr often open the secret stoi-y of their minds^ fot they 
 have above others the privilege of ^ommunicafting their 
 own feelings ; and evety life of a man of geniusj composed 
 by hilttself, presents US with the experimental philosophy 
 of the mind-. By living with their brothers, and con- 
 templating theii? masters, they will judge from conscious- 
 iuess less erroileously than frOm discussion ; and in form- 
 ing comparative views ahd parallel situations, they will 
 discover certain habits and feellugBj and find these reflect- 
 ed in themselves. 
 
 Sydenham has beautifully said, " Whoever describes a 
 Violet exactly as to its colour, taste, smell, fofih, and other 
 |>roperties, will find the description agfee in most paf- 
 iiculars with all the violets ih the Universe." 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Of natural genius. — Minds constitutionally different cannot have an 
 equal aptitude. — Genius not the result of habit ahd education. — 
 Originates in peculiar qualities of the mind.^'The predisposition of 
 genius. — A substitution for tke White paper of Locke.* 
 
 THAT faculty in art which individualises the artist, 
 belonging to him and to no other, and which in a 
 work forms that creative part whose likeness is not found 
 
 * In the second edition of this work in ISH, I touched on some 
 , poihts of this inqtiify in the second chapter: I almost despaired to 
 End any philosopher sympathise With the subject, se invulnefabie, 
 they imagine) are the entrenchments of tlleir theoricfs. I was agree- 
 ably surprised to find these ideas taken up in the Edinburgh Reviem for 
 August, 1820, in an eiitertaining article on Reynolds. I Have, no doubtj 
 profited by the perusal, though this chapter was prepared before I 
 
4:0 LITERART CHARACTER. 
 
 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 have formed their genius 
 solely by their own studies ; when they generated, they 
 conceived that they had acquired ; and, losing the dis- 
 tinction 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 inter- 
 vention 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 
 own philosophical times ; ages of genius.had passed away, 
 and they left no other record than their works ; no pre- 
 concerted theory described the workings of the imagina- 
 tion to be without imagination, nor did they venture to 
 teach how to invent invention. 
 
 The character of genius, viewed as the effect of habit 
 and education, on the principle of the equality of the 
 human mind, infers that men have an equal . aptitude for 
 the work of genius : a paradox which, with a more fatal 
 one, came from the French school, and arose probably 
 from an equivocal, expression. 
 
 Locke employed the well-known comparison of the 
 mind with " white paper void of all characters," to free 
 his famous "Inquiry" from that powerful obstacle to his 
 system, the absurd belief of " innate ideas," of notions of 
 
 met with that spirited vindication of " an inherent difference in the 
 organs or faculties to reoeiye impressions of any kind." 
 
THEORIES 01" GENIUS. 41 
 
 objects before objects were presented to observation. 
 Our philosopher considered that this simple analogy 
 sufficiently described the manner in which he conceived 
 the impressions of the senses write themselves on the mind. 
 His French pupils, the amusing Helvetius, or Diderot, 
 for they were equally concerned in the paradoxical 
 "L'Esprit," inferred that this blank paper served also 
 as an evidence that men had an equal aptitude for 
 genius, just as the blank paper reflects to us whatever 
 characters we trace on it. This eqvMity of minds gave 
 rise to the same monstrous doctrine in the science of 
 metaphysics which that of another verbal misconception, 
 the equality of men, did in that of politics. The Scottish 
 metaphysicians powerfully combined to illustrate the 
 mechanism of the mind, — an important and a curious 
 truth ; for as rules and principles exist in the nature of 
 things, and when discovered are only thence drawn out, 
 genius unconsciously conducts itself by a uniform pro- 
 cess ; and when this process had been traced, they in- 
 ferred that what- was done by some men, under the 
 influence of fundamental laws whicai regulate the march 
 of the intellect, must also be in the reach of others, who, 
 in the same circumstances, apply themselves to the same 
 study. But these metaphysicians resemble anatomists, 
 under whose knife all men are alike. They know the 
 structure of the bones, the movement of the muscles, 
 and where the connecting ligaments lie ! but the invis- 
 ible principle of life flies from their touch. It is the 
 practitioner on the living body who studies in every 
 individual that peculiarity of constitution which forms 
 the idiosyncrasy. 
 
 Under the influence of such novel theories of genius, 
 Johnson defined it as " A Mind of large general powers 
 AcciDENTAixT determined by some particular direction.'''^ 
 On this principle we must infer that the reasoning 
 Locke, or the arithmetical De Moivre, could have been 
 
42 LITBRABT CHABAGTBB. 
 
 the musical and fairy Spenser.* This conception of the 
 ' nature of genius became prevalent. It induted the 
 philosophical Beccaria to assert that every individual had 
 an equal degree of genius for poetry and eloquence ; it 
 runs through the philosophy of the elegant Pugald 
 Stewart ; and Reynolds, the pupU of Johnson in liters' 
 ture, adopting the paradox, constructed his automatic 
 system on this principle of equal aptitude. He saysj 
 " this excellence, however expressed by genius, taste^ or 
 *he gift of Heaven, I ani confident may be acquired." 
 Reynolds had the modesty to fancy that so many rivals^ 
 unendowed by nature, might have equalled the magio 
 of his own pencil : but his theory of industry, so essential 
 to genius, yet so useless without it, too long stimulated 
 the drudges of art, and left us without a Correggio or a 
 Raphael! Another man of genius caught the fever of 
 the new system. Currie, in his eloquent ' " Life of 
 Burns," swells out the scene of genius to a startling 
 magnificence ; for he asserts that, " the talents necessary 
 to the construction of an 'Iliad,' under different dis* 
 cipline and application, might have led armies to vic- 
 tory or kingdoms to prosperity ; might have wielded 
 the thunder of eloquence, or discovered and enlarged 
 the sciences." All this we find in the teat ; but in the 
 clear intellect of this man of genius a vast number of 
 intervening difficulties started up, and in a copious note 
 the numerous exceptions show that the assumed theory 
 requires no other refutation than what the theorist 
 
 * It is more dangerous to define tHan to describe : a dry definitiotl 
 excludes so much, an ai'detit desofiptioil at once appeals to our sylnpa- 
 thies. How much more comprehensible our great dritio beeotneS 
 when he nobly describes genius, " as the power of mimd that collects, 
 combines, amplifies, and animates; the energy without which judg- 
 ment is co'd, and knowledge is inert I" And it is this power of 
 MIND, this primary faculty and native aptitude, which we deem may 
 exist sepafately frotn education and habit, since these are oftea 
 found unaccompanied by genius. 
 
THEOEIES OP GBNIXTS. 4,3 
 
 has himself so abundantly and so judiciously- supplied. 
 There is something ludicrous in the result of a theory of 
 genius which would place Hobhes and Erasmus, those 
 timid and learned recluses, to open a campaign with the 
 iailitafy invention and physical intrepidity of a Marl- 
 borough; or conclude that the romantic bard Of the 
 " Fairy Queen," amidst the quickly-shifting scenes of his 
 visionary reveries, could have deduced, by slow and 
 patient watohinga of the mind, the system and the 
 demonstrations of Newton. 
 
 Such theorists deduce the faculty called genius from A 
 variety of exterior or secondary causes : zealously reject- 
 ing the notion that genius may originate in constitu' 
 tional dispositions, and be only a mode of the individual's 
 existence, they deny that minds are differently consti-' 
 tuted. Habit and education, being more palpable and 
 visible in their operatiohs, and progressive in the develops 
 ment of the intellectual faculties, have been imagined 
 fully sufficient to make the creative faculty a Subject of 
 acquirement. 
 
 But ^hen these theorists had discovered the curious 
 fact, that we have owed to accident several men of genius, 
 and when they laid open some sources which influenced 
 genius in its progress, they did not go one step further, 
 they did not inquire whether such sources and such acci- 
 dents had ever supplied the want of genius in the individ- 
 ual. Effects were here again mistaken for causes. Could 
 Spenser have kindled a poet in Cowley, Richardson a 
 painter in Reynolds, and Descartes a metaphysician 
 in Malebranche, if those master-minds, pointed out as 
 having been such from accident, had not first received 
 the indelible mint-stamp sttuck by the hand of Nature, 
 and which, to give it a name, We may be allO-Wed to call 
 the predisposition of genius ? The accidents so triumph- 
 antly held forth, which are imagined to have created the 
 genius of these men, have occurred to a thousand who 
 
44 LITBRAET CHARACTER. 
 
 have run the same career ; but how does it happen that 
 the multitude remain a multitude, and the man of genius 
 arrives alone at the goal ? • 
 
 This theory, which long dazzled its beholders, was in 
 time found to stand in contradiction with itself, and 
 perpetually with their own experience. Reynolds pared 
 down his decision in the progress of his lectures, often 
 wavered, often altered, and grew more confused as he 
 lived longer to look about him.* The infirm votaries of 
 the new philosophy, with all their sources of genius open 
 before them, went on multiplying mediocrity, while 
 inherent genius, true to nature, still continued rare in 
 its solitary independence. 
 
 Others have strenuously denied that we are born with 
 any peculiar species of miijd, and resolve the mysterious 
 problem into capacity, of which men only differ in the 
 degree. They can perceive no distinction between the 
 poetical and the mathematical genius ; and they con- 
 clude that a man of genius, possessing a general capacity, 
 may become whatever he chooses, but is determined by 
 his first acquired habit to be what he is.f • 
 
 In substituting the term capacity for that of genius, 
 
 * I transcribe the last opinions of Mr. Bdgeworth. " As to original 
 genius, and the effect of education in forming taste or directing talent, 
 the last revisal of his opinions was given by himself, in the introducr 
 tion to the second edition of 'Professional Education.' He was 
 strengthened in his belief that many of the great differences of intellect 
 which appear in men, depend more upon the early cultivating the 
 habit of attention than upon any disparity between the powers of one 
 individual and another. Perhaps, he latterly allowed that there is 
 more difference than he had formerly admitted between the twiural 
 powers oi different persons; but not so great as is generally supposed." 
 —■Edgeivorfli' a Memoirs, ii., 388. 
 
 f Johnson onoe asserted, that "the supposition of one man having 
 more imagination, another more judgment, is not true ; it is only one 
 man has more mind than another. He who has vigour may wallc to 
 the east as well as the west, if he happens to turn his head that 
 way." Godwin was persuaded that all genius is a mere acquisition, 
 for he hints at "infusing it," and making it a thing ('heritable." A 
 
'PEEDISPOSITIOIir OF GBNIUS. 4.5 
 
 the origin or nature remains equally occult. How is it 
 acquired, or how is it inherent ? To assert that any man 
 of genius may become what he wills, those most fer- 
 vently protest against who feel that the character of 
 genius is such that it cannot be other than it is ; that 
 there is an identity of minds, and that there exists an 
 interior conformity as marked and as perfect as the 
 exterior physiognomy. A Scotch metaphysician has 
 recently declared that "Locke or Newton might have 
 been as eminent poets as Homer or Milton, had they 
 given themselves early to the study of poetry." It is 
 well to know how far this taste will go. We believe 
 that had these philosophers obstinately, against nature, 
 persisted in the attempt, as some have unluckily for 
 themselves, we should have lost two great philosophers, 
 and have obtained two supernumerary poets.* 
 
 It would be more useful to discover another source of 
 genius for philosophers and poets, less fallible than the 
 gratuitous assumptions of these theorists. An adequate 
 origin for peculiar qualities in the mind may be found 
 in that constitutional or secret propensity which adapts 
 some for particular pursuits and forms the predisposition 
 of genius. 
 
 Not that we are bound to demonstrate what our 
 adversaries have failed in proving ; we may still remain 
 ignorant of the nature of genius, and yet be convinced 
 
 reversion which has been missed hy the many respectable dunces who 
 have been sons of men of genius. 
 
 * This very Scotch metaphysician, at the instant he lays down this 
 postulate, acknowledges that " Dr. Beattie had talents for a poet, but 
 apparently not for a pWosopher." It is amusing to learn another 
 result of his ungenial metaphysics. This sage demonstrates and con- 
 cludes in these words, " It will therefore be found, with little excep- 
 tion, that a great poet is but an orctinary genius." Let this sturdy Scotch 
 metaphysician never approach Pegasus — he has to fear, not his wings, 
 but his heels. If some have written on genius with a great deal too 
 much, others have written without any. 
 
46 LITERABiT CHAEACTBB. 
 
 that they have not revealed it. The phenomena of pfe- 
 dispasition in the mind are not more ohseure and am,- 
 biguous than those -which have been assigned as the 
 sources of genius in certain individuals. For is it more 
 difficult to conceive that a person bears in his constitu- 
 tional disposition a germ of native aptitude which is 
 developing itself to a predominant character of genius, 
 which breaks forth in the temperament and moulds the 
 babits, than to conjecture that these men of genius could 
 not have been such but from accideni, or that they differ 
 only in their capacity f 
 
 Dvery class of men of genius has distinct habits ; all 
 poets resemble one another, as all painters and all mathe- 
 maticians. There is a conformity in the cast of theip 
 minds, and the quality of each is distinct from the other, 
 and the very faculty which fits them for one particular 
 pursuit, is just the j-everse required for another. If 
 these are truisms, as they may appear, we need not 
 demonstrate that frojo wh.icli we only wish to draw our 
 conclusion. Why does this remarkable similarity pre-, 
 vail through the classes of genius? Because each, iit 
 their favourite production, is working with the same 
 appropriate organ. The poetical eye is early busied 
 with imagery ; as early will the reveries of the poetical 
 mind be busied with the passions; as early will the 
 painter's hand be copying forms and colours ; as early- 
 wUl the young musician's ear wander in the creation of 
 sounds, and the philosopher's head mature its medita- 
 tions. It is then the aptitude of the appropriate organ, 
 however it varies in its character, in which gepius seems 
 most concerned, and which is connatural and connate 
 with the individual, and, as it was ex'pressed in old days, 
 is hovn with him. There seems no other source of 
 genius ; for whenever this has been refused by nature, as 
 it is so often, no theory of genius, neither habit nor educa- 
 tion, have ever supplied its want. To discriminate be- 
 
PEEDISPOSmON AND HABIT. 47 
 
 t-ff-een tlie habit and the predisposition is quite impossible ; 
 because -whenever great genius discovers itself, as it can 
 only do hy continuity, it has become a habit with the 
 individual; it is the fatal notion of habit having the 
 power of generating genius, which has so long served to 
 delude the numerous votaries of mediocrity. Natural or 
 native power is enlarged by art ; but the most perfect 
 art has but narrow limits, deprived of natural disposition. 
 A curious decision on this obscure subject may be 
 drawn from an admirable judge of the nature of genius. 
 Akenside, in that fine poem which forms its history, 
 tracing its source, sang. 
 
 From Heaven my strains begin, from Heaven descends 
 Th.^ flame of genius to the hwman breast. 
 
 But in the fin:^l revision of th^t poem, which he left 
 many years after, the bard hag vindicated the solitary and 
 independeint origin of genius, by the mysterious epithet, 
 
 THE CHOSEN BEBAST. 
 
 The veteran poet was, perhaps, schooled by the vicissi- 
 tudes of his own poetical life, and those of some of his 
 brothers. 
 
 Metaphors are but imperfect illustrations in metari 
 physical inquiries ; usually they include too little or take 
 in too much. Yet fanciful analogies are not willingly 
 abandoned. The iconologists describe Genius as a 
 winged child with ?i flame above its head; the wings 
 and the flame e?;press more than some metaphysical con- 
 clusions. Let me substitute for " the white paper " of 
 Locke, which served the philosopher in his description 
 of the operations of the senses on the mind, a less arti- 
 ficial substance. In the soils of the earth we may dis- 
 cover that variety of primary qualities which we believe 
 tp exist in human minds. The botanist and the geolo- 
 gist always find the nature of the strata indicative of 
 
48 LITERARY CHABACTER. 
 
 its productions; the meagre light herbage announces tho 
 poverty of the soil it covers, while the luxuriant growth 
 of plants betrays the richness of the matrix in which the 
 roots are fixed. It is scarcely reasoning by analogy to 
 apply this operating principle of nature to the faculties 
 of men. 
 
 But while the origin and nature of that faculty which 
 we understand by the term Genius remain still wrapt up 
 in its mysterious bud, may we not trace its history in its 
 votaries ? If Nature overshadow with her wings her 
 first causes, still the effects lie open before us, and ex- 
 perience and observation will often deduce from con- 
 sciousness what we cannot from demonstration. If 
 !N"ature, in some of her great operations, has kept back 
 her last secrets; if Newton, even in the result of his 
 reasonings, has religiously abstained from penetrating 
 into her occult Connexions, is it nothing to be her 
 historian, although we cannot be her legislator ? 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Touth of genius. — ^Its first impulses may be illustrated by its subse- 
 quent actions. — Parents have another association of the man of 
 genius, than we. — Of genius, its first habits. — Its melancholy.^ — Its 
 reveries. — Its love of solitude, — Its disposition to repose. — Of a 
 youth distinguished by his equals. — Feebleness of its first attempts. 
 ' — Of genius not discoverable even in manhood. — The education of 
 the youth may not be that of his genius.^-An unsettled impulse, 
 querulous till it finds its true occupation. — With some, curiosity as 
 .intense a faculty as .invention. — "What the youth first applies to is 
 commonly his delight afterwards. — Facta of the decisive character 
 of genius. 
 
 WE are entering into a fairy land, touching only 
 shadows, and chasing the most changeable lights ; 
 many stories we shall hear, and many scenes will open on 
 
YOUTHFUL STUDIES. ^9 
 
 \is ; yet though realities are but cliialy to be traced in this 
 twilight of imagination and tradition, we think that the 
 first impulses of genius may be often illustrated by the 
 subsequent actions of the individual ; and whenever we 
 find these in perfect harmony, it will be difficult to cou- 
 "vince us that there does not exist .a secret connexion 
 between those first impulses and these last actions. 
 
 Can we then trace in the faint lines of his youth an 
 unsteady outline of the man? In the temperament of 
 'genius may we not reasonably look for certain indica- 
 tions or predispositions, announcing the permanent 
 .character ? Is not great sensibility born with its irrita- 
 ble fibres ? Wm not the , deep retired character cling to 
 its musings ? And the unalterable being of intrepidity 
 and, fortitude, wUl ;he not, commanding even amidst his 
 -sports, lead on :his equals ? The boyhood of Ca,to was 
 marked by the sternness of the man, observable in. his 
 •speech, his countenance, and his puerile amusements; 
 and Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gray, and others, be- 
 trayed the same early appearanceof their intellectual 
 vigour and precocity of character. 
 
 The virtuous and contemplative Boyle imagined that 
 he had discovered in childhood that disposition of mind 
 which indicated an instinctive ingenuousness. An inci- 
 dent which he relates, evinced, as he thought, that even 
 then he preferred to aggravate his fault rather thaji 
 consent to suppress any part of th« truth, an effort which 
 had been unnatural to his mind. His fanciful, yet strik- 
 ing illustration may open our inquiry. "This, trivial 
 passage," the little story alluded to, '^1 have mentioned 
 now, not that I think that in itself it deserves a relation, 
 but because as the sun is seen best at his rising and his 
 . setting, so men's native dispositions are clearliest per- 
 ceived whilst they are children, and when they are 
 dying. These little sudden actions are the greatest dis- 
 coverers of men's true humours." 
 4 
 
50 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 Alfieri, that historian of the literaiy mind, was con- 
 scious that even in his childhood the peculiarity and the 
 melancholy of his character prevailed : a boyhood passed 
 in domestic solitude fed the interior feelings of his impas- 
 sioned character ; and in noticing some incidents of a 
 childish nature, this man of genius observes, " Whoever 
 will reflect on these inept circumstances, and explore 
 into the seeds of the passions of man, possibly may find 
 these neither so laughable^nor so puerile as they may 
 appear." His native genius, or by whatever other term 
 we may describe it, betrayed the wayward predisposi- 
 tions of some of his poetical brothers : " Taciturn and 
 placid for the most part, but at times loquacious and 
 most vivacious, and usually in the most opposite ex- 
 tremes ; stubborn and impatient against force, but most 
 open to kindness, more restrained by the dread of repri- 
 mand than by anything else, susceptible of shame ^o 
 excess, but inflexible if violently opposed." Such is the 
 -portrait of a child of seven years old, a portrait which 
 induced the great tragic bard to deduce this result from 
 his own self-experience, that " man is a continuation of 
 the ehiW* 
 
 That the dispositions of genius in early life presage 
 its future character, was long the feeling of antiquity. 
 Cicero, in his " Dialogue on Old Age," employs a beauti- 
 ful analogy drawn from Nature, marking her secret 
 * conformity in all things which have life and come from 
 her hands; and the human mind is one of her plants. 
 " Youth is the vernal season of life, and, the blossoms 
 it then puts forth are indications of those future fruits . 
 which are to be gathered in the succeeding periods." 
 One of the masters of the human mind, after much pre- 
 vious observation of those who attended his lectures, 
 
 * See in his Life, chap, iv., entitled Soilmppo deW iniJole mdicaio da 
 van fattarelli. " Development of genius, or natural inclination, indi- 
 cated by various little matters." 
 
TOUTHPUL STUDIES. 51 
 
 "would advise one to engage in political studies, then 
 exhorted another to compose history, elected these to be 
 poets, and those to he orators; for Isocrates believed that 
 ■Nature had some concern in forming a man of genius, and 
 endeavoured to guess at her secret by detecting the first 
 energetic inclination of the mind. This also was the prin- 
 ciple which guided the Jesuits, those other great masters 
 in the art of education. They studied the characteristics 
 of their pupils with such singular care, as to keep a secret 
 register in their colleges, descriptive of their talents^ and' 
 the natural turn of their dispositions. In some cases they 
 guessed with remarkable felicity. They described Fon- 
 tenelle, adolescens omnibus numeris absolutus et inter dis- 
 cipulos princeps, " 2i, youth accomplished in every respect 
 and the model for his companions;" but when they 
 describe the elder CrSbillon, puer ingeniosus sed in- 
 signis nebulo, " a shrewd boy, but a great rascaj," they 
 might not have erred so much as they appeaB to have 
 done ; for an impetuous boyhood showed the decision of 
 a character which might not have merely and misanthro- 
 pically settled in imaginary scenes of horror, and the, 
 invention of characters of unparalleled atrocity. 
 
 In the old romance of King Arthur, when a cowherd 
 comes to the king to request he would make his son 
 a knight — " It is a great thing thou askest," said Arthur, 
 who inquired whether this entreaty proceeded from him 
 or his son. The old man's answer is remarkable — " Of 
 my son, not of me ; for I have thirteen sons, and all 
 these will fall to that labour I put them ; but this child 
 will not labour for me for anything that I and my wife 
 will do; but always he will be shooting and casting 
 darts, and glad for to see battles, and to behold knights, 
 and always day and night he desireth of me to be made 
 a knight." The king commanded the cowherd to fetch 
 all his sons ; " they were all shapen much like the poor 
 man ; but Tor was not like none of them in shape and in 
 
52 LITBEAET CHAEACTEE. 
 
 countenance, for he was inuchi more than any of them. 
 And so Arthur knighted him." This simple tale is the 
 history of genius — the cowherd's twelve sons were like 
 himself, but the iinhEtppy genius in the family, Who per- 
 plexed and plagued the cowherd and his wife and his 
 twelve brothers, w^s the youth averse to the common 
 labour, and dreaming of chivalry amidst a herd of cows. 
 A man of genius is thus dropped among the people, 
 ,and has first to encounter the diflSculties of ordinary 
 Tli^h, unassisted by that feeble ductility which adapts 
 its6lf to the coinmon destination. Parents £ire too often 
 the victims of the decided propensity of a ^son to a Virgil 
 or a 'Euclid; and the first step into life of a man of 
 ■genius is disbbedience and grief Lilly, our famous 
 astrologer, has described the frequent situation of such 
 a youth, like 'the cowherd's son who would foe a knight. 
 Lilly pijpposed to his father that he should try his for-r 
 ttihe in the nietropolis, where he expected that his lea'rn- 
 ihg and his talents Would prove serviceable to him; the 
 father quite incapable of dfecovering the latent genius 
 of his son in his studious disposition, Veiy willingly 
 consented to get rid of him, for, as Lilly proceeds, 
 "I could not work, drive the plough, or endure any 
 country labour ; my father oft would say I was good for _ 
 nothing,^'' — words which the fathers of so many men of 
 'gtinius h'aVe repeated.* 
 
 'In reading the membii's of a mail of genius, we often 
 'fiSprobate the doinestie 'persecutions of those who op- 
 
 * 'Shp father of Sir Joahiia Bejnolds reproached him frequently in 
 his boyish days for his oonstant'atlerition'to draVibg, and wrote on 
 tlieliacfeof 'one 'of Ms sketches the coiiddrariatory words, "Done by 
 Joshua Out of 'pure idlehSSS." Mignard distressed his faKhBr,'the. su'r- 
 •geon, by' skfetching the expressive faces of his patients instead of 
 attending ; to ,th,eir diseases ; and pur own Opie, when a boy, and 
 working with his father at his business as a carpenter, ' used fre- 
 quently to excite his 'anger by drawing with red chalk on the deal 
 hoards he had carefully planed f6r hia trade. — Bd. 
 
YOUTHFUL STUDIES. 53 
 
 posed his imGlinationa. No, pQ^t but ip. mov«;d ■vpitli 
 indignation at the recollection of the tutor qA. the Pp^-t 
 Royal thrice burning the romance whiolji. Racine al^ 
 length got by heart; no geometrician, but bitterly ijj- 
 veighs against the, father, of Pascal for not sneering him 
 to study Euclid, whicli he at length undei;stood without 
 studying. The father of Petrarch cast to t^he ^a^es, th^ 
 poetical library of his son, amidst the shrieks, the groans, 
 and the tears of the youth. Yet this burnt-offering 
 neither converted Petrarch into a sober lawyer, nor 
 depijved him of the Roman laurel. The uncle of Alfieri 
 for more than twenty years suppressed the poetical char- 
 acter of this noble bard ; he was a poet without knowing 
 how to write a verse, and Nature, like a hard creditor, 
 exacted, with redoubled interest, all the genius which 
 the uncle had so long kept from her. These are the 
 men whope inherent impulse no human opposition, and 
 even no adverse education, can deter from proving them 
 to be great men. 
 
 Let us, however, be just to the parentg. of a man of 
 genius ; they have another association of ideas respect- 
 ing him than ourselves. We see a grea,t man, they a 
 disobedient child ; we track him through his glory, they 
 are wearied by the sullen resistance of one who is 
 obscure and seems useless. The, career of genius i? 
 rarelv that of fortune or happiness ; and the father, who 
 himself may no^ be ins,ensible to gloTy, drea,d^ lest his 
 son be found among that obscure niu,ltitude, that popu- 
 lace of mean a,rtists, self-d,eluded, yet §elf-dissatisfied, 
 who must expire a^t th? barriers of mediocrity. 
 
 If the youth of genius bjB struggling with a, cpn9,eale(|, 
 impulse, he will often be thrown into a l^rain of secret; 
 instruction which no master can imp.a,rt. Hippocra,tesi 
 profoundly observed, that " our natures have not been, 
 taught us by any master." The faculty which Jhe youthj 
 of genius displays in after-life niay exist Ipng^er.e it is 
 
64 lilTERART CHARAOTEK. 
 
 perceived ; and it will only make its own what is homoge- 
 neous with itself. We may often observe how the mind 
 of this youth stuhbornly rejects whatever is conti-ary to 
 its habits, and alien to its affections. Of a solitary char- 
 acter, for solitariness is the wild nurse of his contempla- 
 tions, he is fancifully descr'ibed by one of the race — and* 
 here fancies are facts : 
 
 He is retired as noon-tide dew, 
 Or fountain in a noon-day grove. 
 
 The romantic Sidney exclaimed, "Eagles fly alone, 
 and they are but sheep which always herd together." 
 
 As yet this being, in the first rudiments of his sensa- 
 tions, is touched by rapid emotions, and disturbed by a 
 vague restlessness ; for him the images of nature are yet 
 dim, and he feels before he thinks ; for imagination pre- 
 cedes reflection. One truly inspired unfolds the secret 
 story — 
 
 Endow'd with all thatlTature can bestow, 
 
 The child of fancy oft in silence bends 
 
 O'er the mixt treasures of his pregnant breast 
 
 With conscious pride. From thence he oft resolves 
 
 To frame he knows not what excelling things ; 
 
 And win he knows not What sublime reward 
 
 Of praise and wonder I 
 
 But the solitude of the youth of genius has a local in- 
 fluence ; it is full of his own creations, of his unmarked 
 passions, and his uncertain thoughts. The titles which 
 he gives his favourite haunts often intimate the bent of 
 his mind — its employment, or its purpose ; as Petrarch 
 called his retreat Linternum, after that of his hei-o 
 Scipio ; and a young poet, from some favourite descrip- 
 tion in Cowley, called a spot he loved to muse in, " Cow- 
 ley's Wall:." 
 
 A ten)perament of this kind has been often mistaken 
 
YOUTHEUL STUDIES. 55 
 
 for melancholy.* " When the intermission of my studies 
 allowed me leisure for recreation," says Boyle of his early 
 life, " I would very often steal away from all company, 
 and spend four or five hours alone in the fields, and 
 think at random; making my delighted imagination 
 the busy scene where some romance or other was daily 
 acted." This circumstance alarmed his friends, who con- 
 cluded that he was overcome with a growing melan- 
 choly. Alfieri found himself in this precise situation, 
 and experienced these undefinable emotions, when, in 
 his first travels at Marseilles, his lonely spirit only 
 haunted the theatre and the seashore : the tragic drama 
 was then casting its influences over his unconscious 
 genius. Almost every evening, after bathing in the sea, 
 it delighted him to retreat to a little recess where the 
 land jutted out ; there would he sit, leaning his back 
 against a high rock, which he tells us, " concealed from ' 
 my sight every part of the land behind me, while before 
 and around me I beheld nothing but the sea and the 
 heavens : the sun, sinking into the waves, was lighting 
 up and embellishing these two immensities ; there would 
 I' pass a delicious hour of fantastic ruminations, and 
 there I should have composed many a poem, had I then 
 known how to write either in verse or prose in any lan- 
 guage whatever." 
 
 An incident of this nature is revealed to us by the 
 other noble and mighty spirit of "our times, who could 
 most truly exhibit the history of the youth of genius, and 
 he has painted forth the enthusiasm of the boy Tasso : — 
 
 * IhiS solemnity of manner was aped in the. days of Elizabeth and 
 James I. hy such as affected scholar-like habits, and is frequently 
 alluded to by the satirists of the time. Ben Jonson, in his " Every 
 Man in his Humour," delineates the " country gull," Master Stephen, 
 as affecting "to be mightily giren to. melancholy," and 'receiving the 
 assurance, "It's your only fine humour, sir; your true, melancholy 
 breeds your perfect fine wit, sir." — E0. 
 
56 llfBEARt CHARACTER. 
 
 ' From my very birth 
 My soul was drunk witk love, wliich did pervade 
 And mingle with whate'er I saw on earth ; 
 Of objects all inanimate I made 
 Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers 
 And rocks whereby they grew-, a paradise,! 
 Where I did lay me down within the shade 
 Of waving trees, and dream'd uncounted hours, 
 Though I was chid for wandering. 
 
 The youth of genius -will be apt to retire from the 
 active sports of his mates. Beattie paints himself in his. 
 own Minstrel : 
 
 Concourse, and noise, and toil he ever fled, 
 
 Nor eared to mihgle in the clamorous fray 
 Of squabbling imps ; but to the forest sped. 
 
 Bossuet ■would not join his young companions, and fl'e'W 
 to his solitary task, while the classical boys avenged 
 themselves by a schoolboy's villanous pun : stigmatising " 
 the studious application of Bossuet by the bos sizetus 
 aratro which frequent flogging had made them classical 
 enough to quote. 
 
 The learned Huet has given an amusing detail of the 
 inventive persecutions of his schoolmates, to divert him 
 from his obstinate love of study. " At length, in order to 
 indulge my own taste, I would rise with the sun, while they 
 were buried in sleep, and hide myself in the woods, that 
 1 might read! and study in quiet;" but they beat the 
 bashes, and started in his burrow the future man of eru- 
 dition. Sir William Jones was rarely a partaker in the 
 active Sports of Harrow ; it was said of Gray that he was 
 never a boy; the unhappy Chatterton and Burns were 
 singularly serious in youth;* as were Hobbes and Bacon. 
 
 * Dr. Gregory says 6f Chatterton, "Instead of the thoughtless levity 
 of ehildhobd, ho possessed the pensiveness, gravity, and melancholy of 
 inatur&f life. lie was frequently so lost in contemplation, thait for many 
 days togetlier he would say but very little, and that apparently by con- 
 straint. His intimates in the school were few, and those of the most 
 
YOUTHFUL STUDIES. 67 
 
 Milton has preserved for us, in solemn numbers, his 
 school-life^- 
 
 When I was yet a child, no childish play 
 
 To me was pleasing: all my mind was set 
 
 Serious, to learn and know, and thence to do 
 
 What might, be public good : myself I thought 
 
 Bom to that end,; born to promote aH truth, 
 
 AU righteous things. ' 
 
 It. is remarkable that this love of repose and musing is 
 retained throughout life. A man of fine genius is rarely 
 enamoured of common amusements or of robust exercises; 
 and he is usually unadroit where dexterity of hand or 
 eye, or trivial, elegances, are required. This characteristic 
 of genius was discovered by Horace in that Ode which 
 schoolboys often versify. Beattie has expressly told us 
 of his Minstrel, 
 
 The exploit of strength, dexterity or speed 
 To him, nor vanity nor joy could bring. 
 
 Alfieri said he could never be taught by a French dan- 
 cino--master, whose art made him at once shudder and 
 laugh. Horace, by his own confession, was a very awk- 
 ward rider, and the poet could not always secure a seat 
 on his mule: Metastasio humorously complains of his 
 gun ■ the poetical sportsman could only frighten the hares 
 and partridges ; the truth was, as an elder poet sings, 
 
 Instead of hounds that make the wooded hills 
 Talk in a hupdred voices to tho riUs, 
 I like the pleasing cadence of a line, 
 Struck by the concert of the sacred Nine. 
 
 And we discover the true "humour" of the indolent con- 
 templative race in their great representatives Virgil and 
 Horace. When they accompanied Mecsenas into the 
 
 serious cast." Of Burns, his schoolmaster, Mr. Murdoch, says—" Rob- 
 ert's countenance was generally grave, and expressive of a serious, qobp 
 templative, and thoughtful mind."^-ED. 
 
58 LITEEART CHARACTER. 
 
 country, while the minister amused himself at tennis, 
 the two bards reposed on a vernal bank amidst the freshr 
 ness of the shade. The younger Pliny, who was so per- 
 fect a literary character, was charmed by the Roman 
 mode of hunting, or rather fowling by nets, which admit- 
 ted him to sit a whole day with his tablets and stylus j 
 so, says he, " should I return with empty nets, my tab- 
 lets may at least be full." Thomson was the hero of his 
 own " Castle of Indolence ;" and the elegant Waller in- 
 fuses into his luxurious verses the true feeling : 
 
 Oh, how I long my careless limbs to lay- 
 Under the plaiitane shade, and all the day 
 Invoke the Muses and improve my vein. 
 
 The youth of genius, whom Beattie has drawn after 
 himself, and I after observation, a poet of great genius, 
 as I understand, has declared to be " too effeminate 
 and timid, and too much troubled with delicate nerves. 
 The greatest poets of all countries," he continues, " have 
 been men eminently endowed with bodily powers, and 
 rejoiced and excelled in all manly exercises." May not 
 our critic of northern habits have often mistaken the art 
 of the great poets in describing such " manly exercises 
 or bodily powers," for the proof of their " rejoicing and 
 excelling in them ?" Poets and artists, from their habits, 
 are not usually muscular and robust.* Continuity of. 
 thought, absorbing reverie, and sedentary habits, will 
 not combine with corporeal skill and activity. , There is 
 also a constitutional delicacy which is too often the 
 
 accompaniment of a fine intellect. The inconveniences 
 
 • 
 
 * "Dr. Cmrrie, in his "Life of Bums," has a passage which may 'be 
 quoted here: "Though by nature of an atliletio form, Burns had in, 
 his constitution the peculiarities and the delicacies that belong to the 
 temperament of genius. He was liable, from a very early period of 
 life, to that interruption in the process of digestion which arises from 
 deep and anxious thought, and which is sometimes the effect, and 
 sometimes the oausfij of depression of spirits." — Ed. 
 
EARLY HABITS. 59 
 
 attached to tte inferior sedentary labourers are participa- 
 ted in by men of genius ; the analogy is obvious, and their 
 fate is common. Literary men may be included in Rar 
 mazzini'a " Treatise on the Diseases of Artizans." Rous- 
 seau has described the labours of the closet as enervating 
 men, and ■weakening the constitution, while study wears 
 the whole machinery of man, exhausts the spirits, de- 
 stroys his strength, and renders him pusillanimous.* But 
 there is a higher principle which guides us to declare, 
 that men of genius should not excel in " all manly exer- 
 cises." Seneca, whose habits were completely literary, 
 admonishes, the man of letters that " Whatever amuse- 
 ment he chooses, he should not slowly return from those 
 of the body to the mind, while he should be exercising 
 the latter night and day." Seneca was aware that " to 
 rejoice' and excel in all riianly exercises," would in some 
 cases intrude into the habits of a literary man, and some- 
 times be even ridiculous, Mortimer, once a celebrated 
 artist, was tempted by his athletic frame to indulge in 
 frequent violent exercises ; and it is not without reason 
 suspected, that habits so unfavourable to thought and 
 study precluded that promising genius from attaining to 
 the maturity of his talents, however he might have suc- 
 ceeded in invigorating his physical powers. 
 
 But to our solitude. So true is it that this love of 
 loneliness is an early passion, that two men of genius of 
 very opposite characters, the one a French wit and the 
 other a French philosopher, have acknowledged that 
 they have felt its mfluence, and even imagined that they 
 had discovered its cause. The Abb6 de St. Pierre, in 
 his political annals^ tells us, " I remember to have heard 
 old Segrais remark, that most young people of both 
 sexes had at one time of their lives, generally about 
 seventeen or eighteen years of age, an inclination to 
 
 » In the Preface to the "Narolsse." ; 
 
60 LITEEAET CHABACTER. 
 
 retire from the world. He maintained this to be a 
 species of melancholy, and. humourously called it the 
 small-pox of the mind, heoause scarce one in a thousand 
 escaped the attack. I myself have had this distemperj_ 
 but am not much marked with it." 
 
 But if the youth of genius be apt to retire from the 
 ordinary sports of his mates, he will often substitute fpp. 
 them others, which are the reflections of those favourite, 
 studies which are haunting his young imagination, as 
 men in their dreams repeat the conceptions which have 
 habitually interested them. The amusements of such, 
 an idler have often been analogous to his later pursuits, 
 Aridsto, while yet a schoolboy, seems to have been very- 
 susceptible of poetry, for he composed a sort of tragedy 
 from the story of Pyramus and Thisbey to be represented 
 by his brothers an^ sisters, and at this time also dei. 
 lighted himself in translating the old Freiwh and Spanish 
 romances. Sir William Jones,, at Harrow, divided thei 
 fields according to a map of Greece, and to each school- 
 fellow portioned out a dominion ; and when wanting a 
 copy of the Tempest to act from, he supplied it from his 
 memory; we must confess that the boy Jones was re-, 
 fleeting in his amusements the cast of mind he displayed 
 in his after-life, and evincing that felicity of memory and 
 taste so prevalent in his literary charaQter. Florian's 
 earliest years were passed in shooting birds all day, and 
 reading every evening an old translation of the Iliad : 
 whenever he got a bird remarkable for its size or its 
 plumage, he personified it by one of the names of his 
 heroes, and raising a funeral pyre, consumed the body : 
 collecting the ashes in an urn, he presented them to his 
 grandfather, with a narrative of his Patiroclus or Sar- 
 pedon. We seem here to detect, reflected in his boyish 
 sports, the pleasing genius of the author of Numa Pom.- 
 pilius, Gonsalvo of Cordova, and William Tell. Bacon, 
 when a child, was so remarkable for thoughtful observa- 
 
BOYHOOD. 61 
 
 tion, that Queen Elizabeth used to call him " the young 
 lord-keeper." The boy made a remarkable reply, when 
 her Majesty, inquiring of him his age, he said, that " lie 
 was two years younger than her Majesty's happy reign." 
 The boy may have been tutored ; but this mixture of 
 gravity, and ingenuity, and political oourtiership, un- 
 doubtedly caught from his father's habits, afterwards 
 characterised Lord Bacon's manhood. I once read the 
 letter of a contemporary of Hobbes, where I found that 
 this great philosopher, when a lad, used to ride on packs 
 of skins to market, to sell them for his father, who was a 
 fellmonger ; and that in 'the market-place he thus early 
 began to vent his private opinions, which long after- 
 wards so fully appeared in his Writings. 
 
 •For a youth to be distinguished by his equals is per- 
 haps a criterion of talent. At that moment of life, with 
 no flattery on the one side, and no artifice on the other, 
 all emotion and no reflection, the boy who has obtained 
 a predominance has acquired this merely by native 
 powers. The boyhood of Nelson was characterised by 
 events congenial with those of his after-days; and his 
 father understood his character when he declared that, " in 
 whatever station he might be placed, he would climb, if 
 possible, to the top of the tree." Some puerile anecdotes 
 which Franklin remembered of himself, betray the inven- 
 tion and the firm intrepidity of his character, and even 
 perhaps his carelessness of means to obtain a purpose. 
 In boyhood he felt a desire for adventure ; but as his 
 father would not consent to a sea life, he made the river 
 near him represent the ocean ; he lived on the wat.er, 
 and was the daring Columbus of a schoolboy's boat. A 
 part where he and his mates stood to angle, in time 
 became a quagmire : in the course of one day, the infant 
 projector thotight of a wharf for them to stand on,- and 
 raised it with a heap of stones deposited there for the 
 building of a house. With that sort of practical wis- 
 
62 LITERAET OHAEACTER. 
 
 dom, or Ulyssean cunning, which marted' his mature 
 character, Franklin raised his wharf at the expense of 
 anothei-'s house. His contrivances to aid his puny- 
 labourers, with his resolution not to quit the great, work 
 till it was effected, seem to strike out to us the in- 
 vention and decision of his future character. But 
 the qualities which would attract the companions of a 
 schoolboy may not be those which are essential to fine 
 genius. The captain or leader of his schoolmates is not 
 to be disregarded ; but it is the sequestered boy who 
 may chance to be the artist or the literary charac- 
 ter. Some facts which have been recorded of men of 
 genius at this period are remarkable. We are told by 
 Miss Stewart that Johnson, when a boy at the free- 
 school, appeared "a huge overgrown misshapen strip- 
 ling;" but was considered as a stupendous stripling; 
 " for even at that early period of life, Johnson maintained 
 his opinions with the same sturdy, dogmatical, and ar- 
 rogant fierceness." The puerile characters of Lord Bo- 
 lingbroke and Sir Robert Walpole, schoolfellows and 
 rivals, were observed to prevail through their after-life ; 
 the liveliness and brilliancy of Bolingbroke appeared in 
 his attacks on Walpole, whose solid and industrious 
 qualities triumphed by resistance. A parallel instance 
 might be pointed out in two great statesmen of our own 
 days ; in the wisdom of the one and the wit of the other 
 ■ — men whom nature made rivals, and time made friends 
 or enemies, as it happened. A curious observer, inj look- 
 ing over a collection of the Cambridge poems, which 
 were formerly composed by its students, has remarked 
 that " Cowley from the first was quaint, Milton sublime, 
 and Barrow copious.',' If then the characteristic dispo- 
 sition may reveal itself thus early, it affords a principle 
 which ought not to be neglected at this obscure period 
 of youth. 
 
 Is there then a period in youth which, yields decisive 
 
BOYHOOD. g3 
 
 marks of the character of genius ? The natures of men 
 are as various as their fortunes. Some, like diamonds, 
 must wait to receive their splendour from the slow 
 touches of the polisher, while others, resembling pearls, 
 appear at once born with their beauteous lustre. 
 
 Among the inauspicious circumstances is the feeble- 
 ness of the first attempts ; and we must not decide on 
 the talents of a young man by his first works. Dryden 
 and Swift might have been deterred from authorship 
 had their earliest pieces decided their fate. Smollett, 
 before he knew which way his genius would conduct 
 him, had early conceived a high notion of his talents 
 for dramatic poetry : his tragedy of the Regicide was 
 refused by Garrick, whom for a long time he could 
 not forgive, but continued to abuse our Roscius, through 
 his works of genius, for having discountenanced his 
 first work, which had none. Racine's earliest compo- 
 sition, as we may judge by some fragments his son 
 has preserved, remarkably contrasts with his wri- 
 tings; for these fragments abound with those points 
 and conceits which he afterwards abhorred. The ten- 
 der author of "Andromache" could not have been 
 discovered while exhausting himself in running after 
 concetti- as surprising as the worst parts of Cowley, in 
 -whose spirit alone he could have hit on this perplexing 
 concetto, descriptive of Aurora : " Fille du Jour, qui nais 
 devant ton pfere !" — " Daughter of Day, but born before 
 thy father !" Gibbon betrayed none of the force and 
 magnitude of his powers in his "Essay on Literature," 
 or his attempted " History of Switzerland." Johnson's 
 .cadenced prose is not recognisable in the humbler sim- 
 plicity of his earliest years. Many authors have begun 
 unsuccessfully the walk they afterwards excelled in. 
 Raphael, when he first drew his meagre forms under 
 Perugino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal 
 beauty which one day he of all men could alone execute. 
 
64 LITERAiRT CHARACTER. 
 
 Who could have imagined, in examining the Dream, of 
 Raphael, that the same pencil could hereafteivhave poured 
 out the miraculous Transfiguration? Or that, in the 
 imitative pupil of Hudson, our country was at length to 
 pride herself on another Raphael ?* 
 
 Even the manhood of genius may pass unohserved by 
 his companions, and, like Mm&B, he may he hidden in a 
 cloud amidst his associates. The celebrated Fabius 
 Maximus in his boyhood was called in derision "the 
 little sheep," from the meekness and gravity of his dis- 
 position. His sedateness and taciturnity, his indifference 
 to juvenile amusement, his slowness and difficulty in 
 learning, and his ready submission to his equals, induced 
 them to consider him as one irrecoverably stupid. The 
 greatness of mind, unalterable courage, and invincible 
 character, which Eabius afterwards displayed, they then 
 imagined had lain concealed under theapparent contrary" 
 cfhaUties. The boy of genius may indeed seem slow and 
 duU even to the phlegmatic ; for thoughtful and observ- 
 ing dispositions conceal themselves in timorous silent 
 characters, who have not yet experienced their strength; 
 and that assiduous love, which cannot tear itself away 
 from the secret instruction it is perpetually imbibing, 
 cannot be easily distinguished from the pertinacity of the 
 mere plodder. We often hear, from the early compan- 
 ions of a man of genius, that at school he appeared heavy 
 and unpromising. Rousseau imagined that the child- 
 hood of some men is accompanied by this seeming and 
 deceitful dulness, which is the sign of a profound genius ; 
 and Roger Asoham has placed among " the best natures 
 
 * Hudson yras the fashionable portrait-painter who suooeeded 
 Eneller, and made a great reputation and fortune ; but he was a very 
 mean artist, who merely copied the peculiarities of his predecessor 
 without his genius. His stiff hard stylo was formality itself; but waa 
 approved in an age of formalism ; the earlier half of the last century.— 
 Ed. 
 
BOYHOOD. g5 
 
 for learning, the sad-natured and hard-witted child ;" that 
 is, the thoughtful, or the melancholic, and the slow. The 
 young painters, to ridicule the persevering labours of 
 Domenichino, which were at first heavy and unpromising, 
 called him " the great ox ;" and Passeii, while he has 
 happily expressed the still labours of his concealed genius, 
 sua taeitiirna lentezza, his silent slowness, expresses his 
 surprise at the accounts he received of the early life of 
 this great artist. " It is difficult to believe, what many 
 assert, that from the beginning, this great painter had a 
 ruggedness about him which entirely incapacitated him 
 from learning his profession; and they have heard from 
 himself that he quite, despaired of success. Yet I cannot 
 comprehend how such vivacious talents, with a mind so 
 finely organised, and accompanied with such favourable 
 dispositions for the art, would show such signs of utter 
 incapacity ; I rather think that it is a mistake iu the 
 proper knowledge of genius, which some imagine indi- 
 cates itself most decisively by its sudden vehemence, 
 showing itself like lightning, and like lightning passing 
 away." 
 
 A parallel case we find in Goldsmith, who passed 
 through an unpromising youth ; he declared that he was 
 never attached to literature till he was thirty ; that poetry 
 had no peculiar charms for him till that age ;* and, indeed, 
 to his latest hour he was surprising his friends by pro- 
 ductions which they had imagined he was incapable of 
 composing. Hume was considered, for his sobriety and 
 assiduity, as competent to become a steady merchant ; and 
 it was said of Boileau that he had no great understanding, 
 but would speak ill of no one. This circumstance of the 
 character in youth being entirely mistaken, or entirely 
 opposite to the subsequent one of maturer life, has been 
 
 * This is a remarkable expression, from Goldsmith : but it is much 
 more so when we hear it from Lord Byron. See a note in the fbllow- 
 ing chapter, on " The First Studies," p. 81. 
 S 
 
66 IITEHART CHARACTER. 
 
 noticed of many. Even a discerning parent or master 
 has entirely failed to develope the genius of the youth, 
 who has afterwards ranked among eminent men; we 
 ought as littje to decide from early unfavourable appear- 
 ances, as from inequality of talent. The great Isaac 
 Barrow's father used to say, that if it pleased God to 
 take from him any of his children, he hoped it might be 
 Isaac, as the least promising ; and during the three years 
 Barrow passed at the Charter-house, he was remarkable 
 only for the utter negligence of his studies and of his 
 person. The mother of Sheridan, herself a literary 
 female, pronounced early tHit he was the dullest and 
 most hopeless of her sons. Bodmer, at the head of the 
 literary class in Switzerland, who had so frequently dis- 
 covered and animated the literary youths of his country, 
 could never detect the latent genius of Gesner : after a 
 repeated examination of the young man, he put his 
 parents in despair with the hopeless award that a mind 
 of so ordinary a cast must confine itself to mere writing 
 and accompts. One fact, however, Bodmer bad over- 
 looked when he pronounced the fate of our poet and 
 artist — the dull youth, who could not retain barren words, 
 discovered an active fancy in the image of things. . While 
 at his grammar lessons, as it happened to Lucian, he was 
 employing tedious hours in modelling in wax, groups of 
 men, animals, and other figures, the rod of the pedagogue 
 often interrupted the fingers of our infant moulder, who 
 never ceased working to amuse his little sisters with his 
 waxen creatures, which constituted all his happiness. 
 Those arts of imitation were already possessing the soul 
 of the boy Gesner, to which afterwards it became so en- 
 tirely devoted. 
 
 Thus it happens that in the first years of life the educa- 
 tion of the youth may not be the education of his genius ; 
 he lives unknown to himself aad others. In all these 
 cases nature had dropped the seeds. in the soil; but even 
 
BOYHOOD. 6Y 
 
 a happy disposition must be concealed amidst adverse 
 circumstances : I repeat, that genius can only make that 
 its own which is homogeneous with its nature. It has 
 happened to some men of genius during a long period of 
 their lives, that an unsettled impulse, unahle to discover 
 the object of its aptitude, a thirst and fever in the tem- 
 perament of too sentient a being, which cannot find the 
 occupation to which only it can attach itself, has sunk 
 into a melancholy and querulous spirit, weary with the 
 burthen of existence ; but the instant the latent talent 
 had declared itself, his first work, the eager offspring of 
 desire and love, has astonished the world at once with 
 the birth and the maturity of genius. 
 
 We are told that Pelegrino Tibaldi, who afterwards 
 obtained the glorious title of " the reformed Michael An- 
 gelo," long felt the strongest internal dissatisfaction at 
 his own proficiency, and that one day, in melancholy and 
 despair, he had retired from the city, resolved to starve 
 himself to death ; his friend discovered him, and having 
 persuaded him to change his pursuits from painting to 
 architecture, he soon rose to eminence. This story D'Ar- 
 genville throws some doubt over ; but as Tibaldi during 
 twenty* years abstained from his pencil, a singular cir- 
 cumstance seems explained by an extraordinary occur- 
 rence. Tasso, with feverish anxiety pondered on five 
 different subjects before he could decide in the choice of 
 his epic ; the same embarrassment was long the fate of 
 Gibbon on the subject of his history. Some have sunk 
 into a deplorable state of utter languishment, from the 
 circumstance of being deprived of the means of pursuing 
 their beloved study, as in the case of the chemist Berg- 
 man. His friends, to gain him over to the more lucra- 
 tive professions, deprived him of his books of natural 
 history ; a plan which nearly proved fatal to the youth, 
 who with declining health quitted the university. At 
 length, ceasing to struggle with the conflicting desh-e 
 
68 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 ■within him, his renewed enthusiasm for his favourite 
 science restored the health he had lost in abandoning it. 
 
 It was the view of the tomb of Virgil which so power- 
 fully influenced the innate genius of Boccaccio, and fixed 
 his instant decision. As yet young, and in the neighbour'; 
 hood of Naples, wandering for recreation, he reached the 
 tomb of the Mantuan. Pausing before it, his youthful 
 mind began to meditate. Struck by the universal glory of 
 that great name, he lamented his own fortune to be occu- 
 pied by the obscure details of merchandise ; already he 
 sighed to emulate the fame of the Roman, and as Villani 
 tells us, from that day he abandoned forever the occupa- 
 tions of commerce, dedicatinjj himself to literature. 
 Proctor, the lost Phidias of our country, would often say, 
 that he should never have quitted his mercantile situar 
 tion, but for the accidental sight of Barry's picture of 
 " Venus rising from the Sea ;" a picture which produced 
 so immediate an effect on his mind, that it determined 
 him to quit a lucrative occupation. Surely we cannot 
 account for such sudden effusions of, the mind, and such 
 instant decisions, but by the principle of that predispo- 
 sition which only waits for an occasion to declare itself. 
 
 Abundant facts exhibit genius unequivocally discover- 
 ing itself in youth. In general, perhaps, a master-mind 
 exhibits precocity. " Whatever a young man at first 
 applies himself to, is commonly his delight afterwards." 
 This remark was made by Hartley, vho has related an 
 anecdote of the infancy of his genius, which indicated the 
 manhood. He declared to his daughter that the inten- 
 tion of writing a book upon the nature of man, was con- 
 ceived in his mind when he was a very little boy — when 
 swinging backwards and forwards upon a gate, not more 
 than nine or ten years old ; he was then meditating upon 
 the nature of his own mind, how man was made, and for 
 what future end. Such was the true origin, in a boy of 
 ten years old, of his celebrated book on " The Frame, the 
 
EAELY BIAS. 69 
 
 Duty, and the Expectation of Man." John Hunter con- 
 ceived his notion of the principle of life, which to his 
 last day formed the subject of his inquiries and experi- 
 ments, when he was very young ; for at that period of 
 life, Mr. Abernethy tell us, he began his observations on 
 the incubated egg, which suggested or corroborated his 
 opinions. 
 
 A learned friend, and an observer of men of science, 
 has supplied me with a remark highly deserving notice. 
 It is an observation that will generally hold good, that 
 the most important systems of theory, however late they 
 may be published, have been formed at a very early 
 period of life. This important observation may be veri- 
 fied by some striking facts. A most curious one will be 
 found in Lord Bacon's letter to Father Fulgentio, where 
 he gives an account of his projecting his philosophy 
 thirty years before, during his youth. Milton from early 
 youth mused on the composition of an epic. De Thou 
 has himself told us, that from his tender youth his mind 
 was full of the idea of composing a history of his own 
 times ; and his whole life was passed in preparation, and 
 in a continued accession of materials for a future period. 
 From the age of twenty, Montesquieu was preparing the 
 materials of JOMsprit des Iioix, by extracts from the 
 immense volumes of civil law. Tillemont's vast labours 
 were traced out in his mind at the early age of nineteen, 
 on reading Baronius ; and some of the finest passages in 
 Racine's tragedies were composed while a pupil, wander- 
 ing in the woods of the Port-Royal. So true is it that the 
 seeds of many of our great literary and scientific works 
 were lying, for many years antecedent to their being 
 given to the world, in a latent state of germination.* 
 
 * I need not to be reminded, that I am not worth mentioning among 
 the illustrious men who have long formed the familiar subjects of my 
 delightful researches. But with tlie middling as well as with the 
 great, ihe same habits must operate. Early in life, I was struck by 
 
70 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 The predisposition of genius has declared itself , in 
 paiaters and poets, who were such before they understood 
 the nature of colours and the arts of verse ; and this 
 vehement propensity, so mysteriously constitutional, may 
 be traced in other intellectual characters besides those 
 which belong to the class of imagination. It was said 
 that Pitt was horn a minister; the late Dr. Shaw I 
 always considered as one horn a naturalist, and I know a 
 great literary antiquary who seems to me to have been 
 £ilso horn such ; for the passion of curiosity is as intense 
 a faculty, or instinct, with some casts of mind, as is that 
 of invention with poets and painters : I confess that to 
 me it is genius in a form in which genius has not yet been 
 suspected to appear. One of the biographers of Sir 
 Hans Sloane expresses himself in this manner : — " Our 
 author's thirst for knowledge seems to have been horn, 
 with him, so that his, Cabinet of Mafi^ie^ J^&J be said tf 
 have commenced with his being" This strange meta,- 
 phorical style has only confused an obscure truth, 
 Sloane, early in life, felt an irresistible impulse which 
 inspired him with .the most enlarged views of the pro- 
 ductions of nature,, and he exulted in their accomplish- 
 ment ; for in his will he has solemnly recorded, that his 
 collections were the fruits of his early devotion, having 
 had from my youth a strong inclination to the study of 
 plants and all other productions of nature. The vehe: 
 
 the inductive philosophy of Bacon, and sought after a Moral Experi- 
 mental Philosophy ; and I had then in my mind an observation of 
 lord Bolinghroke's, for I see I (Quoted it thirty years ago, that '• Ab- 
 stract or general propositions, though never so true, appear obscure or 
 doubtful to us very often till they are explained by examples." So 
 far back as in 1793 I published "A Dissertation on Anecdotes," with 
 the simplicity of a young votary ; there I deduced results, and threw 
 out a magnificent project not very practicable. Prom that time to the 
 hour I am now writing, my metal has been running in this mould, 
 and I still keep casting philosophy into anecdotes, and anecdotes iptf 
 philosophy. „ As I Ijegan I ftiar I shall end. 
 
TOUTflFUL STUDIES. 7l 
 
 ment passion of Peiresc for knowledge, according to 
 accounts which Gassendi received from old men who had 
 known him as a child, broke out as soon as he had been 
 taught his alphabet; for then his delight was to be 
 handling books and papers, and his perpetual inquiries 
 after their contents obliged them to invent something to 
 quiet the child's insatiable curiosity, who was hurt when 
 told that he had not the capacity to understand them. 
 He did not study, as an ordinary scholar, for he never 
 read but with perpetual researches. At ten years of age, 
 his passion for the studies of antiquity was kindled at 
 the sight of some ancient coins dug up in his neighbour- 
 hood ; then that vehement passion for knowledge " began 
 to burn like fire in a forest," as Gassendi happily de- 
 scribes the fervour and amplitude of the mind of this man 
 of vast learning. Bayle, who was an experienced judge 
 in the history of genius, observes on two friars, one of 
 whom was haunted by a strong disposition to gene- 
 alogical, and the other to geographical pursuits, that, 
 " let a man do what he will, if nature incline us to cer- 
 tain things, there is ho preventing the gratification of 
 our desire, though it lies hid under a monk's frock." It 
 is not, therefore, as the world is apt to imagine, only 
 poets and painters for whom is reserved this restless arid 
 impetuous propensity for their particular pursuits; I 
 claim it for the man of science as well as for the man of 
 imagination. And I confess that I consider this strong 
 bent of the mind in men eminent in pursuits in which 
 imagination is little concerned, and whom men of genius 
 have chosen to remove so far from their class, as another 
 gifted aptitude. They, too, share in the glorious fever 
 of genius, and we feel how just was the expression 
 formerly used, of " their thirst for knowledge." 
 
 But to return to the men of genius who answer more 
 strictly to the popular notion of inventors. We have 
 Boccaccio's own words for a proof of his early natural 
 
72 LITEEAET CHARACTEE. 
 
 tendency to tale-writing, in a passage of his genealog 
 of the gods : — " Before seven years of age, when as yet 
 had met with no stories, was without a master, and hardl; 
 knew my letters, I had a natural talent for fiction, am 
 produced some little tales." Thus the "Decamerone 
 was appearing much earlier than we suppose. Descartes 
 while yet a hoy, indulged such habits of deep meditatior 
 that he was nicknamed by his companions " The Philosc 
 pher," always questioning, and ever settling the caus 
 and the effect. He was twenty-five years of age befor 
 he left the army, but the propensity for meditation ha( 
 been early formed ; and he has himself given an accoun 
 of the pursuits which occupied his youth, and of the pro 
 gress of his genius ; of the secret struggle which he si 
 long maintained with his own mind, wandering in coe 
 cealment over ■ the world for more than twenty years 
 and, as he says of himself, like the statuary labouring ti 
 draw out a Minerva from the marble block. Michae 
 Angelo, as yet a child, wherever he went, busied himseL 
 in drawing; and when his noble parents, hurt that a mai 
 of genius was disturbing the line of their ancestiy, force( 
 him to relinquish the pencil, the infant artist flew to thi 
 chisel : the art which was in his soul would not allow oJ 
 idle hands. Lope de Vega, Velasquez, Ariosto, an( 
 Tasso, are all said to have betrayed at their school-taski 
 the most marked indications of their subsequent charac 
 teristics. 
 
 This decision of the impulse of genius is apparent ii 
 Murillo. This young artist was undistinguished at thi 
 place of his birth. A brother artist returning home fron 
 London, where he had studied under Van Dyk, surprise* 
 Munllo by a chastie, and to him hitherto unknown, man 
 ner. Instantly he conceived the project of quitting hi 
 native Seville and flying to Italy — the fever of geniu; 
 broke forth with all its restlessness. But he was desti 
 tute of the most ordinary means to pursue a journey, anc 
 
YOUTHFUL STUDIES. 73 
 
 forced to an expedient, he purchased a piece of canvas, 
 which dividing into parts,, he painted on each figures of 
 saints, landscapes, and flowers — an humble merchandise 
 of art adapted to the taste and devout feelings of the 
 times, and which were readily sold to the adventurers to 
 the Indies. "With these small means he departed, having 
 communicated his project to no one except to a beloved 
 sister, whQse tears could not prevail to keep the lad at 
 home; the impetuous impulse had blinded him to the 
 perils and the impracticability of his wild project. He 
 reached Madrid, where the great Velasquez, his country- 
 man, was struck by. the ingenuous simplicity of the youth^ 
 who urgently requested letters for Rome ; but when that 
 noble genius understood the purport of this romantic 
 journey, Yelagquez assured him that he need not proceed 
 to Italy to learn the art he loved. The great master 
 opened the royal galleries to the youth, and cherished 
 his studies. Murillo returned to his native city, where, 
 from his obscurity, he had never been missed, having 
 ever lived a retired life of silent labour ; but this painter 
 of nature returned to make the city which had not no- 
 ticed his j,bsence the theatre of bis glory. 
 ^ The sarue imperious impulse drove Callot, at the age 
 0f twelve years, from his father's roof. His parents, from 
 prejudices of birth, had conceived that the art of engrav- 
 ing was one beneath the studies of their son; but the boy 
 had listened to stories of the miracles of Italian art, and 
 with a curiosity predominant over any self-consideraition, 
 one morning the genius flew away. Many days had not 
 elapsed, when finding himself in the utmost distress, with 
 a gang of gipsies he arrived at Florence. A merchant 
 of Nancy discovered him, and returned the reluctant boy 
 of genius to his home. Again he flies to Italy, and again 
 his brother discovers him, and reconducts him to hie pa- 
 rents. The father, whose patience and forgiveness were 
 how exhausted, permitted his son to become the most 
 
74 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 original genius of French art — one -who, in his viv 
 cious groups, the touch of his graver, and the natur 
 expression of his figures, anticipated the creations c 
 Hogarth. 
 
 Facts of this decisive character are abundant. See tl 
 boy Nanteuil hiding himself in a tree to pursue the d 
 lightful exercise of his pencil, while his parents are avers 
 to their son practising his young art ! See Handel, i 
 tended for a doctor of the civil laws, and whom no p 
 rental discouragement could deprive of his eilthusiasr 
 for ever touching harpsidhords, and having secretly co: 
 veyed a musical instrument to a retired apartment, listc 
 to him when, sitting through the night, he awakens h 
 harmonious spirit ! Observe Ferguson, the child of 
 peasant, acquiring the art of reading without any or 
 suspecting it, by listening to his father teaching his bri 
 ther ; observe him making a wooden watch without tl 
 slightest knowledge of mechanism ; and while a shepher( 
 studying, like an ancient Chaldean, the phenomena of tl 
 heavens, on a celestial globe formed by his own han( 
 That great mechanic, Smeaton, when a child, disdaine 
 the ordinary playthings of his age ; he collected- the too 
 of workmen, observed them at their work, and aske 
 questions till he could work himself. One day, havin 
 watched some millwrights, the child was shortly after, 1 
 the distress of the famUy, discovered in a situation of e; 
 treme danger, fixing up at the top of a barn a rude win( 
 mill. Many circumstances of this nature occurred befo] 
 his sixth year. His father, an attorney, sent him up 1 
 London to be brought up to the same profession ; but 1 
 declared that " the study of the law did not suit the het 
 of his genius " — a term he frequently used. He addresse 
 a strong memorial to his father, to show his "utter incon 
 petency to study law ; and the good sense of the fath( 
 abandoned Smeaton '' to the bent of his genius in his ow 
 way." Such is the history of the man who raised tl 
 
YOUTHFUL STUDIES. 75 
 
 Eddystone Lighthouse, in the midst of the waves, like 
 the rock on which it stands. 
 
 Can we hesitate to believe that in such minds there 
 was a resistless and mysterious propensity, "growing 
 with the growth " of these youths, who seem to have 
 been placed out of the influence of that casual excite- 
 ment, or any other of those sources of genius, so frequently 
 assigned for its production ? 
 
 Yet these cases are not more striking than the one 
 related of the Abbe La Caille, who ranked among the 
 first astronomers of the age. La Caille was the son of 
 the parish clerk of a village. At the age of teti years 
 his father sent him every evening to ring the church 
 bell, but the boy always returned home late : his father 
 was angry, and beat him, and still the boy returned 
 an hour after he had rung the bell. The father suspect- 
 ing something mysterious in his conduct, one evening 
 watched him. He saw his son ascend the steeple, ring 
 the bell as usual, and remain there during an hour. 
 When the unlucky boy descended, he trembled like one 
 caught in the fact, and on his knees confessed that the 
 pleasure he took in watching the stars from the steeplei 
 was the real cause which detained him from home. As 
 the father was not born to be an astronomer, he flogged 
 his son severely. The youth was found weeping in the 
 streets by a man of science, who, when he discovered in 
 a boy of ten years of age a passion for contemplating 
 the stars at night, and one, too, who had discovered an 
 observatory in a steeple, decided that the seal of Nature 
 had impressed itself on the genius of that boy. Reliev- 
 ing the parent from the son, and the son from the 
 parent, he assisted the young La Caille in his passionate 
 pursuit, and the event completely justified the prediction.' 
 How children feel a predisposition for the studies of; 
 astronomy, or mechanics, or architecture, or natural 
 history, is that secret in nature we have not guessed. 
 
76 lilTERAIlY CHARACTER. 
 
 There may be a virgin thought as well as a virgin hahit 
 — nature before education — ^whick fii'st opens the mind, 
 and ever afterwards is shaping its tender folds. Acci- 
 dents may occur to call it forth, but thousands of youths. 
 have found themselves in parallel situations with Smea- 
 ton, Ferguson, and La Caille, without experiencing their 
 energies. 
 
 The case of Clairon, the great French tragic actress, 
 who seems to have been an actress before she saw a 
 theatre, deserves attention. This female, destined to be 
 a sublime tragedian, was of the lowest extraction ; the 
 daughter of a violent and illiterate woman, who, with 
 blows and menaces, was driving about the child all 
 day to manual labour. "I know not," says Clairon, 
 " whence I derive my disgust, but I could not bear the 
 idea to be a mere workwoman, or to remain inactive in 
 a corner." In her eleventh year, being locked up iff a 
 room as a punishment, with the windows fastened, she 
 climbed upon a chair to look about her. A new object 
 instantly absorbed her attention. In the house opposite 
 she observed a celebrated actress amidst her family ; her 
 daughter was performing her dancing lesson : the girl 
 Clairon, the future Melpomene, was struck by the influ- 
 ence of this graceful and affectionate scene. "All my 
 little being collected itself into my eyes ; I lost not a 
 single motion ; as soon as the lesson ended, all the 
 family applauded, and the mother embraced the daugh- 
 ter. The difference of her fate and mine filled me with' 
 profound grief; my tears hindered me from seeing any 
 longer, and when the palpitations of my heart allowed 
 me to re-ascend ' the chair, all had disappeared." This 
 scene was a discovery ; from that moment Clairon knew 
 no rest, and rejoiced when she could get her mother to 
 confine her in that room. The happy girl was a divinity 
 to the unhappy one, whose susceptible genius imitated 
 her in every gesture and every motion; and Clairon 
 
YOUTHFUL STUDIES. 77 
 
 soon showed the effect of her ardent studies. She 
 betrayed in the common intercourse of life, all the graces 
 she had taught herself; she charmed her friends, and 
 even softened her barbarous mother; in a word, the 
 enthusiastic girl was an actress without knowing what 
 an actress was. 
 
 In this case of the youth of genius, are we to conclude 
 that the accidental view of a young actress practising her 
 studies imparted the character of Clairon? Could a 
 mere chance occurrence have given birth to those facul- 
 ties which produced a sublime tragedian? In aU arts 
 there are talents which may be acquired by imitation 
 and reflection, — ^and thus far may genius be educated ; 
 but there are others which are entirely the result of native 
 sensibility, which often secretly torment the possessor, 
 and which may even be . lost from the want of develop- 
 ment, dissolved into a state of languor from which many 
 have not recovered. Clairon, before she saw the young 
 actress, and having yet no conception of a theatre^-for 
 she had never entered one — ^had in her soul that latent 
 faculty which creates a dramatic genius. " Had I not felt 
 like Dido," she once exclaimed, " I could not have thus 
 personified her !" 
 
 The force of impressions received in the warm suscep- 
 tibility of the childhood of genius, is probably little 
 known to us ; but we may perceive them also working 
 in the moral character, which frequently discovers itself 
 in childhood, and which manhood cannot always conceal, 
 however it may alter. The intellectual and the moral 
 character are unquestionably closely allied. Erasmus 
 acquaints us, that Sir Thomas More had something ludi- 
 crous in his aspect, tending to a smile, — a feature which 
 his portraits preserve ; and that he was more inclined to 
 pleasantry and jesting, than to the gravity of the chan- 
 cellor. This circumstance he imputes to Sir Thomas 
 More "being from a child so delighted with humour, 
 
78 LITERARY CHARACTBE. 
 
 that he seemed to be even born for it." And we knoi 
 that he died as he had lived, with a jest on his lij)s. Th 
 hero, who came at length to regret that he had but on 
 world to conquer, betrayed the majesty of his restles 
 genius when but a youth. Had Aristotle been nig 
 when, solicited to join in the course, the princely boy r( 
 plied, that " He would run in no career where kings wei 
 not the competitors," the prescient tutor might hav 
 recognized in his pupil the future and successful rival o 
 Darius and Porus. 
 
 A narrative of the earliest years of Prince Henry, b 
 one of his attendants, forms an , authentic collection o 
 juvenile anecdotes, which made me feel very forcibl 
 that there are some children who deserve to have a bioj 
 rapher at their side; but anecdotes of children are th 
 rarest of biographies, and I deenied it a singular piece c 
 good fortune to have recovered such a remarkable ev 
 dence of the precocity of character.* Professor Dugal 
 Stewart has noticed a fact in Arnauld's infancy, whicl 
 considered in connexion with his subsequent life, afford 
 a good illustration of the force of impressions received i 
 the first dawn of reason. Arnauld, who, to his eightiet 
 year, passed through a life of theological controversi 
 when a child, amusing himself in the library of the Card 
 nal Du Perron, requested to have a pen given to hin 
 " For what purpose ?" inquired the cardinal. " To writ 
 books, like you, against the Huguenots." The cardina 
 then aged and infirm, could not conceal his joy at th 
 prospect of so hopeful a successor ; and placing the pe 
 in his hand, said, " I give it you as the dying shepherc 
 Damcetas, bequeathed his pipe to the little Corydon. 
 Other children might have asked for a pen — but to writ 
 against the Huguenots evinced a deeper feeling and 
 wider association of ideas, indicating the future polemic. 
 
 * I have preserved this manuscript narrative in " Ouriositiea o 
 Literature," voL ii. 
 
TOTJTHFUL STUDIES. Y9 
 
 Some of these facts, we conceive, afford decisive evi- 
 dence of that instinct in genius, that primary quality of 
 mind, sometimes called organization, -which has inflamed 
 a war of words by an equivocal term. We repeat that 
 this faculty of genius can exist independent of education, 
 and where it is wanting, education can never confer it: 
 it is an impulse, an instinct always workiBg in the char- 
 acter of " the chosen mind ;" 
 
 One with our feelings and our powers, 
 And rather part of us, than ours. 
 
 In the history of genius there are unquestionably many 
 secondary causes of considerable influence in developing, 
 or &^en crushing the germ^ — these have been of late often 
 detected, and sometim.es carried to a ridiculous extreme ; 
 but among them none seem more remarkable than the 
 first studies and the first habits. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The first studies. — The self-educated are marked by stubborn pecu- 
 liarities. — Their errors. — Their improvement from the neglect or 
 cpntempt they incur. — The history cif self-education in Moses Men- 
 delssohn. — Friends usually prejudicial in the youth of genius. — A 
 remarkable interview between Petrarch in his first studios, and his 
 
 ■ literary adviser. — Exhortation. 
 
 THE first studies form an epoch in the history of genius, 
 and unquestionably have sensibly influenced its pro- 
 ductions. Often have the first impressions stamped a 
 character on the mind adapted to receive one, as the first 
 step into life has often determined its walk. But this, 
 for ourselves, is a far distant period in our existence, 
 
80 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 ■which is lost in the horizon of our own recollections, and 
 is usually unobserved by others. 
 
 Many of those peculiarities of men of genius which are 
 not fortunate, and some which have hardened the charac- 
 ter in its mould, may, however, be traced to this period. 
 Physicians tell us that there is a certain point in youth 
 at which the constitution is formed, and on which the 
 sanity of life revolves; the character of genius experi- 
 ences a similar dangerous period. Early bad tastes, early 
 peculiar habits, early defective instructions, all the ego- 
 tistical pride of an untamed intellect, are those evil 
 spirits which will dog genius to its grave. An early at- 
 tachment to the works of Sir Thomas Browne produced 
 in Johnson an excessive admiration of that Latinised 
 English, which violated the native graces of the language ; 
 and the peculiar style of Gibbon is traced by himself "to 
 the constant habit of speaking one language, and writioig 
 another. The first studies of Rembrandt affected his 
 after-labours. The peculiarity of shadow which marks 
 all his pictures, originated in the circumstance of his 
 father's mill receiving light from an aperture at the top, 
 which habituated the artist afterwards to view all objects 
 as if seen in that magical light. The intellectual Poussin, 
 as Nicholas has been called, could never, from an early 
 devotion to the fine statues of antiquity, extricate his 
 genius on the canvas from the hard forms of marble ; he 
 sculptured with his pencil ; and that cold austerity, of ' 
 tone, still more remarkable . in his last pictures, as it be- 
 came mannered, chills the spectator on a first glance. 
 When Pope was a child, he found in his mother's closet a 
 small library of mystical devotion ; but it was not sus- 
 pected, till the fact was discovered, that the effusions of 
 love and religion poured forth in his "Eloisa" were 
 caught from the seraphic raptures of those erotic mystics,, 
 who to the last retained a place in his library among the 
 classical bards of antiquity. The accidental perusal of 
 
YOUTHFUL STUDIES. 81 
 
 Quintus Curtius first made Boyle, to use his own words, 
 " in love with other than pedantic books, and conjured 
 up in him an unsatisfied appetite of knowledge ; so that 
 he thought he owed more to Quintus Curtius than did 
 Alexander." From the perusal of Rycaut's folio of Turk- 
 ish history in childhood, the noble and impassioned bard 
 of our times retained those indelible impressions which 
 gave life and motion to the " Giaour," " the Corsair," 
 and " Alp." A voyage to the country produced the 
 scenery. Rycaut only communicated the impulse to a 
 mind susceptible of the poetical character ; and without 
 this Turkish history we should still have had the poet.* 
 
 The influence of first studies in the formation of the 
 character of genius is a moral phenomenon which has not 
 sufficiently attracted our notice. Franklin acquaints us 
 that, when young and wanting books, he accidentally 
 
 * The following manuscript note by Lord Byron on this passage, 
 cannot fail to interest the lovers of poetry, as well as the inquirers into 
 the history of the human mind. His lordship's recollections of his first 
 readings will not alter the tendency of my conjecture ; it only proves 
 that he had read much more of Eastern history and manners than Ry- 
 caut's folio, which probably Idd to this class of books : 
 
 "KnoUes — Cantemir — De Tott — Lady M. W. Montagu — Hawkins's 
 translation from Mignot's History of the Turks — The Arabian Nights — 
 all travels or histories or books upon the East I could, meet with I had 
 read, as well as Rycaut, before I was ten years old. I think the Ara- 
 bian Nights, first. After these I preferred the history of naval actions, 
 Don Quixote, and Smollett's novels, particularly Roderick Random, 
 and I was passionate for the Roman history. 
 
 , " When a boy I could never bear to read any poetry whatever with- 
 out disgust and reluctance." — MS. note by Lord Byron. Latterly Lord 
 Byron acknowledged in a conversation held in Greece with Count 
 Gamba, not long before he died, " The Turkish History was one of the 
 first books that gave me pleasure when a child; and I believe it had 
 much influence on my subsequent wishes to visit the Levant; and 
 gave perhaps the Oriental colouring which is observed in my poetry." 
 
 I omitted the following note in my last edition, but I shall now pre- 
 serve it, as it may enter into the history of his lordship's character : 
 
 " When I was in Turkey I was oftenor tempted to turn Mussulman 
 than poet, and have ""ten regretted since that I did not. 1818." 
 
83 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 found De Foe's " Essay on Projects," from -which worl 
 impressions were derived which afterwards influence* 
 some of the principal events of his life. The lectures o: 
 Reynolds probably originated in the essays of Richard 
 Son. It is acknowledged that these first made him i 
 painter, and not long afterwards an author ; and it is sai< 
 that many of the principles in his lectures may be trace( 
 in those first studies. Many were the indelible and glo-w 
 ing impressions caught by the ardent Reynolds fron 
 those bewildering pages of enthusiasm! Sir Walte 
 Raleigh, according to a family tradition, when a younj 
 man, was perpetually reading and conversing on the dis 
 coveries of Columbus, and the conquests of Cortez an( 
 Pizarro. His character, as well as the great events o1 
 his life, seem to have been inspired by his favourite his 
 tories ; to pass beyond the discoveries of the Spaniard; 
 became a passion, and the vision of his life. It ii 
 formally testified that, from a copy of Vegetius de It< 
 Militari, in the school library of St. Paul's, Marlborougl 
 imbibed his passion for a military life. If he could no' 
 understand the text, the prints were, in such a mind, suffi 
 cent to awaken the passion for military glory. Rousseai 
 in early youth, full of his Plutarch, while he was als( 
 devouring the trash of romances, could only conceivf 
 human nature in the Colossal forms, or be aflected by th< 
 infirm sensibility of an imagination mastering all hii 
 faculties; thinking like a Roman, and feeling like s 
 Sybarite. The same circumstance happened to Catherin( 
 Macauley, who hersetf has told us how she owed the beni 
 of her character to the early reading of the Romai 
 historians ; but combining Roman admiration With En 
 glish faction, she violated truth in English characters, anc 
 exaggerated romance in her Roman. But the permaneni 
 effect of a solitary bias in the youth of genius, iriipellin§ 
 the whole current of his after-life, is strikingly displayed 
 in the remarkable character of Archdeacon Blackburne 
 
AECHDEACOK BLACKBTJRNE. 83 
 
 the author of the famous " Confessional," and the curious 
 "Memoirs of HoUis," wi'ittea with such a repuMicaa 
 fierceness. 
 
 I had long considered the character of our archdeacon 
 as a lustts politicus et theologieus. Having suhscrihed to 
 the Articles, and enjoying the archdeaconry, he was 
 writing against subscription and the whole hierarchy with 
 a spirit so irascible and caustic, that one would have 
 suspected that, like Prynne and Bastwick, the archdeacon 
 had already lost both his ears ; while his antipathy to 
 monarchy might have done honour to a Roundhead of 
 the Rota Club. The secret of these volcanic explosions 
 was only revealed in a letter accidentally preserved. In 
 the youth of our spirited archdeacon, when fox-hunting 
 was his deepest study, it happened at the house of a 
 relation, that on a rainy day he fell, among other garret 
 lumber, on some worm-eaten volumes which had once 
 been the careful collections of his great-grandfather, an 
 Oliverian justice. " These," says he, " I conveyed to my 
 lodging-room, and there became acquainted with the 
 manners and principles of many excellent old Puritans, 
 and then laid the foundation of my own." The enigma 
 is now solved 1 Archdeacon Blackburne, in his seclusion 
 in Yorkshire amidst the Oliverian justice's library, shows 
 that we are in want of a Cervantes but not of a Quixote, 
 and Yorkshire might yet be as renowned a country as 
 La Mancha ; for political romances, it is presumed, naay 
 be as fertile of ridicule as any of the folios of chivalry. 
 
 We may thus mark the influence through life of those 
 first unobserved impressions on the character of genius, 
 which every author has not recorded. 
 
 Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, 
 produces nothing on the side of genius. Where eduea- 
 ,tion ends, genius often begins. Gray was asked if he 
 recollected, when he first felt the strong predilection to 
 poetry ; he replied that, " he believed it was when he 
 
84 IITERART OHARAOTEE. 
 
 began to read Virgil for his own amusement, and not i 
 school hours as a task." Such is the force of self-educj 
 tion in genius, that the celebrated physiologist, Joh 
 Hunter, who was entirely self-educated, evinced sua 
 penetration in his anatomical discoveries, that he ha 
 brought into notice passages from writers he was unabl 
 to read, and which had been overlooked by profouni 
 scholars.* 
 
 That the education of genius must be its own .work, w 
 may appeal to every one of the family. It is not alway 
 fortunate, for many die amidst a waste of talents and thi 
 wreck of mind. 
 
 Many a soul sublime 
 Has felt the inQuence of malignant star. 
 
 An unfavourable position in society is a usual obstruc 
 tion in the course of this self-education; and a man ©i 
 genius, through half his life, has held a contest with i 
 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 witl 
 their contemporaries. Winckelmann, who passed his youtl 
 in obscure misery as a village schoolmaster, paints feel 
 ings which strikingly contrast with his avocations. " ] 
 formerly filled the office of a schoolmaster with the great 
 est punctuality ; and I taught the A, B, C, to childrei 
 with filthy heads, at the moment I was aspiring after the 
 knowledge of the beautiful, and meditating, low to my 
 self, on the similes of Homer ; then I said to myselfj as ] 
 still say, ' Peace, my soul, thy strength shall surmount 
 
 * Life of John Hunter, by Dr. Adams, p. 59, where the case is curi 
 ously illustrated. [The writer therein defends Hunter from a charge 
 of plagiarism from the .Greelc writers, who had studied accurately 
 certain phases of disease, which had afterwards been " overlooked bj 
 the most profound scholars for nearly two thousand years," until Johii 
 •Hunter by his own close observation had assumed similar conclusions.' 
 
SELF-EDUOATIOIST. 85 
 
 thy cares.' " The obstructions of so unhappy a self-edu- 
 cation essentially injured his ardent genius, and long he 
 secretly sorrowed at this want of early patronage, and 
 these habits of life so discordant with the habits of his 
 mind. "I am unfortunately one of those whom the 
 Greeks named d(fii/iat9sT(;, sero sapientes, the late-learned, 
 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 at 
 your age." This class of the la(e-learned is a useful dis- 
 tinction. 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. Budosus declared that he was both " self- 
 taught and late-taught." 
 
 The SELF-EDUCATED are marked by stubborn peculiari- 
 ties. Often abounding with talent, but rarely with 
 talent in its place, their native prodigality has to dread 
 a plethora of genius and a delirium of wit : or else, hard 
 but irregular students rich in acquisition, they find how 
 their huddled knowledge, like corn heaped in a granary, 
 for want of ventilation and stirring, perishes in its own 
 masses. Not having attended to the process of their 
 own minds, and little acquainted with that of other men, 
 they cannot throw out their intractable knowledge, nor 
 with sympathy awaken by its softening touches the 
 thoughts of others. To conduct their native impulse, 
 which had all along driven them, is a secret not always 
 discovered, or else discovered late in life. Hence it has 
 happened with some of this race, that their first work 
 has not announced genius, and their last is stamped with 
 it. Some are often judged by their first work, and when 
 they have surpassed themselves, it is long ere it is ac- 
 knowledged. They have improved themselves by the 
 very neglect or even contempt which their unfortunate 
 efforts were doomed to meet ; and when once they have 
 
86 LITEEAET CHARACTER. 
 
 learned what is beautiful, they discover a living but un- 
 suspected source in their own wild but unregarded origi- 
 nality. Glorying in their strength at the time that they 
 are betraying their weakness, yet are they still mighty 
 in that eqathusiasm which is only disciplined by its own 
 fierce habits. Never can the native faculty of genius 
 with its creative warmth be crushed out of the human 
 soul ; it will work itself out beneath the encumbrance of 
 the most uncultivated minds, even amidst the deep per- 
 plexed feelings and the tumultuous thoughts of the most 
 visionary enthusiast, who is often only a man of genius 
 Biisplaced.* We may find a whole race of these self- 
 taught among the unknown writers of the old romances, 
 and the ancient baljads of European nations ; there sleep 
 many a Homer and Virgil — legitimate heirs of their ge- 
 nius, though possessors of decayed estates. 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. That enthusiast, with a temper 
 of mind resembling Rousseau's, but with coarser feelings, 
 was the same creature of untamed imagination consumed 
 by the same passions, with the same fine intellect disor- 
 dered, and the same fortitude of soul ; but he found Ms 
 self-taught pen, like his pencil, betray his genius, f A 
 
 *"Oae assertion I will venture to make, as suggested ty my own 
 experience, that tharq exist , folips on. the hiiman understanding, , and 
 the nature of man which would have a far juster claim to their high 
 rank and celebrity, if in' the whole huge volume there could be foiind 
 as much fulness of heart and intellect as burst forth in many a sim- 
 ple page of George Fox and Jacob, Behmen." — Mr. Gokridge's Biogrck 
 phia Liiteraria, i. 143. 
 
 j; Like Hogarth, when he attem,pted to engrave his own works, hi'a 
 originality of style Made them differ from the tamer and more mechan- 
 ical labours of the professional engraver. They have consequently 
 less beauty, but greater vigour. — Ed. 
 
SELP-EDUOATIOir. 87 
 
 vehemeiit enthusiasm breaks through his ill-composed 
 works, throwing the sparks of his bold conceptions into 
 the soul of the youth of genius. When, in his charac- 
 ter of professor, he delivered his lectures at the academy, 
 at every pause his auditors rose in a tumult, and at every 
 close their hands returned to him the proud feelings he 
 adored. This gifted but selt-educated man, once listen- 
 ing to the children of genius whom he had created about 
 him, exclaimed, " Go it, go it, my boys ! they did so at 
 Athens." This self-formed genius could throw up his 
 native mud into the very heaven of his invention ! 
 
 But even such pages -as those of Barry's are the ali- 
 ment of young genius. Before we can discern the 
 beautiful, must we not be endowed with the susceptibil- 
 ity of love ? Must not the disposition be formed before 
 even the object appears ? I have witnessed the young 
 artist of genius glow and start over the revei-ies of the 
 uneducated 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 dis- 
 covered 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 Mendelssohn, on whom literary Germany has 
 bestowed the honorable title of " the Jewish Socrates."* 
 So great apparently were the invincible obstructions 
 which barred out Mendelssohn from the world of litera- 
 ture and philosophy, that, in the history of men of 
 
 * I composed the life of ifendelssohn so far back as in 1T98, in a 
 periodical publication, whence our late biographers have drawn their 
 notices ; a juyenile production, which happened to excite the attention 
 of the late Barry, then not personajly known to me; and he gave all 
 the immortality his poetical pencil could bestow on this man of genius, 
 by immediately placing in his Elysium df Genius Mendelssohn shaking" 
 hands with Addison, who wrote on the truth of the Christian religion, 
 and near Locke, the English master of Mendelssohn's mind. 
 
88 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 genius, it is something like taking in the history of ma 
 the savage of Aveyron from his woods — who, destitut 
 of a human language, should at length create a model o 
 eloquence; who, without the faculty of conceiving 
 figure, should at length he capable of adding to th 
 demonstrations of Euclid ; and who, without a comple 
 idea and with few sensations, should at length, in th 
 sublimest strain of metaphysics, open to the world a ne^ 
 view of the immortality of the soul ! 
 
 Mendelssohn, the son of a poor rabbin, in a village i 
 Germany, received an education completely rabbiniea 
 and its nature must be comprehended, or the term o 
 education would be misunderstood. The Israelites i 
 Poland and Germany live with all the restrictions o 
 their ceremonial law in an i sulated state, and are no 
 always instructed in the language of the country of thei 
 birth. They employ for their common intercourse a bai 
 barous or patois Hebrew ; while the sole studies of th 
 young rabbins are strictly confined to the Talmud, o 
 which the fun(id,mental principle, like the Sonna of th 
 Turks, is a pious rejection of every species of profan 
 learning. This ancient jealous spirit, which walls in th 
 tmderstanding and the faith of man, was to shut out wha 
 the imitative Catholics afterwards called heresy: It is 
 then, these numerous folios of the Talmud which th 
 true Hebraic student contemplates through all the ses 
 sons of life, as the Patuecos in their low valley imagin 
 their surrounding mountains to be the confines of th 
 universe. 
 
 Of such a nature was the plan of Mendelssohn's firs 
 studies ; but even in his boyhood this conflict of stud; 
 occasioned an agitation of his spirits, which affected hi 
 life ever after. Rejecting the Talmudical dreamers, h 
 caught a nobler spirit from the celebrated Maimonides 
 and his native sagacity was already clearing up the sui 
 rounding darkness. An enemy not less hostile to th 
 
MENDELSSOHIT. 89 
 
 enlargement of mind than voluminous legends, presented 
 itself in the indigence of his father, -who was compelled to 
 send away the youth on foot to Berlin, to find labour 
 and bread. 
 
 At Berlin, Mendelssohn becomes an amanuensis to an- 
 other poor rabbin, who could only still initiate him into the 
 theology, the jurisprudence, and the scholastic philosophy 
 of his people. Thus, he was as yet 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 knowl- 
 edge of literature which was finally to place him among 
 the first polished critics of Germany. 
 
 Some unexpected event occurs which gives the first 
 great impulse to the mind of genius. Mendelssohn 
 received this from the 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 va- 
 grant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this 
 vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a 
 mathematician. Mendelssohn, 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 Mendelssohn could speak, the Polander voluntarily 
 undertook his literary education. 
 
 Then was seen one of the most extraordinary spectacles 
 in the history of modern literature. Two houseless 
 Hebrew youths might be discovered, in the moonlit 
 streets of Berlin, sitting in retired comers, or on the 
 Steps of some porch, the one instructing the other, with 
 a Euclid in his hand ; but what is more extraordinary, it 
 was a Hebrew version, composed by- the master for a^ 
 pupil who knew no other language, Who could then 
 have imagined that the future Plato of Gei-many was 
 sitting on those steps ! 
 
90 LITEKART CHARACTER. 
 
 The Polander, whose deep melancholy had settled 
 his heart, died — yet he had not lived in yain, since t 
 electric spark that lighted up the soul of Mendelssoi 
 had fallen from his own. 
 
 Mendelssohn was now left alone ; his mind teeming wi 
 its chaos, and still master of no other language than th 
 barren idiom which was incapable of expressing the ide 
 he was meditating on. He had scarcely made a step in 
 the philosophy of his age, and the genius of Mendelsso] 
 had probably been lost to Germany, had not the singulj 
 ity of his studies and the oast of his mind been detecti 
 by the sagacity of Dr. Kisch. The aid- of this physicii 
 was momentous ; for he devoted several hours every di 
 to the instruction of a poor youth, whose strong eapaci 
 he had the discernment to perceive, and the genero 
 temper to aid. Mendelssohn was soon enabled to rei 
 Locke in a Latin version ; but with such extreme pai 
 that, compelled to search for every word, and to arranj 
 their Latin order, and at the same time to combine met 
 physical ideas, it was observed that he did not so mui 
 translate, as guess by the force of meditation. 
 
 This prodigious effort of his intellect retarded his pi 
 gress, but invigorated his habit, as the racer, by runnii 
 against the hill,' at length courses with facility. 
 
 A succeeding effort was to master the living language 
 and chiefly the English, that he might read his favouri 
 Locke in his own idiom. Thus a great genius for met 
 physics and languages was forming itself alone, witho: 
 aid. 
 
 It is curious to detect, in the character of genius, tl 
 effects of local and moral influences. There, resultc 
 from Mendelssohn's early situation certain defects in h 
 Jewish education, and numerous impediments in h 
 studies. Inheriting but one language, too obsolete ar 
 naked to serve the purposes of modem philosophy, 1 
 perhaps overvalued his new acquisitions, and in b 
 
CRITICISM OF FRIENDS. 91 
 
 delight of tnowing many languages, he with difficulty 
 escaped from remaining a mere philologist ; whUe in his 
 philosophy, having adopted the prevailing principles of 
 Wolf and Baumgarten, his genius was long without the 
 courage or the still 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 wanting to escape 
 from it. 
 
 At length the mind of Mendelssohn enlarged in liter- 
 ary intei'course : he became a great and original thinker 
 in many beautiful speculations in moral and critical phi- 
 losophy ; while he had gradually been creating a style 
 which the critics of Germany have declared to be their 
 first luminous model of precision and elegance. Thus a 
 Hebrew vagrant, first perplexed in the voluminous laby- 
 rinth of Judaieal learning, in his middle age oppressed 
 by indigence and malady, and in his mature life wrestling 
 with that commercial station whence he derived his hum- 
 ble independence, became one of the master-writers in 
 the literature of his country. The history of the mind 
 of Mendelssohn is one of the noblest pictures of the self- 
 education of genius. 
 
 • Friends, whose prudential counsels in the business of 
 life are valuable in our youth, are usually prejudicial in 
 the youth of genius. The multitude of authors and 
 artists originates in the ignorant admiration of their 
 early friends ; while the real genius has often been 'dis- 
 concerted and thrown into despair by the false 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 
 cultivated by knowledge, so tried by experience, and so 
 practised by converse with the literary world, that itSi 
 
92 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 prophetic feeling can anticipate the puWic opinion 
 When a young writer's first essay is shown, some 
 through mere inability of censure, see nothing but beau 
 ties ; others, from mere imbecility, can see none ; an( 
 others, out of pure malice, see nothing but faults. " 
 was soon disgusted," says Gibbon, "with the modes 
 practice of reading the manuscript to my friends. O: 
 such friends some will praise for politeness, and som 
 will criticise for vanity." Had several of our firs 
 writers set their fortunes on the cast of their friends 
 opinions, we might have lost some precious compositions 
 The fi-iends of Thomson discovered nothing but fault 
 in his early productions, one of which happened to be hi 
 noblest, the " Winter ;" they just could discern that thes 
 abounded in luxuriances, without being aware that the; 
 were the luxuriances of a poet. He had created a ne^ 
 school in art — and appealed from his circle to the public 
 From a manuscript letter of our poet's, written whei 
 employed on his " Summer," I transcribe his sentiment 
 on his former literary friends in Scotland — he is writinj 
 to Mallet : " Far from defending these two lines, I dam: 
 them to the lowest depth of the poetical Tophet, preparei 
 of old for Mitchell, Morris, Rook, Cook, Beckingham, an( 
 a long &c. Wherever I have evidence, or think I hav 
 evidence, which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate a 
 all the mules in Persia." This poet of warm afiectioa 
 felt so irritably the perverse criticisms of his learnei 
 friends, that they were to share alike a poetic Hell — prol 
 ably a sort of Duneiad, or lampoons. One of thes 
 " blasts " broke out in a vindictive epigram on Mitchel] 
 whom he describes with a " blasted eye ;" but this criti 
 literally having one, the poet, to avoid a personal reflec 
 tion, could only consent to make the blemish mor 
 active — 
 
 "Why all not faults, injurious Mitchell I why 
 Appears one beauty to thy blasting eye 1 
 
CRITICISM OP FRIENDS. 93 
 
 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 very sensible man, had no sympathy with the poet. 
 " Aikman's reflections on my writings are very good, 
 but he does 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 periodically published in Edinburgh, 
 was " fastidiously " received, as all " home-productions " 
 are: but London avenged the cause of the author. 
 When Swift introduced Parnell to Lord Bolingbroke, 
 aad to the world, he observes, in his Journal, "it is 
 pleasant to see one who hardly passed for anything in 
 L-eland, make his way here with a little friendly forward- 
 ing." Montaigne has honestly told us that in his own 
 province they considered that for him to attempt to 
 become an author was perfectly ludicrous ; at home, says 
 he, "I am compelled to purchase printers; while at a 
 distance, printers purchase me." 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 irretrievable distress; but 
 usually pronounces against novelty. When Reynolds 
 returned from Italy, warm with all the excellence of his 
 art, and painted a portrait, his old master, Hudson, view- 
 ing it, and perceiving no trace of his own manner, ex- 
 claimed that he did not paint so well as when he left 
 England ; while another, who conceived no higher exoel- 
 
 f This weekly journal was cMefly supported by the abilities of the 
 rising young men of the Scottish Bar. Henry Mackenzie, tlie author 
 of the "Man of Feeling," was tha principal contributor. The pub- 
 lication was eommeneed in January, 1779, and concluded May, 
 1790.— Ed. 
 
94 LITERART CHARACTER. 
 
 lence 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 peril 
 in passing them with inattention. He wants a Quintiliani. 
 One mode to obtain such an invaluable critic is the culti- 
 vation of his own judgment in a round of reading and 
 meditation. 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 critics their expounders; 
 from the one he will draw inspiration, and from the others 
 he will Supply those tardy discoveries in art which he 
 who solely depends on his own experience may obtain too 
 late. Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit 
 to be criticised; their progress is like those who travel 
 without a map of the country. The faiore extensive an 
 author's knowledge of what has been done, the greater 
 will be his powers in knowing what to do. To obtain 
 originality, and effect discovery sometimes requires but a 
 single step, if we only know from what point to set for- 
 wards. This important event in the life of genius has 
 too often depended on chance and good fortune, and 
 many have gone down to their graves without having 
 discovered their unsuspected talent. Curran's predomi- 
 nant faculty was an exuberance of imagination when 
 exeitedby passion ; but when young he gave no evidence 
 of this peculiar faculty, nor for several years, while a 
 candidate for public distinction, was he aware of his par-" 
 tioular powers, so slowly his imagination had developed 
 itself. It was when assured of the secret of his strength 
 that his confidence, his ambition, and his industry were 
 excited. 
 
 Let the youth preserve his juvenile compositions, what- 
 ever 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 
 
JUTENTLE WORKS. 95 
 
 them, he may detect some of his predominant habits, re- 
 sume a former manner more happily, invent novelty 
 from an old subject he had rudely designed, and often 
 may steal from himself some inventive touches, which, 
 thrown into his most finished compositions, may seem a 
 happiness rather than an art. It was in contemplating 
 on some of their earliest and unfinished productions, that 
 more than one artist discovered with West that " there 
 were inventive touches of art in his first and juvenile 
 essay, which, with all his subsequent knowledge and ex- 
 perience, he has not been able to surpass." A young 
 writer, in the progress of his studies, should often recol- 
 lect a fanciful simile of Dryden — 
 
 As those who unripe veins in mines explore 
 On the rich bed again the warm turf lay, 
 
 Till time digests the yet imperfect ore ; 
 And know it will be gold another day. 
 
 The youth of genius is that " age of admiration" as 
 sings the poet of " Human Life," when the spell breathed 
 into our ear by our genius, fortunate or unfortunate, is — 
 *' Aspire !" Then we adore art and the artists. It was 
 Richardson's enthusiasm which gave Reynolds the rap- 
 tures he caught in meditating on the description of a 
 great painter ; and Reynolds thought Raphael the most 
 extraordinary man the world had ever produced. West, 
 when a youth, exclaimed that " A painter is a com- 
 panion for kings and emperors !" This was the feeling 
 which rendered the thoughts of obscurity painful and in- 
 supportable to their young minds. 
 
 But this sunshine of rapture is not always spread over 
 the spring of the youthful year. There is a season of 
 self-contest, a period of tremors, and doubts, and dark- 
 ness. These frequent returns of melancholy, sometimes 
 of despondence, which is the lot of inexperienced genius, 
 is a secret history of the heart, which has been finely 
 
96 LITEEART CHARACTER. 
 
 conveyed to us by Petrarch, in a conversatioa with John 
 of Florence, to whom the young poet often resorted 
 when dejected, to reanimate his failing powers, to con- 
 fess his faults, and to confide to him his dark and waver- 
 ing resolves. It was a question with Petrarch, whethfer 
 he should not turn away from the pursuit of literary 
 fame, hy giving another direction to his life. 
 
 " I went one day to John of Florence in one of those 
 ague-fits of faint-heartedness which often happened to 
 me; he received me with his accustomed kindness. 
 ' What ails you ?' said he, ' you seem oppressed with 
 thought : if I am not deceived, something has happened 
 to you.' ' You do not deceive yourself, my father (for 
 thus I used to call him), and yet nothing newly has hap- 
 pened to me ; but I come to confide to you that my old 
 melancholy torments me more than usual. You know 
 its nature, for my heart has always been opened to you; 
 you know all which I have done to draw myself out hf 
 the crowd, and to acquire a name ; and surely not with- 
 out some success, since I have your testimony in my 
 favour. Are you not the truest man, and the best of 
 critics, who have never ceased to bestow on me your 
 praise — and what need I more ? Have you not often 
 told me that I am answerable to God for the talents he 
 has endowed me with, if I neglected to cultivate them ? 
 Your praises were to me as a sharp spur : I applied my- 
 self to study with more ardour, insatiable even of my 
 moments. Disdaining the beaten paths, I opened a new 
 road ; and I flattered myself that assiduous labour would 
 lead to something great ; but I know not how, when I 
 thought myself highest, I feel myself fallen ; the spring 
 of my mind has dried up ; what seemed easy once, now 
 appears to me above my strength.; I stumble at every 
 step, and am ready to sink for ever into despair. I re- 
 turn to you to teach me, or at least advise me. Shall I 
 for ever quit my studies ? Shall I strike into some new 
 
PETRARCH'S LITERARY ADYISBR. 9,7" 
 
 course of. life ? My father, have pity on me ! draw me 
 ottt of tho^ frightful state m which I am lost.' I could 
 proceed no farther without shedding tears. ' Cease to 
 afflict yourself, my son,' said that good man ; ' your con- 
 "dition is not so bad as you think : the truth is,, you knew 
 little at the time you imagined you knew much. The 
 discovery of your ignorance is the first great step you 
 have made towards true knowledge. The veil is lifted 
 up, and you now view those deep shades of the soul 
 which were concealed from you by excessive presump- 
 tion. In ascending an elevated spot, we gradually dis- 
 cover many things whose existence before was not sus- 
 pected by us. Persevere in the career which you entered 
 with my advice ; feel confident that God will not aban- 
 don you : there are maladies which the patient does not 
 perceive ; but to be aware of the disease,, is the first step 
 towards the cure.' " 
 
 This remarkable literary interview is here given, that 
 it may perchance meet the eye of some kindred youth 
 at one of those lonely moments when a Shakspeare may 
 have thought himself no poet, and a Raphael believed, 
 himself no painter. Then may the tender wisdom of a 
 John of Florence, in the cloudy despondency of art,, 
 lighten up the vision of its glory ! 
 
 IifGENUOUS Yotjth! if in a constant perusal of the 
 master-writers, you see your own sentiments anticipated 
 — if, in the tumult of your mind, as it comes in contact, 
 with theirSj new sentiments arise — if, sometimes, looking 
 on the public favourite of the hour, you feel that within 
 which prompts you to imagine that you could rival or 
 surpass him — ^if, in meditating on the confessions of 
 every man of genius, for they all have their confessions, 
 you find you have experienced the same sensations from 
 the same eircumstanceSy encountered the same diflS^cultiest 
 and overcome them by the same means; then let not 
 your courage be, lost in your admiration, but listen to. 
 
98 IITERAET CHARACTER. 
 
 that " Still small voice " in your heart which cries with 
 Correggio and with Montesquieu, "Ed io ^che son 
 pittore !" 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Of the irritability of genius. — Geniua in society often in a state of 
 Buffering. — Equality of temper more prevalent among men of letters. 
 — Of the OGCupatiou of malting a great name. — Anxieties of the 
 most successful. — Of the inventors. — Writers of learning. — Writers 
 of taste. — Artists. 
 
 THE modes of life oi a man of genius, often tinctured 
 hy eccentricity and enthusiasm, maintain an" ternal 
 conflict with the monotonous and imitative habits of 
 society, as society is carried on in a great metropolis, 
 where men are necessarily alike, and where, in perpetual 
 intercourse, they shape themselves to one another. 
 
 The occupations, the amusements, and the ardour of 
 the man of genius are at discord with the artificial 
 habits of life ; in the vortexes of business, or the world 
 of pleasure, crowds of human beings are only treading 
 in one another's steps. The pleasures and the sorrows 
 of this active multitude are not his, while his are not 
 obvious to them; and his favourite occupations strength- 
 en his peculiarities, and increase his sensibility. Genius 
 in society is often in a state of sufiering. Professional 
 characters, who are themselves so often literary, yield- 
 ing to their predominant interests, conform to that 
 assumed urbanity which levels them with ordinary 
 minds; but the man of genius cannot leave himself 
 behind in the cabinet he quits ; the train of his thoughts 
 is not stopped at will, and in the range of conversa- 
 tion the habits of his mind will prevail: the poet 
 will sometimes muse till he modulates a verse; the 
 artist is sketching what a moment presents, and a 
 
IRRITABILITY OS GENIUS. 99 
 
 moment changes ; the philosophical historian is suddenly 
 absorbedj'by a new combination of thought, and, placing 
 his hands over his eyes, is thrown back into the Middle 
 Ages. Thus it happens that an excited imagination, a 
 high-toned feeling, a wandering reverie, a restlessness 
 of temper, are perpetually carrying the man of genius 
 out of the processional line of the mere conversationists. 
 Like all solitary beings, he is much too sentient, and pre- 
 pares for defence even at a random touch or a chance hit. 
 His generalising views take things only in masses, while 
 in his rapid emotions he interrogates, and doubts, and 
 is caustic ; in a word, he thinks he converses while he is 
 at his studies. Sometimes, apparently a complacent 
 listener, we are mortified by detecting the absent man : 
 now he appears humbled and spiritless, ruminating over 
 some failure which probably may be only known to 
 himself; and now haughty and hardy for a triumph he 
 has obtained, which yet remains a secret to the world. 
 No man is so apt to indulge the extremes of the most 
 Opposite feelings : he is sometimes insolent, and some- 
 times querulous ; now the. soul of tenderness and tran- 
 quillity, — then stung by jealousy, or writhing in aver- 
 sion ! A fever shakes his spirit ; a fever which has 
 sometimes generated a disease, and has even produced a 
 slight perturbation of the faculties.* In one of those 
 
 * I have given a history ot literary gutirrek from personal motives, 
 in " Quarrels of Authors," p. 529. There we find how many contro- 
 versies, ia which the public get involved, have sprung from some sud- 
 den squabble?, some negloct of petty civility, some uplucky epithet, or 
 gome casual observation dropped without much consideration, which 
 mortified or enraged the genus i/rritaMle ;' a, title which from ancient 
 day's has been assigned to every description of authors. The late Dr. 
 Wells, who had some experience in his intercourse with many literary 
 characters, observedf that "in whatever regards the fruits of thpir 
 mental labours, this is universally acknowledged to be true. Some 
 of the malevolent passions indeed frequently become in learned men 
 more than ordinarily stroflg, from want of that restraint upon their ex- 
 citement which society imposes." A puerile critic has reproached me 
 
100 IITEBART CHAEAOTBR. 
 
 manuscript notes by Lord Byron on this work, which I 
 have wished to preserve, I find his lordship observing on 
 the feelings of genius, that "the depreciation of the 
 lowest of mankind is. more painful than the applause of 
 the highest is pleasing." Such is the confession of 
 genius, and such its liability to hourly pain. 
 
 Once we were nearly receiving from the hand of genius 
 the most curious sketches of the temper, the irascible hu- 
 mours, the delicacy of soul, even to its shadowiness, from 
 the" warm sbozzos of Burns, when he began a diary of the 
 heart, — a narrative of characters and events, and a chro- 
 nology of his emotions. It was natural for such a crea- 
 ture of sensation and passion to project such a regular; 
 task, but quite impossible for him to get through it. The 
 paper-book that he conceived would have recorded ajl 
 these things turns out, therefore, but a very imperfect 
 document. Imperfect as it was, it has been thought 
 proper not to give it entire. Yet there we view a warm 
 original mind, when he first stepped into the polished circles 
 of society, discoyering that he could no longer " pour outi, 
 his bosom, his every thought and floating fancy, his very, 
 inmost soul^ with unreserved confidence to another, with- 
 out hazard of losing part of that respect which man de- 
 serves from man; or, from the unavoidable imperfections 
 attending human nature, of one day repenting his confi- 
 dence." This was the first lesson he learned at Edinburgh, 
 and it was as a substitute for such a human being that he 
 bought a paper-book to keep under look and key : " a. 
 security at least equal," says he, " to the bosom of any 
 friend whatever." Let the man of genius pause over the 
 fragments of this " paper-book ;" — ^it will instruct as much 
 as any open confession of a criminal at the moment he is, 
 about to suffer. No man was more afflicted with that 
 
 for having drawn 1117 description entirely from my own fancy: I 
 
 have taken it from life I See further symptoms of this disease at the 
 close of the chapter on Sdf-^raise in the present work. 
 
BUEK'S DIARY. JQl 
 
 miserable pride, the infiirmity of men of imagination, 
 ■whicli is so jealously alive, even among their best friends, 
 as to exact a perpetual acknowledgment of their powers. 
 Our poet, with all his gratitude and veneration for " the 
 noble Giencairn," was " wonnded to the soul " because 
 his lordship showed " so much attention, engrossing atten- 
 tion, to the only blockhead at table; the whole company 
 consisted of his lordship, Dunderpate, and myself." 
 This Dunderpate, who dined with Lord Glenoairn, might 
 have been a useful citizen, who in some points is of more 
 value than an irritable bard. Burns was equally offended 
 with another patron, who was also a literary brother, 
 Dr. Blair. At the moment, he too appeared to be neg- 
 lecting the irritable poet " for the mere carcass of great- 
 ness, or when his eye measured the diference of their 
 point of elevation ; I say to myself, with scarcely any 
 emotion," (he might have added, except a good deal of 
 painful contempt,) " what do I care for him or his pomp 
 either ?" — " Dr. Blair's vanity is proverbially known 
 among his acquaintances," adds Burns, at the moment 
 that the solitary haughtiness of his own genius had en- 
 tirely escaped his self-observation. ** 
 
 This character of genius is not singular. ■Grimm tells 
 of Marivaux, that though a good man, there was some- 
 thing dark and suspicious in his character, which made 
 it difficult to keep on terms with him ; the niost innocent 
 word would wound him, and he was always inclined to 
 think that there was an intention to mortify him ; this 
 disposition made him unhappy, and rendered his ac- 
 quaintance too painful to endure. 
 
 What a moral paradox, but what an unquestionable 
 fact, is the wayward irritability of some of the finest 
 geniuses, which is often weak to effeminacy, and capri- 
 cious to childishness ! while minds of a less delicate tex- 
 ture are not frayed and fretted by casual frictions ; and 
 plain sense with a coarser grain, is sufficient to keep 
 
102 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 down these aberrations of their feelings. How mortify- 
 ing is the list of — 
 
 fears of the brave and follies of the wise 1 
 
 Many have been sore and implacable on an illusion to 
 some personal defect— on the obscurity of their birth — on 
 some peculiarity of habit ; and have suffered themselves 
 to be governed in life by nervous whims and chimeras, 
 equally fantastic and trivial. This morbid sensibility 
 lurks in the temperament of genius, and the infectioli is 
 often discovered where it is not always suspected. 
 Cumberland declared that the sensibility of some men 
 of genius is so quick and captious, that you must first 
 consider whom they can be happy with, befdre you can 
 promise yourself any happiness with them : if you bring 
 uncongenial humours into contact with each other, all 
 the objects of society will be frustrated by inattention to 
 the proper grouping of the guests. Look round on our 
 contemporaries ; every day furnishes facts which confirm 
 our principle. Among the vexations of Pope waS the 
 libel of " the pictured shape ;"* and even the robuSt mind 
 of Johnson could not suffer to be exhibited as " blinking 
 Sam."f Milton must have delighted in contemplating 
 his own person ; and the engraver not having reached 
 our sublime bard's ideal grace, he has pointed his indig- 
 nation in four iambics. The praise of a skipping ap6 
 raised the feeling of envy in that child of nature and 
 genius. Goldsmith. Voiture, the son of a vintner, like 
 
 * He was represented as an ill-made monkey in the frontispiece to 
 a satire noted in " Quarrels of Authors," p. 286 (last edition). — Ed. 
 
 \ Johnson was disploE^sed at the portrait Reynolds painted of him 
 which dwelt on his near-sightedness ; declaring that " a man's defects 
 should never be painted." The same defect was made the subject of 
 a caricature particularly allusive to critical prejudices in his " Lives of 
 the Poets," in which he is pictured as an owl " blinking at the stars." 
 —Ed. • 
 
SENSITIVENESS OF GENIUS. 103 
 
 our Prior, was so mortified whenever reminded of his 
 original occupation, that it was bitterly said, that wine, 
 which cheered the hearts of all men, sickened the heart 
 of Voiture. Akenside ever considered his lameness as an 
 unsupportable misfortune, for it continually reminded 
 him of the fall of the cleaver from one of his father's 
 blocks. Beccaria, invited to Paris by the literati, ar- 
 rived melancholy and silent, and abruptly returned home. 
 At that moment this great man was most miserable from 
 a fit of jealousy : a young female had extinguished all 
 his philosophy. The poet Rousseau was the son of a 
 cobbler ; and when his honest parent waited at the door of 
 the theatre to embrace his son on the success of his first 
 piece, genius, whose sensibility is not always virtuous, 
 repulsed the venerable father with insult and contempt. 
 But I will no longer proceed from folly to crime. 
 
 Those who give so many sensations to others must 
 themselves possess an excess and a variety of feelings. 
 We find, indeed, that they are censured for their extreme 
 irritability ; and that happy equality of temper so preva- 
 lent among men of leiteks, and which is conveniently 
 acquired by men of the world, has been usually refused to 
 great mental powers, or to fervid dispositions — authors 
 and artists. The man of wit becomes petulant, the pro- 
 found thinker morose, and the vivacious ridiculously 
 thoughtless. 
 
 When Rousseau once retired to a village, he had to 
 learn to endure its conversation ; for this purpose he was 
 compelled to invent an expedient to get rid of his uneasy 
 sensations. "Alone, I have never known ennui, even 
 when perfectly unoccupied ; my imagination, filling the 
 void, was sufficient to busy me. It. is only the inactive 
 chit-chat of the room, when every one is seated face to 
 face, and only moving their tongues, which I never could 
 support. There to be a fixture, nailed with one hand on 
 the other, to settle the state of the weather, or watch the 
 
lOi IITEKARY CHARACTEa 
 
 flies about one, or, what is worse, to be bandying compli- 
 ments, this to me is not bearable." He hit on the expe- 
 dient of making lace-strings, carrying his working cush- 
 ion in his visits, to keep the peace with the country 
 gossips. 
 
 Is the occupation of making a great name less anxious 
 and precarious than that of making a great fortune ? the 
 progress of a man's capital is unequivocal to him, but 
 that of the fame of authors and artists is for the greater 
 part- of their lives of an ambiguous nature. They become 
 whatever the minds or knowledge of others make them ; 
 they are the creatures of the prejudices and the predispo- 
 sitions of others, and must suffer from those precipitate 
 judgments which are the result of such prejudices and 
 such predispositions. Time only is the certain friend of 
 literary worth, for time makes the world disagree among 
 themselves ; and when those who condemn discover that 
 there are others who approve, the weaker party loses 
 itself in the stronger, and at length they learn that the 
 author was fer more reasonable than their prejudices had 
 allowed them to conceive. It is thus, however, that the 
 regard which men of genius find in one place they lose in 
 another. We may often smile at the local gradations of 
 genius; the fervid esteem in which an author is held 
 here, and the cold indifference, if not contempt, he en- 
 counters in another place ; here the man of learning is 
 ■condemned as a heavy drone, and there the man of wit 
 annoys the unwitty listener. 
 
 And are not the anxieties of even the most successful 
 men of genius renewed at every work — often quitted in 
 despair, often returned to with rapture ? the same agita- 
 tion of the spirits, the same poignant delight, the same 
 weariness, the same dissatisfaction, the same querulous 
 languishmenit after excellence ? Is the man of genius an 
 mvENTOB ? the discovery is contested, or it is not com- 
 prehended for ten years after, perhaps not during his 
 
CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM. I05 
 
 whole life ; even men of science are as children before 
 ■him. Sir Thomas Bodley wrote to Lord Bacon, remon- 
 strating with him on his new mode of philosophising. 
 It seems the fate of all originality of thinking to fee im- 
 mediately opposed ; a contemporary is not prepared for 
 its comprehension, and too often cautiously avoids it, 
 from the prudential motive which turns away from a new 
 and solitary path. Bacon was not at all understood at 
 home in his own day ; his reputation — for it was not ce- 
 lebrity — ^was confined to his history of Henry VII., and 
 his Essays; it was long after his death before English 
 writers ventured to quote Bacon as an authority; and 
 with equal simplicity and grandeur, Bacon called himself 
 " the servant of posterity," Montesquieu gave his Esprit 
 des Zioix to be read by that man in France, whom he 
 conceived to be the best judge, and in return received 
 the most mo^rtifying remarks. The great philosopher ex- 
 claimed in despair, " I see my own age is not ripe enough 
 to understand my work; however it shall be published!" 
 When Kepler published the first rational work on comets, 
 it was condemned, even by the learned, as a wild dream. 
 CoperniouB so much dreaded the prejudice of mankind 
 against his treatise on " The Revolutions of the Heaven- 
 ly Bodies," that by a species of continence of all others 
 most difficult to a philosopher, says Adam Smith, he de- 
 tained it in his closet for thirty years together. Linnaeus 
 once in despair abandoned his beloved studies, from a 
 too irritable feeling of the ridieule in which, as it ap- 
 peared to him, a professor Siegesbeck had involved his 
 famous system. Penury, neglect, and labour Linnaeus 
 could endure, but tjiat his botany should become the ob- 
 ject of ridicule for all Stockholm, shook the nerv«s of 
 this great inventor in his science. Let him speak for 
 himself. " No one cared how many sleepless nights and 
 tpilsome hours I had passed, while all with one voice -de" 
 clared, that Siegesbeck had annihilated me. I took my 
 
106 LITERARY OHABACTEB. 
 
 leave of Flora, who bestows on me nothing but Sieges- 
 beeks ; and condemned my too numerous observations a 
 thousand times over to eternal oblivion. What a fool 
 have I been to waste so much time, to spend my days in 
 a study which yields no better fruit, and makes me the 
 laughing-stock of the world." Such are the. cries of the 
 irritability of genius, and such are often the causes. The 
 world was in danger of losing a new science, had not 
 Linneeus returned to the discoveries which he had forsa- 
 ken in the madness of the mind ! The great Sydenham, 
 who, like our Harvey and our Hunter, effected a revolu- 
 tion in the science of medicine, and led on alone by the 
 independence of his genius, attacked the most prevailing 
 prejudices, so highly provoked the malignant emulatioij 
 of his rivals, that a conspiracy was raised against the 
 father of our modern practice to banish him out of the 
 college, as " guilty of medical heresy." John Himter was 
 a great discoverer in his own science ; but one who well 
 knew him has told us, that few of his contemporaries 
 perceived the ultimate object of his pursuits; and his 
 strong and solitary genius laboured to perfect his designs 
 without the solace of sympathy, without one cheering, ap- 
 probation. "We bees do not provide honey for our- 
 selves," exclaimed Van Helmont, when worn out by the 
 toils of chemistry, and still contemplating, amidst tribu- 
 lation and persecution, and approaching death, his "Tree 
 of Life," which he imagined he had discovered in the ce- 
 dar. But with a sublime melancholy his spirit breaks 
 out; "My mind breathes some unheard-of thing within; 
 though I, as unprofitable for this life, shall be buried !" 
 Such were the mighty but indistinct anticipations of this 
 visionary inventor, the father of modern chemistry ! 
 
 I cannot quit this shoi-t record of the fates of the in- 
 ventors in science, without adverting to another cause of 
 that irritability of genius which is so closely connected 
 with their pursuits. If we look into the history of theoT 
 
MISarVIN'GS OF INVENTORS. lOf 
 
 ries, we shall be surprised at the vast number which have 
 " not left a rack behind." And do we suppose that the 
 inventors themselves were not at times alarmed by se- 
 cret doubts of their soundness and stability ? They felt, 
 too often for their repose, that the noble architecture 
 which they had raised might be built on moveable sands, 
 and be found only in the dust of libraries ; a cloudy day, 
 or a fit of indigestion, would deprive an inventor of his 
 theory all at once ; and as one of them said, " after din- 
 ner, all that I have written in the morning appears to me 
 dark, incongruous, nonsensical." At such moments we 
 should find this man of genius in no pleasant mood. The 
 true cause of this nervous state cannot, nay, must not, 
 be confided to the world: the honour of his darling 
 theory will always be dearer to his pride than the con- 
 fession of even slight doubts which may shake its truth. 
 It is a curious fact which we have but recently dis- 
 covered, that Rousseau was disturbed by a terror he ex- 
 perienced, and which we well know was not unfounded, 
 that his theories of education were false and absurd. He 
 could not endure to read a page in his own " Emile"* 
 without disgust after the work had been published ! He 
 atsknoW^ledged that there were more suffrages against his 
 notions than for them. " I am not disple/ased," says he, 
 "with myself on the style and eloquence, but I still 
 dread that my writings are good for nothing at- the 
 bottbm, and that all my theories are full of extrava- 
 gance." [Je crains toujours que jephohe par h fond, et 
 que tous mes systhtnes ne sont que des extravagances.'\ 
 Hartley with his " Vibrations and Vibratiuncles," Lieb- 
 nitz with his " Monads," Cudworth with his " Plastic Na- 
 tures," Malebranohe with his paradoxical doctrine of 
 " Seeing all things in God," and Burnet with his hereti- 
 cal " Theory Of the Earth," must unquestionably at times 
 
 *Iii a letter by Hume to Blair, written iu 1166, apparently first pub- 
 lished in the Literary Gazette, Nov. If, 1821. 
 
108 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 have betrayed an irritability which those about them may 
 have attributed to temper, rather than to genius. 
 
 Is our man of genius — ^not the victim of fancy, but the 
 slave of truth — a learned author ? Of the living waters 
 of human knowledge it cannot be said that " If a man 
 drink thereof, he shall never thirst again." What 
 volumes remain to open ! what manuscript but mates 
 his heart palpitate ! There is no term in researches which 
 new facts may not alter, and a single date may not 
 dissolve. Truth ! thou fascinating, but severe mistress, 
 thy adorers are often broken down in thy servitude, 
 performing a thousand unregarded task-works ! Now 
 winding thee through thy labyrinth with a single thread, 
 •often unravelling — now feeling their way in darkness, 
 doubtful if it be thyself they are touching. How much 
 of the real labour of genius and erudition must remain 
 concealed from the world, and never be reached ^by 
 their penetration 1 Montesquieu has described this feel- 
 ing after its agony : " I thought I should have killed 
 myself these three months to finish a morceau (for his 
 great work), which I wished to insert, on the origin and 
 revolutions of the civil laws in France. You will read 
 it in three hours ; but I do assure you that it cost me so 
 much labour that it has whitened my hair." Mr. Hallam, 
 stopping to admire the genius of Gibbon, exclaims, " In 
 this, as in many other places, the masterly boldness and 
 precision of his outline, which astonish those who have 
 trodden parts of the same field, is apt to escape an 
 uninformed reader." Thrice has my learned friend, 
 Sharon Turner, recomposed, with renewed researches, 
 the history of our ancestors, of which Milton and Hume 
 had despaired — ^thrice, amidst the self-contests of ill-health 
 and professional duties ! 
 
 The man of erudition in closing his elaborate work is 
 still exposed to the fatal omissions of wearied vigilance, 
 or the accidental knowledge of some inferior mind, and 
 
SENSITrVENBSS TO CRITICISM. 109 
 
 always to the reigning taste, whatever it chance to be, of 
 the public. Burnet criticised Varillas unsparingly;* 
 hut when he wrote history himself, Harmer's " Specimen 
 of Errors in Burnet's History," returned Burnet the 
 pangs which he had inflicted on another. Newton's 
 favourite work was his " Chronology," which he had 
 written over fifteen times, yet he desisted from ita 
 publication during his life-time, from the ill-usage of 
 which he complained. Even the "Optics" of Newton 
 had no character at home till noticed in France. The 
 calm temper of our great philosopher was of so fearful a 
 nature in regard to criticism, that Whiston declares that 
 he would not publish his attack on the " Chronology," lest 
 it might have killed our philosopher ; and thus Bishop 
 Stillingfleet's end was hastened by Locke's confuta'tion 
 of his metaphysics. The feelings of Sir John Marsham 
 could hardly be less irritable when he found his great 
 work tainted, by an accusation that it was not fiiendly to 
 revelation.f When the learned Pocock published a 
 specimen of his translation of Abulpharagias, an 
 Arabian historian, in 1649, it excited great interest ; but 
 in 1663, when he gave the world the complete version, it 
 met with no encouragement : in the course of those 
 thirteen, years, the genius of the times had changed, and 
 Oriental studies were no longer in request. 
 
 The great Verulam profoundly felt the retardment of 
 his fame ; for he- has pathetically expressed this sentiment 
 in his testament, where he bequeaths his name to pos- 
 terity, ATTEE SOME GENEEATIC^NS SHALL BE paSt. BrUCe 
 
 * For an account of this work, and Burnet's sxipose Of it, see " Curi- 
 osities of Literature," vol. i. p. 132. — Ed. 
 
 f This great work the Canon Chronims, was published in 16Y2, and 
 wag the first attempt to make the Egyptian chronology clear and 
 intelligible, and to reconcile the whole to the Scripture chronology; a 
 labour he had commenced in Biairiba Ohronologica, published in 
 1649.— Ed. 
 
1]0 IITERAET CHARACTER. 
 
 sunk into his grave defrauded of that just fame which 
 his pride and vivacity perhaps too keenly prized, at least 
 for his happiness, and which he authoritatively exacted 
 from an unwilling puhlic. Mortified and indignant at 
 the reception of his great labour hy the cold-hearted 
 scepticism of little minds, and the maliciousness of idling 
 wits, he, whose fortitude had toiled through a life of 
 difficulty and danger, could not endure the laugh and 
 scorn of public opinion ; for Bruce there was a simoon 
 more dreadful than the Arabian, and from which genius 
 cannot hide its head. Yet Bruce only met with the fate 
 which Marco Polo had before encountered; whose 
 faithful narrative had been contemned by his contem- 
 poraries, and who was long thrown aside among le- 
 gendary writers.* 
 
 Harvey, though his life was prolonged to his eightieth 
 year, hardly lived to see his great discovery of the circu- 
 lation of the blood established : no physician adopted It ; 
 and when at length it was received, one party attempted to 
 rob Harvey, of the honour of the discovery, while another 
 asserted that it was so obvious, that they could only ex- 
 •press their astonishment that it had ever escaped obser- 
 vation. Incredulity and envy are the evil spirits which 
 have often dogged great inventors to their tbmbj and 
 there only have vanished. — But I seem writing the '' ca- 
 
 * His stories of the wealth and population of China, which he 
 described as consisting of millions, obtained for him the nickname of 
 Marco Milione among the Venetians and other small Italian states, who 
 were unable to comprehend the greatness of his trutliful narratives of 
 Eastern travel. Upon his death-bed he was adjured by his friends to 
 retract his statements, which he indignantly refused. It was long 
 after ere his truthfulness was established by other travellers ; the 
 Venetian populace gave his house the name La Oorte di MiMoni: and 
 a vulgar caricature of the great traveller was always introduced in 
 their carnivals, who was termed Marco MiUone; and delighted them 
 witii the most absurd stories, in which everything was computed by 
 millions. — ^Ed. ' 
 
EEPUTATIOJT DIFFICULT OF ACQUIRT. m 
 
 lamities of authors," and have only begun the cata- 
 logue. 
 
 The reputation of a writer of taste is subject to more 
 difficulties than any other. Similar was the fate of the 
 finest ode-writers in our poetry. On their publication, 
 the odes of Collins could find no readers ; and those of 
 Gray, though ushered into the reading world by the 
 fashionable press of Walpole, were condemned as failures. 
 When Kaoine produced his " Athalie," it. was not at all 
 relished: BoUeau indeed declared that he understood 
 these matters better than the public, and prophesied that 
 the public would return to it : they did so ; but it was 
 sixty years afterwards; and Racine died without sus- 
 pecting that *''Athalie" was his masterpiece. I have 
 heard one of our great poets regret that he had devoted 
 so much of his life to the cultivation of his art, which 
 arose from a project made in the golden vision of his 
 youth: "at a time," said he, "when I thought that the 
 fountain could never be dried up." — " Your baggage will 
 reach posterity," was observed. — " There is much to 
 spare," was the answer. 
 
 Every day we may observe, of a work of genius, that 
 those parts which have all the raciness of the soil, and 
 as such are most liked by its admirers, are those which 
 are the most criticised. Modest critics shelter them- 
 selves under that general amnesty too freely granted, 
 that tastes are allowed to differ ; but we should approxi- 
 mate much nearer to the truth, if we were to say, that 
 but few of mankind are prepared to relish the beautiful 
 with that enlarged taste which comprehends all the forms 
 of feeling which genius may assume ; forms which may 
 •be necessarily associated with defects. A man of genius 
 composes in a state of intellectual emotion, and the magic 
 of his style Consists in the movements of his soul ; but 
 the art of conveying those movements is far separated 
 from the feeling which inspires them. The idea,; in the 
 
112 LITEKART OHARACTEK 
 
 mind is not always, found under the pen, any more than 
 the artist's conception can always breathe in his pencil. 
 Like Flamingo's image, which he kept polishing till his 
 friend exclaimed, " What perfection would you have ?" — 
 " Alas !" exclaimed the sculptor, " the original I am la- 
 bouring to come up to is in my head, but not yet in my 
 hand." 
 
 The writer toils, and repeatedly toils, to throw into 
 our minds that sympathy with which w& hang over the 
 illusion of his pages, and become himself. Ariosto wrote 
 sixteen diiferent ways th« celebrated stanza descriptive 
 of a tempest, as appeal's by his MSS. at Ferrara ; and the 
 version he preferred was the last of the sixteen. We 
 know that Petrarch made forty-four alterations of a single 
 verse : " whether for the thought, the expression, or the 
 harmony, it is evident that as many operations in the 
 heart, the head, or the ear of the poet occurred," observes 
 a man of genius, TJgo Foscolo. Quintilian and Horace 
 dread the over-fondness of an author for his compositions : 
 alteration is not always improvement. A picture over- 
 finished fails in its effect. If the hand of the artist can- 
 not leave it, how much beauty may it undo ! yet still he 
 is lingering, still strengthening the weak, still subduing 
 the daring, still searching for that single idea which 
 awakens so many in the minds of others, while often, as 
 it once happened, the dash of despair hangs the fbaiaa on 
 the horse's nostrils. I have known- a great sculptor, who 
 for twenty years delighted himself with forming in his 
 mind the nymph his hand was always creating. How 
 rapturously he beheld her ! what inspiration ! what illu- 
 sion ! Alas ! the last five years spoiled the beautiful- 
 which he had once reached, and could not stop and 
 finish ! 
 
 The art of composition, indeed, is of such slow attain- 
 ment, that a man of genius, late in life, may discover how 
 its secret conceals itself in the habit ; how discipline con- 
 
SLOWNESS OF GRKAT WORKS. 113 
 
 sista in exercise, how perfection comes from experience, 
 and how unity is the last effort of judgment. When Fox 
 meditated on a history which should last with the lan- 
 guage, he met his evil genius 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 complained, while he mourned 
 oyer the fragment of genius which, after such zealous 
 preparation, he dared not complete. ■ Curran, an orator 
 of vehement eloquence, often strikingly original, when 
 late in life he was desirous of cultivating literary compo- 
 sition, unaccustomed to its more gradual march, found a 
 pen cold, and destitute of every grace. 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 may be born, the 
 art of writing is not easily obtained. The existing man- 
 uscripts of Rousseau display as many erasures as those 
 of Ariosto or Petrasch ; they show his eagerness to dash 
 down his first thoughts, and the art by which he raised 
 them to the impassioned style of his imagination. The 
 memoir of Gibbon was composed seven or nine times, 
 and, after all, was left unfinished ; and Bufibn tells us 
 that he wrote his " Epoques de la Nature " eighteen times 
 before it satisfied his taste. Burns's anxiety in finishing 
 his poems was great ; " All my poetry," said he, " is the 
 efiect of easy composition, but of laborious correction." 
 
 Pope, when employed on the Iliad, found it not only 
 occupy his thoughts by day, but haunting his dreams 
 by night, and once wished himself hanged, to get rid of 
 Homer: and that he experienced often such literary ago- 
 nies, witness his description of the depressions and eleva- 
 tions of genius : 
 
 WIio pants for glory, finds but short repose ; 
 A breath revives hiBi, or a breath o'erthrows I 
 
114 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 When Romney undertook to commence the first sub- 
 ject for the Shakspeare Gallery, in the rapture of enthu- 
 siasm, amidst the sublime ^nd pathetic labouring in his, 
 whole mind, arose the terror of failure. The subject, 
 chosen was " The Tempest ;" and, as Hayley truly ob- 
 serves, it created many a tempest, in the fluctuating 
 spirits of Roniney. The yeheinent desire of that perfee-^ 
 tion which geiiius conceives, and cannot always execute, 
 held a perpetual contest, with that dejection of spirits, 
 which degrades the unhappy sufferer, and casta him, 
 grovelling among the mean of his class. In a nationaJL 
 work, a man of genius pledges his honour to the world for 
 its performance; but to redeein that pledge, there is a 
 darkness in the uncertain issue, and he is risking bis. hon-- 
 our for ever. By that work he will alwa,ys be j^udged,.. 
 for public failures are never forgotte^i,, and" it is not then 
 a party, but the public itself, who become his adversaries.. 
 With Romney it was " a fever of the mad ;"' and bis 
 friends could scarcely inspire him with sufficient courage, 
 to proceed with his arduous picture, .which e3?ei;c!is,ed,' his, 
 imagination and his pencil, for several years. I have 
 heard that he built a painting-room purposely for this, 
 picture ; and never did an anchorite poup fortb a n^ore 
 fervent orison to Heaven, than Romney when thisi labour 
 was complete. He had a fine genius, with all its solitary 
 feelings, but he was uneducated, and incoinpetent even to 
 write a letter ; yet on this occasion, relie,vied ffoni, , his 
 intense anxiety under so long a work, he wrote one of the 
 most eloquent. It is a document in the histpry of genius, 
 and reveals all those feelings which qre here too faijitly 
 described,* I once heard iin amiable author, whose, lite- 
 rary career has perhaps not, answered, the. fond hopes of 
 
 * " My Dear Fbienb, — Tout kindness in rejoicing so heartily at the 
 birth of my picture has given me great satisfaction. 
 
 "There has been an anxiety labouring in my mind the greater part 
 of the last twelvemonth. At times iihad, nearly over.whelmed me. I 
 
ANSIETT OF AUTHORS. 113 
 
 his youth, half in anger and in love, declare that he 
 ■would retire to some solitude, -w-here, if any one would' 
 follow him, he would found a new order — th6 order of 
 
 THE DISAPPOINTED. 
 
 Thus the days of-a man of genius are passed in labours 
 as unremitting and exhausting as those of the artisan. 
 The world is not always aware, that to sonie, meditation, 
 composition, and even conversation, may inflict pains 
 undetected by the eye and the tenderness of friendship. 
 Whenever Rousseau passed a morning in society, it was 
 observed, that in the evening he was dissatisfied and dis- 
 tressed ; and John Hunter, in ■ a mixed company, found 
 that conversation fatigued, instead of amtising hiin, 
 Hawkesworth, in the second paper of the "-Adventurer," 
 has drawn, from his own feelings, an eloquent compara- 
 tive estimate of intellectual with corporeal labour*; it 
 may console the humble mechanic ; and Plato, in his 
 work on " Laws," seems to have been aware of this 
 analogy, for he consecrates all working m«n or artisans 
 to Vulcan and Minervsf, because both those deities alike are 
 hard labourer^. Yet with genius all does not' termiiid.tej, 
 even with the most skilful labour. What the toiling 
 Vulcan and the thoughtful Minerva' may waht,wili too- 
 ofteil be absent — the presence of the Graces. Ik; the alle- 
 gorical picture of the School of Design, by Carlo Maratti, 
 where the students- are led through their various studies, 
 in the opening clouds- above the academy are seen the 
 Graces, hovering over their pupils, with an inscription 
 they must ofteii recollect— &wsa di noi ogni faiicm 
 h vana. 
 
 The anxious uncertainty of an author for his- composi"- ' 
 tions resembles the anxiety of a lover when he has written 
 
 thought I should absolutely Ka^ siink into dfespair. 0! what a kind 
 friend ia in those times! I thank God^ -whatever my picture may be, 
 i can say thus much, I am a- greater philosopher and a better Chria- 
 tian." 
 
116 LITERAEY CHAEAOTER. 
 
 to a mistress who has not yet decided on his claims; 
 he repents his labour, for he thinks he has written too 
 much, while he 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, in a parallel between ambition and 
 genius, has distinguished them in this ; that while " am- 
 bition perseveres in the desire of acquiring power, genius 
 Jlaffs of itself. Genius in the midst of society is a pain, 
 an internal fever which would require to be treated as a 
 r'eal disease, if the records of glory did not soften the 
 sufierings it produces." — " Athenians ! what troubles 
 have you not cost me," exclaimed Demosthenes, " that I 
 may be talked of by you !" 
 
 These moments of anxiety often darken the brightest, 
 hours of genius. Racine had extreme sensibility; jthe 
 pain inflicted by a severe criticism outweighed all the 
 applause he received. He seems to have felt, what he 
 was often 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.* Cor- 
 neille's objections he would attribute to jealousy — at his 
 pieces when burlesqued at the Italian theatref he would 
 smile outwardly, though sick at heart ; but his son in- 
 forms us, that a stroke of raillery from his witty friend 
 Chapelle, whose pleasantry hardly sheathed 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. More than once Molifere 
 
 * See the article "On the Influence of a bad temper in Criticism, "in 
 " Calamities of Authors," for a notice of Dennis and his career. Ed. 
 
 f See the article on "The Sensibility of Racine " in "Literary Mis- 
 cellanies " (in the present volume), and that on "Parody," in " Curiosi- 
 ties of Literature," vol ii., p. 469. — Ed. 
 
ANXIETY 01- AUTHORS. 117 
 
 and Racine, in vexation of spirit, resolved to abandon 
 their dr'amatic career; it was Boileau who ceaselessly 
 animated their languor: "Posterity," he cried, "will 
 avenge the injustice of our %ge !" And Congreve's 
 comedies met with such moderate success, that it appears 
 the author was extremely mortified, and on the ill recep- 
 tion of The Way of the World, determined to write no 
 more for the stage. When he told Voltaire, on the 
 French wit's visit, that Voltaire must consider him as. a 
 private gentleman, and not as an author, — which apparent 
 affectation called down on Congreve the sarcastic sever- 
 ity of the French author,* — more of mortification and hu- 
 miility might have been in Congreve's language than of 
 affectation or pride. 
 
 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 discus- 
 sions, and either occasioned or increased a mental aliena- 
 tion. In one of his letters, we find that he repents the 
 composition of his great poem, for although his own 
 taste approved of that marvellous, which still fornis a 
 noble part of its creation, yet he confesses that his cold 
 reasoning critics have decided that the history of his 
 hero, Godfrey, required another species of conduct. 
 " Hence," cries the unhappy bard, " doubts torment me ; 
 but for the past, and what is done, I know of no remedy ;" 
 and he longs to precipitate the publication, that " he may 
 be delivered from misery and agony." He solemnly 
 swears — "Did not the circumstances of my situation 
 compel me, I would not print it, even perhaps during 
 my life, I so much doubt of its success." Such was the 
 painful state of fear and doubt experienced by the author 
 of the " Jerusalem Delivered," when he gave it to the 
 world ; a state of suspense, among the children of im- 
 
 * Voltaire quietly said he should not have troubled himself to visit 
 him if he had been merely a private gentlpmaa. — Ed. 
 
118 LITBBABT CHARACTER. 
 
 agiaation, in WHcli none are more liable to participate 
 than the true sensitive artist. We may now inspect the 
 severe correction of Tasso's muse, in the fac-simile of a 
 ■page of his manuscript| in Mr. Dibdin's late " Tour." 
 She seems to have inflicted tortures on his pen, supassr 
 ing even those which may be seen in the fac-simjle pag^ 
 which, thirty years ago, I gave of Pope's Homer.* At 
 Florence may still be viewed the many works begun and 
 abandoned by the genius of Michael Angelo ; they are 
 preserved inviolate — " so sacred is the terror of Michael 
 Angelo's genius !" exclaims Forsyth. These works are 
 not always to be considered as failures of the chisel; 
 they appear rather to have been rejected for coming 
 short of the artist's first conceptions : yet, in a Strain of 
 sublime poetry, he has preserved his sentiments on the 
 force of intellectual labour ; he thought that there was 
 nothing which the imagination conceived, that could not 
 be made visible in marble, if the hand were made to 
 obey the mind : — ■ 
 
 Kon ha rottimo artista atcun conoetto, 
 Ch' un marmo solo in ae nou cireoscriva 
 Col suo soverchio, e solo a qneHo arriva 
 
 Ija man che obbedlsce all' iutelletto. 
 
 IMITATED. 
 
 The sculptor never yet conqeiyfid 9 thought 
 Tli^t yielding marble has refused to aid ; 
 
 But never with a mastery he wrought — 
 Save when the hand the intellect obeyed. 
 
 An interesting domestic story has been preserved of 
 Gesner, who so zealously devoted hi§ graver and his 
 pencil to the arts. His sensibility was ever struggling 
 after that ideal excellence which he could not attain. 
 Often he sunk into fits of melancholy, and, gentle as he 
 
 * It now forma the frontispiece to vol. ii. of the last edition of the 
 " Curiosities of Literature." — ^Ed. 
 
■INTELLECTTTAI LABOUR. IIQ 
 
 was, the tenderness of his wife and friends could ntft 
 soothe his distempered feelings; it was necessary to 
 abandon him to his own thoughts, till, aftet 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 
 eye fixed on one of his pictures : it was a group of fauns 
 with young shepherds dancing at the entrance of a 
 cavern shaded with vinfes ; his eye appeared at length to 
 glisten ; and a sudden return to good humour broke out 
 in this lively apostrophe — " Ah ! see those playful chil- 
 dren, they always dance J" 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 
 artisans* — there are also some sorrows peculiar to them^ 
 and which the world can neither pity nor soften, because 
 they do not enter into their experience. The querulous 
 language of so many men of genius has been «ometime3 
 attributed to causes very different from the real ones^- 
 the most fortunate live to see their talents contested and 
 their best works decried. Assuredly many an author has 
 sunk into his grave with6ut the consciousness of having- 
 obtained that fame for which he had sacrificed an arduous 
 life. The too feeling Smollett 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 ingenuously what I had to expect 
 in the capacity of an mutkoi; I should, in all probability, 
 hare spared myself the ineredible labour and chagrin I 
 
 * See Ramaainl, " De Morbia Artifldufti Diatfiba," which Dr. James 
 translated in 1750. It is » sad reflection, resulting ft-om this curious 
 treatise, that the arts entail no small mischief upon their respective 
 workmen; so that th« means by which they lire are too often the 
 occasion of their being hurried out of the world. 
 
120 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 have since undergone." And Smollett was a popular 
 writer ! Pope's solemn declaration in the preface to his 
 collected works comes by no means short of Smollett's 
 avowal. Hume's philosophical indifference could often 
 suppress that irritability which Pope and Smollett fully 
 indulged. 
 
 But were the feelings of Hume more obtuse, or did his 
 temper, gentle as it was by constitution, 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 !" 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 sup- 
 pressed resentment — " His forcible mode of expresskjuj" 
 the ' brilliant quick movements of his eyes, and the ges- 
 tures of his body," these betrayed the pangs of con- 
 tempt, 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 advertise- 
 ment is marked by farther irritability. He contemptu- 
 ously offers the purchasers of his " Analysis of Beauty," 
 to present them gratis with an " eighteenpenny pam- 
 phlet," 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'at- 
 tempts to Conceal his irritation by offering to dispose gra- 
 tuitously of the criticism which had disturbed his nights.* 
 
 * Hogarth was not without reason for exasperation. He was Se- 
 verely attacked for his theories about tlie curved line of beauty, which 
 was branded as a foolish attempt to prove crookedness elegant, and 
 himself vulgarly caricatured. It was even asserted that the theory 
 was stolen from Lomazzo. — Ed. 
 
IBEIT ABILITY OF GENIUS. 121 
 
 Parties confederate against a man of genius, — as hap- 
 pened 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 Phaedra, 
 that Boileau addressed to him an epistle " On the Utility to 
 he 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 
 >vhioh his own age refused to his early and his late labour. 
 That great man was, however, compelled by his injured 
 feelings, 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 sub- 
 terfuge to which a great genius was forced. The acquaint- 
 ances of the poet Collins probably complained of his 
 wayward humours and irritability ; but how could they 
 sympathise 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 immor- 
 tal odes ? Can we forget the dignified complaint of the 
 Rambler, with which he awfully closes his work, appeal- 
 ing 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 aifections 
 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 
 
 * See " Quarrels of Authors," p. 403, on the confederacy of several 
 ■wits against D'Avenant, a great genius; where I discovered that a 
 volum,e 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 tlie discovery of so 
 many transcribers of title-pages, frequently miscalled literary historians., 
 
122 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 has raged even among philosophers, we must not be sur- 
 pfieed at the temperament of poets. These la-st have 
 abandoned their country ; they have changed their name ; 
 they have punished themselves with exile in the rage of 
 their disorder. No 1 not poets only. Descartes sought 
 in vain, even in his secreted life, for a refuge for his 
 genius; he tliought 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 
 Testored to them. Even the reasoning Hume once pro- 
 •posed 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.* 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 
 ieai-ning, fine writers, or artists. It is a state not friendly 
 to equality of temper. In the various humours inci- 
 dental to it, when they are often deeply affected, the 
 cause escapes all perception of sympathy. The intellect- 
 
 * 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 th« language of his "father land;" an 
 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 toforma 
 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 
 ekewhere,' I have never regretted for a moment that country, but 
 often that I ever returned to it at all." 
 
GENIUS AND SOCIETY. 123 
 
 Tial malady eludes even the tenderness of friendsHp. At 
 those moments, the lightest injury to the feelings, which 
 at another tim« 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 fiiendship 
 animated by a high esteem for the intellectual excellence 
 of the man of genius ; not the general intercourse of so- 
 ciety ; 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-ivork, which 
 lose their effe'ct 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. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 The spirit of literature and the spirit of society. — The Inventors. — So- 
 _ciety offers seduction and not reward to men of genius. — The notions 
 o^persons of fashion of men of genius. — The habitudes of the man 
 of genius distinct from those of the man of society. — Study, meditar 
 tion, 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 in- 
 sulated 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 Ilobbes, Newton 
 
124 LITERAEY CHARACTER. 
 
 and Milton. Even so late as the days of Dryden, Addi- 
 son, 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 illumin- 
 ates 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; tind the family of genius, the poet, the 
 painter, and the student, are no longer recluses. They _ 
 mix with their rivals, who are jealous of equ&lity, or with 
 others who, incapable of valuing them for theinselves 
 albne, rate them but as parts of an integral. i 
 
 The man of genius is now trammelled with the arti- 
 ■ ficial 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 con- 
 stitutes 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 pro- 
 portion 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 couu- 
 
GENIUS AND 'SOCIETY. 125 
 
 terfeiting 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 medi- 
 tation, 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." 
 
 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 pre- 
 tended 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 
 concede to him is only a part of the system of politeness ; 
 and should he be dull in discovering the "favourite quality 
 of their self-love, or in participating in their volatile 
 tastes, he will find frequent opportunities of observing, 
 with the sage at the court of Cyprus, that "what he 
 knows is not proper for this place, and what is proper for 
 this place he knows not." This society takes little per- 
 sonal interest in the literaiy character. Horace Walpole 
 lets us into this secret when writing to another man of 
 fashion, on such a man of genius as Gray — " I agree with 
 you most absolutely in your opinion about Gray ; he is 
 the worst company in the world. JFrom a melancholy- 
 turn, from living reclusely, and from a little too much 
 
126 LITEEART OHAEAOTEE. 
 
 dignity, he never converses easily ; all his words are 
 measured and chosen, and formed into sentences : his 
 writings are admirable — ^he himself is not agreeable." 
 This volatile being in himself personified the quintessence 
 of that society .which is called "the world,' and could not 
 endure that equality of mtellect which genius exacts. He 
 rejected Chatterton,, and quarrelled with every literary 
 man and every artist whom he first iavited to familiarity 
 — and then hated. Witness the fates of Bentley, of Muntz^ 
 of Gray, of Cole, and others. Such a mind was incapa- 
 ble of appreciating the literary glory on which the mighty 
 mind of Burke was meditating. . Walpole knew Burke at 
 a critical moment of his life, and he has recorded his own. 
 feelings : — " There was a young Mr. Burke who wrote a 
 book, in the style of Lord Bolingbroke,, that was much- 
 admired. He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his 
 authqrism yet, and thinksi there is nothing, so charming 
 as writers, and to be one : he will know better one. of thesei 
 days.'''' Gray and Burke ! What mighty men must be; 
 submitted to the petrifying sneer — that indifference of 
 selfism for great sympathies — of this volatile and heart:; 
 less man of- literature and rank ! 
 
 That thing of silk,.' 
 Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk I 
 
 The confidential confession of Racine to his son is re-^ 
 markable : — " Do not think that I am sought after' by the 
 great for my dramas ; Corneille composes nobler verses 
 than mine, but no one notices himj,and he only pleases. 
 by the mouth of the actors. I never allude to my works 
 when with men of the world^but I amuse them about, 
 matters they like to heai\ My talent with them consist*,, 
 not in making them, feel that I have any, but in showing' 
 them that they have," Racine treated the great like 
 the children of society ; Corneille would not oompromiafe 
 for the tribute he exacted, but he consoled himself when, 
 
GENIUS AND SOCIETY. 127 
 
 at his entrance into the theatre, the audience usually rose 
 to salute him. The great comic geniua of France, -who 
 indeed was a very thoughtful and serious man, addressed 
 a. poem to the. painter llignard, expressing his conviction 
 that " the court," by which a Frenchman of the court of 
 Louis XIV. meant the society we call " fashionable," is 
 fatal to the perfection of art — 
 
 Qui se donne k la cour se d^robe d son art ; 
 
 Un esprit paxtagfe rarement se consomme, 
 
 Et les emplois de feu demandent 6>ut,l'liomme. 
 
 Has not the fate in society of our reigning literary 
 favourites been uniform? Their mayoralty hardly ex- 
 ceeds the year: they are pushed aside to put in their 
 place another, who, in his turn, must descend. Such is 
 the history of the literary character encountering the 
 perpetual difficulty of appearing wliat he really is not, 
 while he sacrifices to a few, in a certain corner of the 
 metropolis,, who have long fantastically styled themselves 
 "the world," that more dignified celebrity which makes 
 an author's name more familiar than his person. To one 
 who appeared astonished at the extensive celebrity or 
 Bufibn, the modei-n Pliny replied, " I have passed fifty 
 years at my desk." Haydn would not yield up to society 
 more than those hours which were not devoted to study. 
 These were indeed but few : and such were the uniformity 
 and retiredness of his- life, that " He was for a long time 
 the only musical man in Europe who was ignorant of the 
 celebrity of Joseph Haydn." And has not one, the most 
 sublime of the race, sung, 
 
 che seggendo in piiima, 
 In Fama non si Tien, nS sotto coltre ; 
 Saoza la qual cbi sua vita consuma 
 Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia 
 Qual fummo in aere, ed in acqua la schiuma. 
 
 For not on downy plumes, nor under shade-. 
 Of canopy reposing, Fame is won 
 
128 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 Without ■which, whosoe'er consumes his days, 
 . leaveth such vestige of himself on earth 
 As smoke iu air, or foam upon the wave.* 
 
 But meji of genius, in their intercourse with persons of 
 fashion, have a secret inducement to court that circle. 
 They feel a perpetual want of having the reality of their 
 talents confirmed to themselves, and they often step into 
 society to observe in what degree they are objects 
 of attention ; for though ever accused of vanity, the 
 greater part of men .of genius feel that their existence, 
 as such, must depend on the opinion of others. This 
 standard is in truth always problematical and variable ; 
 yet they cannot hope to find a more certain one among 
 their rivals, who at all times are adroitly depreciating 
 their brothers, and "dusking" their lustre. They dis- 
 cover among those cultivators of literature and the arts 
 who have recourse to them for their pleasure, inipas- 
 sioned admirers, rather than unmerciful judges — judges 
 who have only time to acquire that degree of illuminar 
 tion which is just sufficient to set at ease the fears of 
 these claimants of genius. 
 
 When literary men assemble together, what mimetic 
 friendships, in their mutual corruption ! Creatures of 
 intrigue, they borrow other men's eyes, and act by feel- 
 ings often even contrary to their own: they wear a 
 mask on their face, and only sing a tune they have 
 caught. Some hierophant in their mysteries proclaims 
 their elect whom they have to initiate, and their profane 
 who are to stand apart under their ban. They bend to 
 the spirit of the age, but they do not elevate the public 
 to them; they care not for truth, but only study to 
 produce efiect, and they do nothing for fartie but What 
 obtains an instant purpose. Yet their fame is not there- 
 fore the more real, for everything connected with 
 fashion becomes obsolete. Her ear has a great suscepti- 
 * Gary's Dante, Canto ixiv. 
 
GENIUS AND SOCIETY. 129 
 
 bility of -weariness, and her eye rolls for incessant 
 novelty. Never was she earnest for anything. Men's 
 minds with her become tarnished and old-fashioned as 
 furniture. But the steams of rich dinners, the eye which 
 isparldes with the wines of France, the luxurious night 
 which flames with more heat and brilliancy than God 
 has made the day, this is the world the man of coterie- 
 celebrity has chosen ; and the Epicurean, as long as his 
 senses do not cease to act, laughs at the few who retire 
 to the solitary midnight lamp. Posthumous fame is — a 
 nothing ! Such men live like unbelievers in a future 
 state, and their narrow calculating spirit coldly dies in 
 their artificial world : but true genius looks at a nobler 
 source of its existence ; it catches inspiration in its insu- 
 lated studies ; and to the great genius, who feels how 
 his present is necessarily connected with his future 
 celebrity, posthumous fame is a reality, for the sense 
 acts upon him ! 
 
 The habitudes of genius, before genius looses its fresh- 
 ness in this society, are the mould in which the character 
 is cast ; and these, in spite of all the disguise of the man, 
 will make him a distinct being from the man of society. 
 Those who have assumed the literary character often for 
 purposes very distinct from literary ones, imagine that 
 their circle is the public ; but in this factitious public all 
 their interests, their opinions, and even their passions, 
 are temporary, and the admirers with the admired pass 
 away with their season. " Is it not sufficient that we 
 speak the same language," says a witty philosopher, " ^ut 
 we must learn their dialect; we must think as they 
 think, and w6 must echo their opinions, as we act by 
 imitation." Let the man of genius then dread to level 
 himself to the mediocrity of feeling and talent ' required 
 in such circles of society, lest he become one of them- 
 selves ; he will soon find that to think like them will in 
 time become to act like them. But he who in solitude 
 9 
 
130 LITERARY OHARAGiER. 
 
 adopts no transient feelings, and reflects Ho artificial 
 lights, who is only himself; possesses an immense advan- 
 tage: he has not attached importance to what is merely 
 local and fugitive, but listens to interior truths, and fixes 
 on the immutable nature of things. He is the man of 
 every age* Malebranche has observed, that " It is not 
 indeed thought to be charitable to disturb common 
 opinions, because it is not truth which unites society as 
 it exists so much as opinion and custom :" a principle 
 which the world would not, I think, disagree with ; but 
 which tends to render folly wisdom itself, and to inake 
 error immortal. 
 
 Ridicule is the light scourge of society, and the terror 
 of genius; Ridicule surrounds him with her chimeras-, 
 which, like the shadowy monsters opposing ^neas, are 
 impalpable to his strokes : but remetiiber when the sibyl 
 bade the hero proceed without noticing them, he found 
 these airy nothings as harmless as they were unreal. 
 The habits of the literary character will, however; be 
 tried by the men and women of the world by their own 
 standard : they have no other ; the salt of ridicule gives^ 
 a poignancy to their deficient coitiiprehensiioh, and their 
 perfect ignorance, of the persons or things which are the 
 subjects of their ingenious animadversions. The habits 
 of the literary character seem inevitably repulsive to 
 persons of the world. Voltaite, and his companion, the 
 scientific Madame De Chatelet, she who introduced 
 Newton to the French nation, lived entirely devoted to- 
 literary pursuits, and theit habits were strictly literary. 
 It happened Once that this Ibamed pair dhjpped unex- 
 pectedly into a fashionable cirete in the 6Mteau of a 
 French noblematl. A Madame de Sta'6l, the persifleur in 
 office of Madame Du Deffand, has copiously narrated 
 the whole affair; They arrived at midnight like two 
 famished spectres, and there wias some trouble to put 
 them to supper md. bed. They are called apparitions, 
 
TOLTAIKE AND DE CHATELET. 131 
 
 because they were never visible by day, only at ten at 
 night ; for the one is busied in describing great deeds, 
 and the other in commenting on Newton. Like other 
 apparitions, they are uileasy companions: they will 
 neither play nor T^alk; they will not dissipate their 
 mornings with the charming circle about them, nor 
 allow the charming circle to break into their stUdiieS. 
 Voltaire and Madame de Chatelet would have su&red 
 the Same pain in being forced to an abstinence of their 
 regular studies, as this circle of " agreables '' would have 
 at the loss of their meals and their airings. However, 
 the persiflewr declares they were cij)hers " en Soci6t6," 
 adding no value to the number, and to Which theit 
 learned writings bear no reference. 
 
 But if this literary couple Would not play, what waS 
 worse, Voltaire poured out a Vehement declamatioil 
 against a fashionable species of gaitibliilg', whidh apped.rg' 
 to have itiade tljem all stare. But Madame de Chatelet 
 is the more frequent, victim of ovit pei'slflea/i'. The leariied 
 lady would change her apartment^-for it was too noisy, 
 and it had sUioke without fire — ^which last was her eM- 
 blem. " She is reviewing her Prineipidi ; sin exerisis^ 
 she repeats every year, without which precautiort they 
 inight escape from her, and get so far away that she 
 niight never find them again. I believe that her head in 
 respect to them is a house of imprisonmeilt rather thrin 
 the place of thdr birth ; sO that she is right to watcfi 
 them closely ; and she prefers the fresh air of this occu- 
 pation to our amusements, and persists in her invisibility 
 till night-time. She has six or seven tables in her apart-' 
 ments, for she wants them of all sizfes ; immense ones to 
 spread out her papers, solid ones to hold her itlStrumentB,_ 
 lighter ones, &c. Yet with all this she could not escape 
 from the a-ccident vPhich happened to Philip II., after' 
 passing the night iil writing, wheri a bottle of ink fell 
 over the despatches ; but the lady did not imitate the 
 
132 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 moderation of the prince ; indeed, she had not written on 
 State affairs, and what was spoilt in her room was algehra, 
 much more difficult to copy out." Here is a pair of por- 
 traits of a great poet and a great mathematician, whose 
 hahits were discordant with the fashionahle circle in 
 which they resided — ^the representation is just, for it is 
 by one of the coterie itself. 
 
 Study, meditation, and enthusiasmj^ — this is the progress 
 of genius, and these cannot be the habits of him who lin- 
 gers till he can only live among polished crowds ; who, 
 if he bear about him the consciousness of genius, will still 
 be acting under their influeiices. And perhaps there 
 never was one of this class of men who had not either 
 first entirely formed himself in solitude, or who amidst 
 society will not be joften breaking out to seek for himself. 
 Wilkes, no longer touched by the fervours of literary 
 and patriotic glory, suffered life to melt away as a do- 
 mestic voluptuary; and then it was that he observed 
 with some surprise of the great Earl of Chatham, that he 
 sacrificed every pleasure of social life, even in youth, to 
 his great pursuit of eloquence. That ardent character 
 studied Barrow's Sermons so often as to repeat them 
 from memory, and could even read twice from beginning 
 to end Bailey's Dictionary ; these are little facts which 
 belong only to great minds ! , The earl himself acknowl- 
 edged an artifice he practised in his intercourse with 
 society, for he said, " when he was young, he always 
 came late into company, and left it early." Vittorio Al- 
 fieri, and a brother-spirit, our own noble poet, were rarely 
 seen amidst the brilliant circle in which they were born.. 
 The workings of their imagination were perpetually 
 emancipating them,, and one deep loneliness of feeling 
 proudly ihsulated them among the unimpassioned triflers 
 of their rank. They preserved unbroken the unity of 
 their character, in constantly escaping from the proces- 
 
A LITBRART MONARCH. 133 
 
 sional speetaeh of society.* It is no trivial observation 
 of another noble writer, Lord Shaftesbury, that " it may 
 happen that a person may be so much the worse author, 
 for being the finer gentleman." 
 
 An extraordinary instance' of this disagreement be- 
 tween the man of the world and the literary character, 
 we find in a philosopher seated on a throne. The cele- 
 brated JuLLau stained the imperial purple with an author's 
 ink; and when he resided among the Antiochians, his 
 unalterable character shocked that volatile and luxurious 
 race. He slighted the plaudits of their theatre, he ab- 
 horred their dances and their horse-races, he was absti- 
 nent even at a festival, and incorrupt himself, perpetually 
 admonished the dissipated citizens of their impious 
 abandonment of the laws of their country. The Antio- 
 chians libelled their, emperor, and petulantly lampooned 
 his beard, which the philosopher carelessly wore neither 
 perfumed nor curled. Julian, scorning to inflict a sharper 
 punishment, pointed at them- his satire of " the Misopo- 
 gon, or the Antiochian ; the Enemy of the Beard," where, 
 amidst irony and invective, the literary monarch bestows 
 on himself many exquisite and characteristic touches. 
 All that the persons of fashion alleged against the literary 
 character, Julian unreservedly confesses— his undressed 
 beard and awkwardness, his obstinacy, his unsociable 
 habits, his deficient tastes, while at the same time he 
 represents his good qualities as so many extravagances. 
 But, in this Cervantic pleasantry of self-reprehension, the 
 imperial philosopher has not failed to show this light 
 and corrupt people that the reason he coiild not possibly 
 
 * Jn a note which L6rd Byron has written in a copy of this work 
 his lordship says, " I fear this was not the case ; I have been but too 
 much in that circle, especially in 1812-13-14." 
 
 To the expression of " one deep loneliness of feeling," his lordship 
 has marked in the margin "True." I am gratified to confirm the 
 theory of my ideas of the man of genius, by the practical experiende 
 of the greatest of our age. 
 
13^ IJTEEART CHARACTER. 
 
 resemble them, existed in the unhappy circumstance of 
 having been subject to too strict an education under a 
 family tijtor, -who had never suffered him to swerve from 
 the one right way, and who (additional misfortune !) had 
 inspired him with such a silly reverence for Plato and 
 Socrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus, that he had been 
 induced to mafee tbes^ his models. " Whatever manners," 
 gays the emperor, "I may have previously contracted, 
 whether gentle or boorish, it is impossible for me now to 
 ^Iter or unlearn, Habit is said to be a second nature ; 
 to oppose it is irksome, but to counteract the study of 
 more than thirty yeajrs is extremely difficult, especially 
 when it has been imbibed with so much attention." 
 
 And what if men of genius, relinquishing their habits, 
 could do this violence to their nature, should we not 
 lose the original for a factitious genius, and spoil one 
 race without improving the other ? If nature and habit, 
 that second nature which prevails even over the first, 
 have created two beings distinctly different, what mode 
 of e?:istence shall ever assimilate them ? Antipathies 
 and sympathies, those still occult causes, however cout 
 oealed, will break forth at an unguarded moment. Clip. 
 the wings of an eagle that he may roost amopg domestic 
 fowls, — at some unforeseen moment his pinions will over- 
 shadow and terrify his tiny associates, for " the feathered 
 king " will be still musing on the rock and the cloud. 
 
 The man of genius will be restive even in his trara- 
 melled paces. Too impatient amidst the heartless cour- 
 tesies of society, and little practised in the minuter 
 attentions, he has rarely sacrificed to the unlanghing 
 graces of Lord Chesterfield. Plato ingeniously compai-es 
 Socrates to the gallipots of the Athenian apotljecaries ; 
 the grotesque figures of owls and apes were painted on 
 their exterior, but they contained within precious balsams. 
 The man of genius amidst many a circle jjiay exclaim 
 with Themistocles, " I cannot fiddle, but I can make a 
 
A LITERARY MONARCH. 13g 
 
 little village a great city;" and with Corneillej he may- 
 be allowed to smile at his own deficiencies, and even 
 disdain to please in certain conventional manners, assert- 
 ing that " wanting all these things, he was not the le^s 
 Corneille." • 
 
 But with the great thinkers and students, their char- 
 acter is still more obdurate. Adam Smith could never 
 free himself from the embarrassed manners of a recluse 5 
 he was often absent, and his grave and formal conver- 
 sation made him seem distant and reserved, when in fact 
 no man had warmer feelings for his intimates. One who 
 knew Sir Isaac Newton tells us, that " he would some- 
 times be silent and thoughtful, and look all the while 
 as if he were saying his prayers." A French princess, 
 desirous of seeing the great moralist Nicolle, experienced 
 an inconceivable disappointment when the moral in- 
 structor, entering with the most perplexing bow imagin- 
 able, silently sank into his chair. The interview pro- 
 moted no conversation, and the retired student, whose 
 elevated spirit might have endured martyrdom, shrunk 
 with timidity in the unaccustomed honour of conversing 
 with a princess and having nothing to say. Observe 
 Hume thrown into a most ridiculous attitude by a woman 
 of talents and coterie celebrity. Our philosopher was 
 called on to perform his part in one of those inventions 
 of the hour to which the fashionable, like children in 
 society, have sometimes resorted to attract their world 
 by the rumour of some new extravagance. In the pres- 
 ent, poor Hume was to represent a sultan on a Sof^, , 
 sitting between two slaves, who were the prettiest and 
 most vivacious of Parisians. Much was anticipated from 
 this literary exhibition. The two slaves were ready at 
 repartee, but the utter simplicity of the sultan displayed 
 a blockishness which blunted all edge. The phlegmatio 
 metaphysician and historian only gave a sign of life by 
 repeating the same awkwaj-d gesture, and the same ridi- 
 
136 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 culous exclamation, -without end. One of the fair slaves 
 soon discovered the unchangeable nature of the forlorn 
 philosopher, impatiently exclaiming, " I guessed as much, 
 never was there such a calf of a man !" — " Since this 
 a,fiair," adds Madame d'Epinay, " Hume is at present 
 banished to the class of spectators." The philosopher, 
 indeed, had formed a more correct conception of his 
 own character than the volatile sylphs of the Parisian 
 circle, for in writing to the Countess de Boufflers, on an 
 invitation to Paris, he said, " I have rusted on amid 
 l)ooks and study ; have been little engaged in the active, 
 and not much in the pleasurable, scenes of life ; and am 
 more accustomed to a select society than to general 
 companies." If Hume made a ridiculous figure in these 
 circles, the error did not lie on the side of that cheerful 
 and profound philosopher. — This subject leads our inqui- 
 ries to the nature of the conversations of men'' of 
 geniics. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Conversations of men of genius. — Their deficient agreeableness may 
 result from qualities which conduce to their greatness. — Slow-minded 
 men not the dullest. — The conversationists not the ablest writers.-^ 
 Their true excellence in conversation consists of associations with 
 their pursuits. 
 
 IN conversation the sublime Dante was taciturn or 
 satirical ; Butler sullen or caustic ; Gray and Alfieri 
 seldom talked or smiled; Descartes, whose habits had 
 formed him for solitude and meditation, was silent ; Rous- 
 seau was remarkably trite in conversation, not an idCa, not 
 a word of fancy or eloquence warmed him ; Addison and 
 Moliere in society were only observers ; and Dryden has 
 very honestly told us, " My conversation is slow and dull, 
 
CONVERSATIONAL POWEE. I37 
 
 my humour saturnine and reserved ; in short, I am none 
 of those who endeavour to break jests in company, or 
 make repartees." Pope had lived among "the great," 
 not only in rank but in intellect, the most delightful con- 
 versationists ; but the poet felt that he could not contri- 
 bute to these seductive pleasures, and at last confessed 
 that he could amuse and instruct himself much more by 
 another means : " As much company as I have kept, and 
 as much as I lovp it, I love reading better, and would 
 rather be employed in reading, than in the most agree- 
 able, conversation." Pope's conversation, as preserved 
 by Spence, was sensible ; and it would seem that he had 
 never said but one witty thing in his wh(3le life, for only 
 one has been recorded. It was ingeniously said of 
 Vaucanson, that he was as much an automaton as any 
 which he made. Hogarth and Swift, who looked on the 
 circles of society with eyes of inspiration, were absent in 
 company ; but their grossness and asperity did not pre-j 
 vent the one from being the greatest of comic painters, 
 nor the other as much a creator of manners in his way. 
 Genius, even in society, is pursuing its own operations, 
 and it would cease to be itself were it always to act like 
 others. 
 
 Men of genius who are habitually eloquent, who have 
 practised conversation as an art, for some even sacrifice 
 their higher pursuits to this perishable art of acting, have 
 indeed excelled, and in the most opposite manner. Home 
 Tooke finely discriminates the wit in conversation of 
 Sheridan and Curran, after having passed an evening in 
 their company. " Sheridan's wit was like steel highly 
 poUshed and sharpened for display and use ; Curran's 
 was a mine of virgin gold, incessantly crumbling away 
 from its own richness." Charles Butler, whose reminis- 
 cences of his illustrious contemporaries are derived froni 
 personal intercourse, has correctly described the familiar 
 conversations of Pitt, Fox, and Burke : " The most inti- 
 
X38 IITEEART CHAEACTEE. 
 
 mate friends of Mr. Fox complained of his too frequent 
 ruminating silence. Mr. Pitt talked, and his talk was 
 fascinating. Mr. Burke's conversation was rambling, but 
 splendid and instructive beyond comparison." Let me 
 add, that the finest genius of our times, is also the most 
 delightful man; he is that rarest among the rare of 
 human beings, whom to have Imown is nearly to adore ; 
 whom to have seen, to have heard, forms an era in our 
 life ; whom youth remembers with enthusiasm, and whose 
 presence the men and women of " the world" feel like a 
 dream from which they would not awak«n. His bonhomie 
 attaches our hearts to him by its simplicity ; his legen- 
 dary conversation makes us, for a moment, poets like 
 himself.* 
 
 But that deficient agreeableness in social life with 
 Tj^hioh men of genius have been often reproached, may 
 really result from the nature of those qualities which 
 conduce to the greatness of their public character. A 
 thinker whose mind is saturated with knowledge on a 
 particular subject, will be apt to deliver himself authori- 
 tatively ; but he will then pass for a dogmatist : should 
 he hesitate, that he may correct an equivocal expression, 
 or bring nearer a remote idea, he is in danger of sinking 
 into pedantry or rising into genius. Even the fulness of 
 knowledge has its tediousness. " It is rare," said Miller 
 branche, " that those who meditate profoundly, can ex- 
 plaia well the objects they have meditated on ; for they 
 hesitate when they have to speak ; they are scrupulous 
 to convey false ideas or use inaccurate terms. They do 
 not choose to speak, like others, merely for the sake of 
 talking." A vivid and sudden perception of truth, or a 
 severe scrutiny after it, may elevate the voice, and burst 
 
 * This was written under tlje inspiration of a night's conversation, 
 or rather listening to Sir Walter Soott, — I cannot bring myself to 
 erase what now, alas I has closed in the silence of a swift termination 
 of his glorious existence. ' ' ' '.' 
 
CONVBRSATIONAl PO"WEK. I39 
 
 with ao irruptive heat on the subdued tone of couversa' 
 tion. These men are too much in earnest for the weak 
 or the Tain. Such aeripusness kills their feehle animal 
 Bpkits. Smeaton, a creative genius of his class, had a 
 warmth of expression which seemed repulsive to many : 
 it arose from an intense application of mind, which im^^ 
 pelled him to break out hastily when anything was said 
 that did not accord with his ideas. Persons who are ob- 
 stinate till they can give up their notions with a safe con- 
 science, are troublesome intimates. Often too the cold 
 tardiness of decision is only the strict balancing of scep^ 
 ticism or candour, while obscurity as frequently may arise 
 from the deficiency of previous knowledge in the listener. 
 It was said that Newton in conversation did not seem to 
 understand his own writings, and it was supposed that 
 his memory had decayed. The fact, however, was not 
 so ; and Pemberton makes a curious distinction, which 
 accounts for Kewton not always being read}/ to speak on 
 subjects of which he was the sole master. " Inventora 
 seem to treasure up in their own minds what they have 
 fpund out, after another manner than those do the same 
 things that have not this inventive faculty. The former, 
 when they have occasion to produce their knowledge, in 
 some means are obliged immediately to investigate part 
 of what they want, For this they are not equally fit at 
 all times ; and thus it has often happened, that such as 
 retain things chiefly by means of a very strong memory, 
 haye appeared off-hand more expert than the discoverers 
 themselves." 
 
 ^ peculiar characteristic in the conversations of men 
 of genius, which has often injured them when the listen- 
 ers were 80t intimately acquainted with the men, are 
 those sports of a vacant mind, those sudden impulses to 
 throw out paradoxical opinions, and to take unexpected 
 views of things in some humour of the moment. These 
 fanciful and capricious ideas are the grotesque images of 
 
140 UTERART CHARACTER. 
 
 a playful mind, and are at least as frequently misrepre- 
 sented as they are misunderstood. But thus the cunning 
 Philistines are enahled to triumph over the strong and 
 gifted man, because in the hour of confidence, and in the 
 abandonment of the mind, he had laid his head in the lap 
 of wantonness, and taught them how he might be shorn 
 of his strength. Dr. Johnson appears often to have in- 
 dulged this amusement, both in good and ill humour. 
 Even such a calm philosopher as Adam Smith, as well as 
 such a child of imagination as Burns, were remarked for 
 this ordinary habit of men of genius ; which, perhaps, as 
 often originates in a gentle feeling of contempt for their 
 auditors, as from any other cause. Many years after 
 having written the above, I discovered two recent confes- 
 sions which confirm the principle. A literary character, the 
 late Dr. Leyden, acknowledged, that " in conversation I 
 often verge so nearly on absurdity, that I know it is per- 
 fectly easy to misconceive me, as well as to misrepresent 
 me." And Miss Edgeworth, in describing her father's 
 conversation, observes that, " his openness went too far, 
 almost to imprudence ; exposing him not only to be mis- 
 represented, but to be misunderstood. Those who did 
 not know him intimately, often took literally what was 
 either said in sport, or spoken with the intention of 
 making a strong impression for some good purpose." 
 Cumberland, whose conversation was "delightful, hap- 
 pily describes the species I have noticed. " Nonsense 
 talked by men of wit and understanding in the hour 
 of relaxation is of the very finest essence of convivi- 
 ality, and a treat delicious to those who have the sense 
 to comprehend it ; but it implies a trust in the company 
 not always to be risked." The truth is, that many, 
 eminent for their genius, have been remarkable in society 
 for a simplicity and playfulness almost infantine. Such 
 was the gaiety of Hume, such the bonhomie of Fox ; and 
 one who had long lived in a circle of men of genius in 
 
SIMPLICITY OF GENIUS. 141 
 
 the last age, was disposed to consider this infantine sim- 
 plicity as characteristic of genius. It is a solitary grace, 
 ■which can never lend its charm to a man of the world, 
 whose purity of mind has long been lost in a hacknied 
 intercourse with everything exterior to himself. 
 
 But above all, what most offends, is that freedom of 
 opinion which a man of genius can no more divest him- 
 self of, than of the features of his face. But what if this 
 intractable obstinacy be only resistance of character ? 
 Burns never could account to himself why, "though 
 when he had a mind he was pretty generally beloved, he 
 could never get the art of commanding respect," and 
 imagined it was owing to his deficiency in what Sterne 
 calls " that understrapping virtue of discretion ;" " I am 
 so apt to a lapsus linguce,^'' says this honest sinner. 
 Amidst the stupidity of a formal circle, and the inanity 
 of triflers, however such men may conceal their impatience, 
 one of them has forcibly described the reaction of this 
 suppressed feeling : " The force with which it burst out 
 when the pressure was taken off, gave the measure of the 
 constraint which had been endured." Erasmus, that 
 learned and charming writer, who was blessed with the 
 genius which could enliven a folio, has • well described 
 himself, sum naturd propensior ad jocos quam fortasse 
 deceat .•— m.ore constitutionally inclined to pleasantry than, 
 as he is pleased to add, perhaps became him. We know 
 in his intimacy with Sir Thomas More, that Erasmus was 
 a most exhilarating companion ; yet in his intercourse 
 with the great he was not fortunate. At the first glance 
 he saw through affectation and parade, his praise of folly 
 was too ironical, and his freedom carried with it no pleas- 
 antry for those who. knew not to prize a laughing sage. 
 . In conversation the operations of the intellect with 
 some are habitually slow, but there will be found no dif- 
 ference between the result of their perceptions and those 
 of a quicker nature ; and hence it is that slow-minded men 
 
142 EtTEUARY CSARAGTEB. 
 
 are not, as men of the world imagine, always the dufleSti 
 Nicolle said of a scintillant Wit, " He vanquishes me in 
 the drawing-room, but surrenders to me at discretion on 
 the staira." Many a great wit has thought the wit it was 
 too late to speak, and many a great reasonef has only 
 reasoned when his opponent has disappeared. Conversa- 
 tion with such men is a losing game ; and it is often la- 
 mentable to observe how men of geniuS are reduced to a 
 state of helplessness from not commanding their attention, 
 while inferior intellects habitually are found to possess 
 what is called " a ready mind," For this reason some, 
 as it were in despair, have shut themselves up in silence. 
 A lively Frenchman, in describing the distinct sorts of 
 conversation of his literary friends, among whom was Brj 
 Franklin, energetically hits off that close observer and, 
 thinker, wary, even in society, by noting down "the 
 silence of the celebrated Franklin." "We learn f^oni 
 Cumberland that Lord Mansfield did not promote that 
 conversation which gave him any pains to carry on. He 
 resorted to society for simple relaxation, and could even 
 find a pleasure in dulness when accompanied with pla- 
 cidity. " It was a kind of Cushion to his understanding," , 
 observes the wit. Chaucer, like La Fontaine, was more 
 facetious in his tales than in his conversation ; for the 
 Countess of Pembroke used to rally him, observing that 
 his silence was more agreeable to her than his talk. , 
 Tasso's conversation, which his friend Manso has attempt* 
 ed to preserve for us, was not agreeable. In company 
 he sat absorbed in thought, with a melancholy air ; arid 
 it was on one of these occasions that a person present ob- 
 serving that this conduct was indicative of madness, that 
 Tasso, who had heard him, looking on him without emo- 
 tion, asked whether he was ever acquainted with a mad- 
 man who knew when to hold his tongue !' Malebranche 
 tells us that one of these mere men of learning, who can 
 only venture to praise antiquity, once said, "I' have seen 
 
COKfTEADICTORT CHARACTER. 14-3 
 
 Descartes; I knew him, and frequently have conversed 
 with him; he was a good sort of man, and was not want- 
 ing in sense, but he had nothing extraordinary in him.," 
 Had Aristotle spoken French instead of Greek, and had 
 this man frequently conversed with him, unquestionably 
 he would not have discovered, even in this idol of anti- 
 quity, anything extraordinaryi Two thousand years 
 would have been wanting for our learned critic's percep- 
 tions. 
 
 It is remarkable that the conversationists have rarely 
 proved to be the abler writers. He whose fancy is sus- 
 ceptible of excitement in the presence of his auditors^ 
 making the miilds of men run with his own, seizing on 
 the first impressions, and touching the shadows and out- 
 lines of things — with a memory where all lies ready at 
 hand, quickened by habitual associations, and varying 
 with all those extemporary changes and fugitive colours 
 which melt away in the rainbow of conversation ; with 
 that wit, which is only wit in one place, and for a time ; 
 with that vivacity of animal spirits which often exists 
 separately from the more retired intellectual powers — ■ 
 this man can strike out wit by habit, and pour forth a 
 stream of phrase which has sometimes been imagined' to 
 require only to be written down to be read with the same 
 delight with which it was heard ; but he cannot print his 
 tone, nor his air and manner, nor the contagion of his 
 hardihood. All the while we were not sensible of the 
 flutter of his ideas, the incoherence of his transitions, hiS' 
 vague ■ notions, his doubtfal assertions, and Ms meagre 
 knowledge. A pen is the extinguisher of this luminary. 
 
 A curious contrast occurred between Buffon and his 
 friend Montbelliard, who was associated in his great work. 
 The one possessed the reverse qualities of the other: 
 Buffon, whose style in his composition is elaborate and 
 declamatory, was in conversation coarse and careless; 
 Pleading that conversation with him was only a relaXa-. 
 
144 LITERAET OHAEACTBR. 
 
 tion, he rather sought than avoided the idiom and slang 
 of the mob, when these seemed expressive and facetious ; 
 ■while Montbelliard threw every charm of animation over 
 his delightful talk : hut when he took his seat at the rival 
 desk of Buffon, an immense interval separated them ; he 
 whose tongue dropped the honey and the music of the 
 bee, handled a pen of iron ; while Buffon's was the soft 
 pencil of the philosophical painter of nature. Cowley and 
 Killegrew furnish another instance. Cowley was embar- 
 rassed in conversation, and had no quickness in argument 
 or reply : a mind pensive and elegant could not be struck 
 at to catch fire : while with Ballegrew the sparkling bub- 
 bles of his fa,ncy rose and dropped.* When the delight- 
 ful conversationist wrote, the deception ceased. Denham, 
 who knew them both, hit off the difference between them : 
 
 Had Cowley ne'er spoke, Killegrew ne'er writ, 
 Combined in one they had made a matcliless wit. 
 
 Not, however, that a man of genius does not throw out 
 rnany things in conversation which have only been found 
 admirable when the public possessed them. The public 
 often widely differ from the individual, and a century's 
 opinion may intervene between them. The fate of genius 
 is sometimes that of the Athenian sculptor, who submit- 
 ted his colossal Minerva to a private party for inspection. 
 Before the artist they trembled for his daring chisel, and 
 the man of genius smiled ; behind him they calumniated, 
 and the man of genius forgave. Once fixed in a public 
 place, in the eyes of the whole city, the statue was the 
 
 * Killegrew's eight plays, upon which his character as an author rests, 
 hare not been republished with one exception — (Ae f araora's Weddiiig — 
 which is given in Dodsley's collection ; and which is suCfiolent to sat- 
 isfy curiosity. He was a fayourite with Charles the Second, a,nd had 
 great influence with him. Some of his witty court jests are preserved, 
 but are too much imbued with the spirit of the age to be quoted here. 
 He was sometimes useful by devoting his satiric sallies to urge the king 
 to his duties. — Ed. 
 
CONTRADICTORT CHARACTER. 145 
 
 Divinity ! They e is a certain distance at which opinions, 
 as well as statues, must be viewed. 
 
 But enough of those defects of men of genius which 
 often attend their conversations. Must we then bow to 
 authorial dignity, and kiss hands, because they are inted ? 
 Must we bend to the artist, who considers us as nothing 
 unless we are canvas or marble under his hands ? Are 
 there not men of genius the grace of society and the 
 charm of their circle ? Fortunate- men ! more blest than 
 their brothers ; but for this, they are not the more men 
 of genius, nor the others less. To how many of the ordi- 
 nary intimates of a superior genius who complain of his 
 defects might one say, " Do his productions not dejight 
 and sometimes surprise you ? — You are silent ! I beg 
 your pardon; the public has informed you of a great 
 name ; you would not otherwise have perceived the pre- 
 cious talent" of your neighbour : you know little of your 
 friend but his name." The personal familiarity of ordinary 
 minds with a man of genius has often produced a ludi- 
 crous prejudice. A Scotchman, to whom the name of a 
 Dr. Robertson had travelled down, was curious to know 
 who he was. — " Your neighbour !" — But he could not per- 
 suade himself that the man whom he conversed witlf was 
 the great historian of his country. Even a good" man 
 could not believe in the announcement of the Messiah, 
 from the same sort of prejudice : " Can there anything 
 g"ood come out of Nazareth ?" 
 
 Suffer a man of genius to be such as nature and habit 
 have formed him, and he wUl then be the most interest- 
 ing companion ; then will you see nothing but his char- 
 acter. , Akenside, in conversation with select friends, often 
 touched by a romantic enthusiasm, would pass in review 
 those eminent ancient? whom he loved ; he imbued with 
 his poetic faculty even the details .of their lives; and 
 seemed another Plato .while he poured libations to their 
 memory in the language of Plato, among those whose 
 10 
 
14^ ttTfeft-ART 'CllAR-A'(3i'lta; 
 
 stwdies and feeling wefe congenial "with \^s own. liom- 
 ney, with a fancy entitely Ms own, would give Vent to 
 his effusion*, uttered m a hofried accetat and elevuted 
 tone, and often accOftipatiied by teaira, to ifrhich fey ooh^ 
 fetittttion he wias prone ; thus Cumberland, from personal 
 intimaeyj desctibe's the conversation of this mail of geniua. 
 Even 'the temperate BBnsibili'ty df Hame was touched by 
 the bursts of feeling of RousSeaii 5 who, he says, " in Con- 
 VWsatioh kihdtes often to ia degree of heat -frhioh Idoiks 
 Jike inspiration." Barry, that unhappy genius ! was the 
 most repmlsiVe of men in his exterior. The Vehemence 
 of his language, the %ild^esB of his glance, his h^bit of 
 inttsudncing vtilgar Oaths, Iviiich, by #ome ufolucky aSso'ei' 
 %tion of habit, sef ted him as expletives and inteijection'Sj 
 •com'municated even a hortof to some. A piotis and ~a, 
 leatned lady. Who -had felt into'teraMte 'ifflfea'si'tfegs in MS 
 ^i-^SeiU'de, did not, however, leave tfcis -Bian 'Of'^'affts that 
 Vety evening withoiit an impression that shfe haA iiever 
 heard s6 divihe a toan ift her M6. The cohv^i'Satlba 'hfaj-- 
 ^easing to tiiiita on thftt pi'inoi|)le of beneVoletifee -Wfeich 
 pe'rvai3ie8''Ohristianity,and on the meekneSi of "the S'otmder^ 
 it gaYe ^Ktty an opportunity of opening o"& the ohatact"^ 
 ■of 'Jesu's -mth that copiOxtsness of heart saSid mind which, 
 ©ttOe faeatd, could 'nevet be -IforgOtt^. ThM artist indeed 
 -had long in 'his meddtatitfnS m ideal fbead of 'dhrist, -frhich 
 he isVae aliVay^ 'talking of ex:ecuti%g"; " It is bei'e !" he 
 would cry, striking his head. That wMeh baffled the in- 
 vention, M we are told, of teofnaffto da Vinoi, who left 
 Ms *Chli^ ftfeadtess, having 'exhaliiBtjed Ms cl-estive faculty 
 amcmg iJhe fl,poiSles,^his imaginative pi<rftui*e of the myste- 
 I'ious tMon *of a divine 'and human tfatute, 'meVe'r ceaiSed, 
 even when conversing, to haunt the Reveries ctf ISaiS-y.^ 
 
 There aTe feW-authorsandtfitistfe who arfenot■eloq=aent- 
 •ly inStrnetive on that class of knowledge or "that 'depart- 
 -mefit of JsM Whaoh Teve^ls the mastery 'o<f their life. Their 
 conversations Of *Ms nature affeet 'the miind to a distant 
 
ELOQUBUCE OF BAERT. J^J 
 
 period of life. • Who, having listened to euch, has forgotten 
 what a man of genius has said at such moments ? Who 
 dw€lls not on the smgle thought or the glflwing expree- 
 gion, stamped in the heat of the moment, Vhioh cam* 
 from its source ? I%€n the mind of genijas rises as the 
 melody of the JBoHan harp, whea the winds suddenly 
 sweep over the strings — -it comes and goes— and leav-es 
 a sweetness beyoad the harmonies of art. 
 
 The Miscdlemea of PoUtian are not only the result of 
 his stndies in the rich library of Lorenzo de' Medici, fejjt 
 of conversations which had passed in tliose rides which 
 Lorenzo, accompanied by PoUtian, preferred' to the pomp 
 of cavalcades. Wlieu fhe Cardinal de Cabaasoll* strayed 
 with Petrarch abo^at his valley in many a wandering diS' 
 oomrsie, liey Bonmetimes extended their walks to such » 
 dista;nee, that tlie serrant sought them in yain tp an- 
 nounce tks diminer-'hoiur, amd feund them retUtrnwig in the 
 evening. Whea Helvetius enjoyed the social conversa- 
 tion of a literary frienJ, he described it as " a ehase «f 
 ideas." Such are ike liteiaryieonvei!s»tions -which Uonoe 
 Tooike alluded to, wien -he said " I assure you, we find 
 more difficalty to finisih itfean to begin oiuj cenver^tiiane." 
 
 Hie maituTal and coiii)genia<l eonviereatioios of men of let* 
 ters and of artists must tben jbe those wWdi are 'Mct^ 
 ated with theiir pnusaita, and these are of a diffesreiiit com- 
 ple»i(Dn wiljh the -.talk '(of men i©f the woj^ld, the ojfc^ects of 
 wihich are rdrawn fem the temporary passions of parjy- 
 men, or .the variable om dits of triflers— ^topics iStudioiiiKily 
 rejected from these -more iranqiuilisiQg iconvfffsatiow. 
 Diamonds can only be polished by their own duat, And 
 are only fihaped by itihe jfriotion of otheir daamonds ; and 
 so it liappens witibi Eteraay m^i and artists. 
 
 A mestiag of this nature has bee© reeorded by -Cicero, • 
 which hiaimBelf and Atticus had with Vamo iax rflhe cousn- 
 try. Varro -acrinang from Rome in tliejir n^hbour^opd 
 Fomewiiat fatigued, had sent ti messenger to bis friends,. 
 
148 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 '^As soon as -we had heard these tidings," says Cicero, 
 "we could not delay hastening to see one who was 
 attached to us by the same pursuits and by former 
 friendship." They set off, but found Varro half way, 
 urged by the same eager desire to join them. They con- 
 ducted him to Cicero's villa. Here, while Cicero was in- 
 quiring after the news of Rome, Atticus interrupted the 
 political rival of Cffisar, observing, "Let us leave off in- 
 quiring after things which cannot be heard without pain. 
 Rather ask about what we know, for Varro's muses are 
 longer silent than they used to be, yet surely he has not 
 forsaken thein, but rather conceals what he writes." — 
 " By no means !" replied Varro, " for I deem him to be a 
 whimsical man to write what* he wishes to suppress. I 
 have indeed a great work in hand (on the Latin lan- 
 guage), long designed for Cicero." The conversation 
 then took its natural turn by Atticus having got rid of 
 the political anxiety of CicerO'. Such, too, were the con-. 
 versations which passed at the literary residence of the 
 Medici family, which was described, with as much truth 
 as fancy, as " the Lyceum of philosophy, the Arcadia of 
 poets, and the Academy of painters." We have a pleas- 
 ing instance of such a meeting of literary friends in those 
 conversations which passed in Pope's garden, where there 
 was often a remarkable union of nobility and literary 
 men. There Thomson, Mallet, Gay, Hooke, and Glover 
 met Cobham, Bathurst, Chesterfield, Lyttleton, and other 
 lords ; there some of those poets found patrons, and Pope 
 himself discovered critics. The contracted views of Spenoe^ 
 have unfortunately not preserved those literary con ver-i 
 sations, but a curious passage has dropped from the pen 
 of Lord Bolingbroke, in what his lordship calls " a letter 
 to Pftpe," often probably passed over among his political 
 tracts. It breathes the spirit of those delightful conver- 
 sations. " My thoughts," writes his lordship, "in what 
 order soever they flow, shall be communicated to you 
 
LITERARY SOLITUDE 14,9 
 
 just as they pass through my »iiwdf— just as they used to 
 be when we conversed together on these or any other sub- 
 ject ; when wi sauntered alone, or as we have often done 
 with good Arbuthnot, and the jocose Dean of St. Patrick, 
 among the multiplied scenes of your little garden. The 
 theatre is large enough for my ambition." Such a scene 
 opens a beautiful subject for a curious portrait-painter. 
 These literary groups in the garden of Pope, sauntering, 
 or divided in confidential intercourse, would furnish a 
 scene of literary repose and enjoyment among some of 
 the most illustrious names in our literature. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Literary solitude. — ^Its necessity. — ^Its pleasures. — Of visitors by 
 profession. — Its inconveniences. 
 
 THE literary character is reproached with an extreme 
 passion for retirement, cultivating those insulating 
 habits, which, while they are great interruptions, and. 
 even weakeners, of domestic happiness, induce at the 
 same time in public life to a secession from its cares, and 
 an avoidance of its active duties. Yet the vacancies of 
 retired men are eagerly fijled by the many unemployed 
 men of the world happily framed for its business. We do 
 not hear these accusations raised against the painter who 
 wears away his days by his easel, or the musician by the 
 side of his instrument ; and much legs should we against 
 the legal and commercial character ; yet all these are as 
 much withdrawn from public and private life as the lit- 
 erary character. The desk is as insulating as the library. 
 Yet the man who is working for his individual interest is 
 ■ more highly estimated than the retired student, whose 
 disinterested pursuits are at least more profitable to the 
 
150 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 world than to himself. La BruySre discovered the world's 
 erroneous estimate of literary labour : " There requires a 
 better namej" he says, " to be bestowed on the leisure; 
 (the idleness he calls it) of the literary character, — to 
 meditate, to compose, to read and to be tranquil, should 
 be called working." But so invisible is the progress of 
 intellectual pursuits and so rarely are the objects palpable 
 to the observers, that the literary character appears to be 
 denied for his pursuits, what cannot be refused to every 
 Other. That unremitting application and unbroken series 
 of their thoughts, admired in every profession, is only 
 complained of in that one whose professors with so mnph 
 sincerity mourn over the brevity of life, which has often ; 
 closed on them while sketching their works. 
 
 It is, however, only in solitude that the genius of emi- , 
 nent men has been formed. There their first thoughts 
 sprang, and there it will become them to find their last : 
 for the solitude of old age — and old age must be often in ,. 
 solitude— may be found the happiest with the literary 
 character. Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, and en- 
 thusiasm is the true parent of genius. In all ages solitude 
 has been called for — ^has been flown to. No considerable 
 work was ever composed till its author, like an ancient ; 
 magician, first retired to the grove, or to the closet, to in- 
 vocate. When genius languishes in an irksome solitude 
 among crowds, that is the moment to fly into seclusion 
 and meditation. There is a society in the deepest solitude ; 
 in all the men of genius of the past 
 
 First of your kind, Society dirine I 
 
 and in themselves ; for there only can they indulge in the 
 romances of their soul, and there only can they occupy . 
 themselves in their dreams $nd their vigils, and, with 
 the morning, fly without interruption to the labour they , 
 had reluctantly quitted. If there 'be not periods when 
 they shall allow their days to melt harmoniously into 
 
SQIITEFDE OP SEKira. 151 
 
 eaoh other, if they do not pass whole weeks together in 
 their study, witihout intervening absences, they will not 
 \>e admitted intot the last recess of the Muses. Whethei> 
 their glory eome froni researches, or from enthusiasm, 
 time, with not a. feather ruffled on his wings, time alone 
 opens discoveries and kindles meditation. This desert of 
 solitude, so vast and so dreary to the man of the world, 
 to the man of genius is the magical garden of Ar^nida, 
 whose enchantments arose amidst solitude, while solitude 
 was everywhere among those enchantijients. 
 
 Whenever Michael Angelo, tha,t ' ■ divine madman," as 
 Richardson once wrote on the hack of one of his draw- 
 ings, was meditating on some great design, he closed 
 hinxaelf up from the world, " Why do you lead sq soli: 
 tary a Ufe ?" asked a friend. *• Art,'' replied the sublime 
 artist, *' Art is a jealous god 3 it requires the whole and 
 entire man." P»ring his mighty labour in the Sistine 
 Chapel, he refiised to have any communication with any 
 person even at his own house. Such undisturbed and 
 solitary attention is demanded even by undoubted genius 
 as the price of performance. How then shall we 'deem 
 of that feebler race who exult in oecasional excellgnce, 
 and who so ofteji deceive themselves by mistaking th^ 
 evanescent flashes of genius for that holier flame which 
 burns on -its altar, because tike fiiel is incessantly sup-r 
 plied ? 
 
 We observe men of genius, in public situations, sigh: 
 ifig for this solitude. Amidst the impediments of the 
 world, they are doomed tQ view their iatelleotual baiir 
 quet often rising before them, }ike some fairy delusion, 
 aever to taste it. The great Verulam often eomplained 
 of the disturbances of his public life, and rejoiced in the 
 occasional retirement; he stole from public aifairs. " And 
 now, because I am in the country, { will send yoa some 
 of toy country fruits, which with me are good meditar 
 tions; when I am in the city, they are choked with 
 
162 UTEEART CHARACTEE. 
 
 business." Lord Clarendon, whose life so happily com- 
 hined the contemplative with the active powers of man, 
 dwells on three periods of retirement which he enjoyed ; 
 he always took pleasure in relating the great tranquillity 
 of spirit experienced during his solitude at Jersey, where 
 for more, than two years, employed on his history, he 
 daily wrote " one sheet of large paper with his own 
 hand." At the close of his life, his literary labours in 
 his other retirements are detailed with a proud satisfac- 
 tion. Each of his solitudes occasioned a new acquisi- 
 tion ; to one he owed the Spanish, to another the French, 
 and to a third the Italian literature. The public are not 
 yet acquainted with the fertility of Lord Clarendon's 
 literary labours. It was not vanity that induced Scipio 
 to declare of solitude, that it had no loneliness for him, 
 since he voluntarily retired amidst a glorious life to his 
 Lintemum. Cicero was uneasy amid applauding Rome, 
 and has distinguished his numerous works by the titles 
 of his various villas. Aulus Gellius marked his solitude 
 by his " Attic Nights." The " Golden Grove " of Jeremy 
 Taylor is the produce of his retreat at the Earl of Car- 
 berry's seat in Wales ; and the " Diversions of Pnrley " 
 preserved a man of genius for posterity. Voltaire had 
 talents well adapted for society; but at one period 
 of his life he passed five years in the most secret seclu-' 
 sion, and indeed usually lived in retirement. Montes- 
 quieu quitted the brilliant circles of Paris for his books 
 and his meditations, and was ridiculed by the gay 
 triflers he deserted; "but my great work," he observed 
 in triumph, " avance k pas de geant." Harrington, to 
 cordpose his " Oceana," severed himself from the society 
 of his friends. Descartes, inflamed by genius, hires an 
 obscure house in an unfrequented quarter at Paris, and 
 there he passes two years, unknown to his acquaintance. 
 Adam Smith, after the publication of his first work, with- 
 drew into a retirement that lasted ten years : even 
 
YALUB OF TIME. 153 
 
 Hume rallies him for separating himself from the 
 world ; hut by this means the great political inquirer 
 satisfied the world hy his great work. And thus it was 
 with men of genius long ere Petrarch jnthdrew to his 
 Val chiusa. 
 
 The interruption of visitors by profession has been 
 feelingly lamented by men of letters. The mind, matur- 
 ing its speculations, feels the unexpected conversation of 
 cold ceremony chilling as March winds over the blos- 
 soms of the Spring. Those unhappy beings who wander 
 from house to house, privileged by the charter of society 
 to obstruct the knowledge they cannot impart, to weary 
 because they are wearied, or to seek amusement at the 
 cost of others, belong to that class of society which 
 have affixed no other idea to time than that of getting 
 rid of it. These are judges not the best qualified to 
 comprehend the nature and evil of their depredations in 
 the silent apartment of the studious. Who may be often 
 driven to exclaim, in the words of the Psalmist, " Verily 
 I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands 
 in innocency : for all the day long have I been plagueil, 
 and chastened every morning.'''' 
 
 When Montesquieu was deeply engaged in his great 
 work, he writes to a friend : — " The favour which your 
 friend Mr. Hein often does me to pass his mornings with 
 me, occasions great damage to my work as well by his 
 impure French as the length of his details." — "We are 
 afraid," said some of those visitors to Baxter, " that we 
 break in upon your time." — " To be sure you do," replied 
 the disturbed and blunt scholar. To hint as gently as 
 he could to his friends, that he was avaricious of time, 
 one of the learned Italians had a prominent inscription, 
 over the door of his study, intimating that whoever 
 remained there must join in his labours. The amiable 
 Melancthon, incapable of a harsh expression, when he 
 received these idle visits, only noted down the time he 
 
154 LITERART CHARAOTEK. 
 
 bad expended, tbat h^ might peanimate his industiy, 
 and not lose a day. Evelyn, eontimially importuned by 
 niorning visitors, or " taken np by other impertinenoie^ . 
 of my life in tl^e country," stole his honrs from bis night 
 rest " to redeem his losses." The literary character has 
 been driven to the naost inventive shifts to escape the 
 irruption of a formidable party at a single rush, who 
 enter, without " besieging or beseeching," as Milton has 
 it. The late Mr. Ellis, a, man of elegant tastes and poeti- 
 cal temperament, on one of these occasions, &t his oonntiy^ 
 "house, assured a Uterary friend, that when driven to 
 the last, he usually made his escape by a leap out of the 
 window ; and Boileau has noticed a similar dilemma when 
 at the villa of the President Lamoignon, .while they were 
 holding their delightful conversations in his grounds. 
 
 Quelquefois de fdeheux arrivent trois volees, 
 
 Que du pars i I'mstant aasUgent leg allees ; ■> 
 
 Alors sauTe qui pent, et qijatre foia heureux 
 
 Qui sait e'^chapper, i q,uelque autr^ ignorf 4'eux, 
 
 Brand HoUis endeavoured to hold out "the idea of 
 singularity as a shield;" and the great Robert Boyle 
 was compelled to advertise in a newspaper that he must 
 decline visits on certain days, that he might have leisure 
 to finish some of his works.* 
 
 * This curious advertisement is preserved in Dr. Birch's " Life of 
 Boyle," p. 272. Boyle's labours wera so ■ exhausting to his naturally 
 weak frame, and sp continuoua from his eager desirefor investigatjoa, 
 tliat this advertisement wag cpneooted by th? advice pf his physician, 
 " to desij'e to be excused from receiving visits (unless upon .occasions 
 very extraordinary) two days, in the week, namely, on thg forenoon of 
 Tuesdays and Fridays (both foreign post days), and on Wednesdays 
 and Saturdays in the afternoons, that he may have some time, both to 
 recruit his spirits, to range his papers, ,an4 All up the lacimB of them, ■ 
 and to take some care of his affairs in Ireland, which are very muoli . 
 disordered and have their face often changed by the public pajajnities 
 there." He ordered likewise a board to be placed over his door, witl} 
 an inBoription signifying when he did, and when he did not receive 
 vjejts,— -B)). , ■ ' . ^ 
 
SOLITUDE OF GEXIU^a Igg 
 
 Boccaccio has given aa interesting akconnt of the 
 mode of life of the studious Petrarch, for op a visit he 
 found that Petrarch would not suffer his hours of study- 
 to be broken into even by the person ■whom of all men he 
 loved most, and did not quit his morning studieaNfor his 
 guest, who during that time occupied himself by reading 
 or transcribing the works of his master. At the decline 
 of day, Petrarch quitted his study for his garden, where 
 he delighted to open his heart in mutual confidence. 
 
 But this solitude, at first a necessity, and then a 
 ' pleasure, at length is not borne without repining. To 
 tame the fervid wildness of youth to the strict regulari- 
 ties of study, is a sacrifice performed by the votary ; but 
 even Milton appears to have felt this irksome period of 
 life'; for in the preface to " Smectymnuus," he says : — ^" It 
 is but justice not to defraud of due esteem the wearisome 
 labours and studious watchings wherein I have spent 
 and tired out almost a whole youth." Cowley, that 
 enthusiast for seclusion, in his retirement calls himself 
 "the Melancholy Cowley." I have seen an original 
 letter of this poet to Evelyn, where he expresses his 
 eagerness to see Sir George Mackenzie's "Essay on 
 Solitude ;" for a copy of which he had sent over the town, 
 without obtaining one, being "either all bought up, or 
 burnt in the fire of London."* — "I am the more de. 
 sii'ous," he says, " because it is a subject in which I am 
 most deeply interested. Thus Cowley was requiring a 
 
 * This event happening when London was the chief emporium of 
 books, occasioned manj printed just before the time to be excessively 
 rare. The booksellers of Paternoster-row had removed their stock to 
 the vaults below St. Paul's for safety as the fire approached them. 
 ■Among the stock was Prynne's records, vol. iii, which were all burnt 
 except a few copies which had been sent into the country, a perfect 
 set has been valued in consequence at one hundred pounds. The rarity 
 of all books published about the era of the great fire of London induced 
 one curious collector. Dr. Bliss, of Oxford, to especially devote himself 
 to gathering such in Ms library. — Ed. 
 
^i'. 
 
 156 i^flTBRART CHARACTER. 
 
 book to confirm his predilection, and we know he made 
 the experiment, which did not prove a happy one. We 
 find even /Gibbon, with all his fame about him, antici- 
 pating tj/e dread he entertained of solitude in advanced 
 life, yl feel, and shall continue to feel, that domestic 
 solitjade, however it may be alleviated by the world, by 
 stady, and even by friendship, is a comfortless state, 
 which will grow more painful as I descend in the vale of 
 years." And again: — "Your visit has only served to 
 remind me that man, however amused or occupied in his 
 closet, was not made to live alone." 
 
 Had the mistaken notions of Sprat not deprived us of 
 Cowley's correspondence, we doubtless had viewed thp 
 picture of lonely genius touched by a tender pencil.* 
 But we have Shenstone, and Gray, and Swift. The heart 
 of Shenstone bleeds in the dead oblivion of solitude -.-^ 
 " Now I am come from a visit, every little uneasiness is 
 sufficient to introduce my whole train of melancholy con- 
 siderations, and to make me utterly dissatisfied with the 
 life I now lead, and. the life I foresee I shall lead. I am 
 angry, and envious, and dejected, and frantic, and disre- 
 gard all present things, as becomes a madman to do. I 
 am infinitely pleased, though it is a gloomy joy, with the 
 application of Dr. Swift's complaint, that he is forced to 
 die in a rage, like a rat in a poisoned hole." Let the 
 lover of solitude muse on its picture throughout the year, 
 in this stanza, by the same amiable but suffering poet: — 
 
 Tedious again to curse the drizzling day, 
 Again to trace the wintry tracks of snow, 
 
 Or, soothed by vernal airs, again, survey 
 The self-same hawthorns bud, and cowslips blow. 
 
 Swift's letters paint with terrifying colors a picture of 
 solitude ; and at length his despair closed with idiotism. 
 Even the playful muse of Gresset throws a sombre queru-" 
 lousness over the solitude of men of genius; — 
 
 * See the article on Cowley in " Calamities of Authors." 
 
MBDITATIOKS OF GENIUS. 157 
 
 Je les voia, victimes du genie, 
 Au foible prii d'un eclat passager, 
 Vivre isoles, sans jouir de la vie I 
 Yingt ans d'ennuia pour quelques jours de gloire. 
 
 Such are the necessity, the pleasures, and the incon- 
 veniences of solitude ! It ceases to be a question whether 
 men of genius«^should blend with the masses of society ; 
 for whether in solitude^ or in the world, of all others they 
 must learn to live with themselves. It is in the world 
 that they borrow the sparks of thought that fly upwards 
 arid perish : but the flame of _genius can only be lighted 
 in their own solitary breast. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 The meditations of genius. — A work on the art of meditation not yet 
 produced. — ^Predisposing the mind. — Imagination awakens imagina- 
 tion.— Generating feelings by music-^Slight habits. — Darlcness and 
 silence, by suspending the exercise of oiir senses, increase the vi- 
 vacity of cur conoeptions.-r-The arts of memory. — Memory the foun- 
 dation of genius. — Inventions by several to preserve their own 
 jnoral and literary character. — ^And to assist their studies. — The 
 mediations of genius depend on habit. — Of the night-time. — ^A day 
 of meditation should precede a day of composition. — Works of mag- 
 nitude from slight conceptions. — Of thoughts never written. — The 
 art of meditation exercised at all hours and places. — Continuity of 
 attention the source of philosophical discoveries, — Stillness of medi- 
 tation the first state of existence in genius. ' 
 
 A CONTINUITY of attention, a patient quietness of 
 mind, forms one of the characteristics of genius. 
 To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions 
 of men of genius — the men of reasoning and the men of 
 imagination. There is a thread in our thoughts, as there 
 is a pulse in our hearts ; he who can hold the one, knows 
 
158 LfTlSRART OHAKACTEB. 
 
 how to think ; and he ■who can move the other, knows 
 how to feel. 
 
 A work on the art of meditation has not yet been pro- 
 duced ; yet such a work might prove of immense advan- 
 tage to him who never happened to have more than one 
 solitary idea. The pursuit of a single principle has pro- 
 duced a great sy-stem. Thus probably we owe Adam 
 Smith to the French economists. . And a loose hint has 
 oondxicted to a new discovery. Thus Girard, taking ad- 
 vantage of an idea first started by T'enelon, produced 
 his " Syaonymes." But while, in every manual art, every 
 great workman improves on Ms predecessor, of the art of 
 the mind, notwithstanding the facility of practice, and 
 our incessant experience, millions are yet ignorant of the 
 first rudiments ; and men of genius themselves are rarely 
 acquainted with the materials they are working on. Cer- 
 tain constituent principles of the mind itself, which the 
 study of metaphysics curiously developes, offer many im- 
 portant regulations in this desirable art. We may even 
 suspect, since men of genius in the present age have con- 
 fided to us the secrets of their studies, that this art may 
 fee eaa-ried oa by more obvious means than at first would 
 appear, and even by mechanical contrivances and prac- 
 tical habits. A mind well organised may be regulated 
 by a single contrivance, as by a bit of lead we govern 
 the fime anaohinery by wHch we track the flight of time. 
 Many secrets in this art of the mind yet remain as insu- 
 lated facts, which may hereafter enter into an experi- 
 mental history. 
 
 Johnson has a curious observation on the Mind itself. 
 He thiflnks it obtains a natationary point, Arem whence it 
 can inever advance, ©oenarring befone the andddle iof life. 
 " When the ipowers'of naturaMve sattained !bbeir intended 
 energy, they can be no more advanced. The ishmib cam 
 never become a tree. Nothing 1;hen remains tout jiwoo- 
 tioe and :empenenae , and jpei-haps why the^ do so .little 
 
POWERS OF MIND. |59 
 
 may he woHh inquiry." * The result of this inquiry 
 would profeably lay a broader foundation for this art of 
 the mind than w« have hitherto possessed. Adam 
 Ferguson has expressed himself with sublimity ^ — " The 
 Justre which man casts around him, like the flame of a 
 meteor, shines only while his motion ■oontiaues ; the mo- 
 ments of rest and of obscarity are the same." What is 
 this art of meditation, but the power of withdrawing 
 ourselves from thie world, to view that world moving 
 within ourselves while we are in repose ? As the artist 
 by an optical instrument, reflects and concentrates the 
 boundless landscape ■ around him, and patiently traces 
 all nature in that small space. 
 
 There is a government of our thoagfets. The mind of 
 genius can be made to take a p^ioular disposition or 
 train of ideas. It is a remarkable circumstance in the 
 studies of men of genius, that previous to composition 
 they have often awakened their imagination by the im- 
 agination of their favourite masters. By touching a mag- 
 net, they become a magiiet. A circumstance has been 
 recorded of Gray, by Mr. Mathias, " as worthy of all ao- 
 oeptation among the higher votaries of the divine art, 
 when they are assured that Mr. fGrray never sate down to 
 "Compose any poetry without previously, and for a con- 
 siderable time, reading the works of Spenser." But the 
 ^circumstance was mot unusual with Malherbe, ComeiUte, 
 ■and Racine-; and thte >morit fervid verses of Homer, and 
 the "most tender of Euripides, w«re often repeated by 
 Milton. Even a!n!ti(|udty exhibits the same eKciting inter- 
 •course of the mind -of genius. Cioero dnforms us how 
 ■his ' eloquence oaught inspiration from a constant stady 
 ■of the Latin and Grecian poetry ; a»d it has been record- 
 >ed off Pomipey, who was great leven i^ his youth, that he 
 -iieTCT undertook any considerable enterprise without 
 
 '*l Moommend tlie reader to turn to the -wTiote passage, in JohnBotfS 
 "Letters to Mrs. Thrale," vol i<, p. 296. 
 
160 LITERAET CHARACTER. 
 
 animating his genius by having read to him the character 
 of Achilles in the first Iliad ; although he acknowledged 
 that the enthusiasm he caught came rather from the poet 
 than the hei-o. When Bossuet had to compose a funeral 
 oration, he was accustomed to retire for several days to 
 his study, to ruminate over the pages of Homer; and 
 when asked the reason of this habit, he exclaimed, in 
 these lines — 
 
 ■ ^magnam mihi montem, animumque 
 
 Delius inspiret Tates. 
 
 It is on the same principle of predisposing the mind, 
 that many have first generated their feelings by the 
 symphonies of music. Alfieri often before he wrote 
 prepared his mind by listening to music : " Almost all 
 my tragedies were sketched in my mind either in the act 
 of hearing, music, or a few hours after" — a circumstance 
 which has been recorded of many others. Lord»Bacon 
 had music often played in the room adjoining his study: 
 Milton listened to his organ for his solemn inspiration, 
 and music was even necessary to Warburton. The 
 symphonies which awoke in the poet publime emotions, 
 m.ight have composed the inventive mind of the great 
 critic in the visions of his theoretical mysteries. A cele- 
 brated French preacher, Bourdaloue or Massillon, was 
 once found playing on a violin, to screw his mind up to 
 the pitch, preparatory for his sermon, which within a 
 short interval he was to preach before the court. Cur- 
 ran'a favourite mode of meditation was with his violin in 
 his hand; for hours together would he forget himself, 
 running voluntaries over the strings, while his imagina- 
 tion in collecting its tones was opening all his faculties 
 for the coming emergency at the bar. When Leonardo 
 da Vinci was painting his " Lisa," commonly called La 
 Joconde, he had musicians constantly in waiting, whose 
 light harmonies, by their associations, inspired feelings of 
 Tipsy danoe and revelry. 
 
PECULIARITIES OF GEUIUS. Igl 
 
 There are slight habits which may he contracted by 
 genius, which assist the action of the mind ; but these 
 are of a nature so trivial, that they seem ridiculous 
 when they have not been experienced : but the imagina- 
 tive race exist by the acts of imagination. Haydn 
 would never sit down to compose without being in full 
 dress, with his great diamond ring, and the finest 
 paper to write down his musical compositions. Rousseau 
 has told us, when occupied by his celebrated romance, of 
 the influence of the rose-coloured knots of ribbon which 
 tied his portfolio, his fine paper, his brilliant ink, and his 
 gold sand. Similar facts are related of many. When- 
 ever Apostolo Zeno, the predecessor of Metastasio, pre- 
 pared himself to compose a new drama, he used to say 
 to himself, " Apostolo ! reoordati che questa & la prima 
 opera che dai in, luce.'''' — " Apostolo ! remember that this 
 is the first opera you are presenting to the public." We 
 are scarcely aware how we may govern our thoughts by 
 means of our sensations : De Luc was subject to violent 
 bursts of passion ; but he calmed the interior tumult by 
 the artifice of filling his mouth with sweets and comfits. 
 When Goldoni found his sleep disturbed by the obtrusive 
 ideas still floating from the studies of the day, he con- 
 trived to lull himself to rest by conning in his mind a 
 vocabulary of the Venetian dialect, translating some 
 word into Tuscan and French ; which being a very unin- 
 teresting occupation, at the third or fourth version this 
 recipe never failed. This was an art of withdrawing 
 attention from the greater to the less emotion ; by which, 
 as the interest weakened, the excitement ceased. Men- 
 delssohn, whose feeble and too sensitive frame was often 
 reduced to the last stage of suffering by intellectual exer- 
 tion, when engaged in any point of difficulty, would in 
 an instant contrive a perfect cessation from thinking, by 
 jnechanically going to the window, and counting the 
 tiles upon the roof of his neighbour's house. Such facts 
 
 n 
 
163 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 show how much art may Ibe concerned in the gOTemment 
 of our thoughts. 
 
 It is an unquestionable fact that some profound think- 
 ers cannot pursue their intellectual operations amidst the 
 distractions of light and noise. With them, attentiori. 
 to what is passing within is interrupted by the discordant 
 impressions from objects pressing and obtruding on thef 
 external senses. There are indeed instances, as in the 
 case of Priestley and others, of authors who have pursued 
 their literary works amidst conversation and their family ; 
 but such minds are not the most origirfal thinkerff, and 
 the most refined writers ; or their subjects are of a nature 
 which requires little more than judgment and diligence. 
 It is the mind only in its fulness which casn brood over 
 thoughts till the incubation produces vitality. Stach is 
 the feeling in this act of study. In Plutarch's time they 
 showed a subterraneous place of study built by De^ 
 mosthenes, and where he often continued for two or 
 three months together. Malebranche, Hobbe^, Coriieille, 
 and others, darkened their apartment wheii they wrote, 
 to concentrate their thoughts, as' Milton says of the 
 mind, " in the spacious circuits of her musing." It is in 
 proportion as we can suspend the exercise of all our other 
 senses that" the liveliness of our conception increases— this 
 is the observation of the most elegant metaphysician of 
 our times ; and when Lord Chesterfield advised that his 
 ptipil— -whose attention wandered on every palssing object^ 
 which unfitted him for study— should be instructed in a 
 darkened apartment, he -^-as aware of this principle ; 
 the boy would learn, and retain what he learned, ten 
 times as well. We close our eyes' whenever we Would 
 collect our mind together, or trace? more distinctly an 
 object which seems to have faded away in our recolle'ei 
 tion. The study of an author or an artist would be ill 
 placed in the midst of a beautiful landscape ; the " Pen- 
 seroso" of Milton, " hid from day's garish eye," is the, 
 
OdisfDUOS OF THOUGHT. l'6'3' 
 
 tnari of geiiius. A secluded and naked a^iartmSnt,- ■#itli 
 nothing but a desk, a chair, and a single sheet of p'aper, 
 was for fifty years the study of Buffon ;• the single oma- 
 ment -was d pWilt of Ne-vHoH placed before his eyes — 
 nothittg broke into tlie unity of Ms reveries'. Cuniber- 
 larid'^ liveliest comedy, thet West Jndidfij #as written in 
 aih unfrirnished apartment,- close iri front of an Irish turf- 
 s'tack ; aWd 6ur (ioini6 writer waiS fully aware of the 
 aflvtotages of the situation. " In all my hours of study," 
 sayW that eliegaiit writer, " it has been through life my 
 6bject so to locate myself a.i to have little or nofehing to 
 di^tiact iaf alttention, and therefore brilliant rooms c/f 
 pleais'arit progpects I have ever avoided. A dead wall, br,' 
 as in the present d^se, an Irish ttirf-stack, are ftot attract 
 tioiiB that can" call off the fancy from its' pursuits ;• and 
 •Whilst in these ptirguits it' can' find interest aiid occtipa- 
 tion, it waiitS no outward aid' to cheer it. My father, I 
 belielve, rather wondered at' liiy choice." Th6 principle 
 ascertaWed^ the eoiis'equ'erices ate obviiouiS. 
 
 The arts' 6f me^di'd'ry' haVe' at' all tii&e^' eicited th^ afr 
 t'ention of the studious ;^ they opeil' ei \^brld' 6f undivillged 
 niysfei'ies, whdre every one Seems to f6¥i&' soriie discovery 
 of his own, rather exciting his astonishni'ent thalii enlarg- 
 ing' his coitipreh^nsibii; L^ Sage, a litodetii' philosopher,' 
 had a memlory singulEfrly defficffive. IricapSIMe of a<i(Jiurin'g 
 languages, and deficient Hi all' thoS'e studi^es which depend 
 oh'the exei-dise of the memory, it beiiiatm'e the object of 
 Kis siibsequent exertions t6 supply thig deficiency bj* 
 th^' order atad method h6 observed in arranging^ ever/ 
 new fact or idea he dbtaiiled; so that in reality with a' 
 ■v^ei*/ bad m^riiory, it a^jsearg that he ■was still enabled 
 to recall at will sinf ideia,' ot ^ny knowledge which he 
 had Stored up. John' Hhiiiter happily' illustrated the 
 advantaged which every 6ne derives fifoiii' puttihg his' 
 thoughts in writiA^, "it reSfeffibfes a ti^desman taking' 
 sTiock ; 'H^ithout which he nevei' kno^V^'eiffi^r ■fl'HJst he poS- 
 
164 LITERAET CHAEACTEE. 
 
 sesses, or in what he is deficient." The late William 
 Hutton, a man of an original cast of mind, as an expei-i- 
 ment in memory, opened a hook which he had divided 
 into 365 columns, according to the days of the year : he 
 resolved to try to recollect an anecdote, for every column, 
 as insignificant and remote as he was able, rejecting all 
 under ten years of age ; and to his surprise, he filled 
 those spaces for small reminiscences, within ten columns ; 
 but till this experiment had been made, he never con- 
 ceived the extent of his faculty. "Wolf, the German 
 metaphysician, relates of himself that he had, by the 
 most persevering habit, in bed and amidst darkness, 
 resolved his algebraic problems, and geometrically com- 
 posed all his methods merely by the aid of his imagina- 
 tion and memory ; and when in the daytime he verified 
 the one and the other of these operations, he had always 
 found them true. Unquestionably, such astonishing in- 
 stances of a well-regulated memory depend on the prac-' 
 tice of its art gradually formed by frequent associations. 
 When we reflect that whatever we know, and whatever 
 we feel, are the very smallest portions of all the knowl- 
 edge we have been acquiring, and all the feeling^ we 
 have experienced through life, how desirable would be 
 that art which should again open the scenes which have 
 vanished, and revivify the emotions which other impres-' 
 sions have effaced ? But the faculty of memory, although 
 perhaps the most manageable of all others, is considered' 
 a subordinate one ; it seems only a grasping and ac- 
 cumulating power, and in the work of genius is imagined 
 to produce nothing of itself; yet is memory the founda''' 
 tion of Genius, whenever this faculty is associated with' 
 imagination and passion ; with men of genius it is a 
 chronology not merely of events, but of emotions ; hence 
 they remember nothing that is not interesting' to their 
 feelings., Persons of inferior capacity have imperfect 
 recollections from feeble impressions. Are not the in- 
 
THOUGHTS UNEXECUTED. 165 
 
 cidents of the great novelist often founded on the com- 
 mon ones of life ? and the personages so admirably alive 
 in his fictions, were they not discovered among the 
 crowd ? The ancients have described the Muses as the 
 daughters of Memory; an elegant fiction, indicating the 
 natural and intimate connexion between imagination and ' 
 reminiscence. 
 
 The arts of memory will form a saving-bank of genius, 
 to which it may have recourse, as a wealth which it can 
 accumulate imperceptibly amidst the ordinary expendi- 
 ture. Locke taught us the first rudiments of this art, 
 when he showed us how he stored his thoughts and his 
 facts, by an artificial arrangement ; and Addison, before 
 he commenced his " Spectators," had amassed three folios 
 of materials. But the higher step will be the volume 
 which shall give an account of a man to himself, in 
 which a single observation immediately becomes a clue 
 of past knowledge, restoring to him Wb lost studies, and 
 his evanescent existence. Self-contemplation makes the 
 man more nearly entire : and to preserve the past, is half 
 of immortality. 
 
 The worth of the diary must depend on the diarist ; 
 bjit " Of the things which concern himself," as Marcus 
 Antoninus entitles his celebrated -Cork — this volume, 
 reserved for solitary contemplation, should be considered 
 as a future relic of ourselves. The late Sir Samuel 
 Romilly commenced, even in the most occupied period 
 of his life, a diary of his last twelve years; which he 
 declares in his will, " I bequeath to my children, as it 
 may be serviceable to them." Perhaps in this Romilly 
 bore in mind the example of another eminent lawyer, the 
 celebrated Whitelocke, who had drawn up a great work, 
 entitled " Remembrances of the Labours of Whitelocke, 
 in the Annals of his Life, for the Instruction of his- Chil- 
 dren." That neither of these family books has appeared, 
 
166 LITEEAEY CHABACTEH. 
 
 j^ our coiru^op loss. Stfoli legacj.es fi'Qiji ^9,9,11 iJieii ought 
 Jo beconie the inb.erjt^pc.e of tlf,eir conntrymep. 
 
 To regjater the tr^nsafiljpus of tjjp ^ay, :with ol^serva- 
 tions on what, a.nd on -^honi, h^ had seep, was the advice 
 pf Lor^ :^aimes to jhe late Jj^r. Curweif; ^nd for years his 
 head neyer reached its pillow T^tlfout performing a task 
 which habit had made easy. " Our best and surjest road 
 to knowledge," said Lpj-d JIainies, ,"is by profiting from 
 the labours of others, and majimg t^pir e^cperience our 
 own." In tbis manner Curwen teljs us lj|e ^p.quirp^ by 
 habit tJf^ art of thinking ; an^ he is an able testimony 
 9f the practic.9.bility and succ,es? iOf ^}i,e plan, for he capflid- 
 ly tells us, ■' Though many wpuld sicken at tj;e i,de^ of 
 ipiposing ^]ich a |iask upon themselves, yet the attempt, 
 perseyere^^ in for a shprt time, would soon become a cus- 
 tom more irksome to omit than it was difficult to cppi- 
 menc^." , i> 
 
 .Cpi^l^ we lqok,ipto the libraries of authprp, the stijidips 
 pf artists, and the l^bpratpries pf che^iip^ts, a,;^^ vie^ 
 wj),at they h^ye pnly sketched^ or what Ije spattered in 
 fragments, and could we trace their first and la^st ttpugbts, 
 we might ^i^cpver that ye have lost mpre tljan w^ possess. 
 TJierp we might vjew fpundatipng ;^t]iou^ superstructures, 
 once the monuments ojf theij" hopes ! A liyjng arcj^itspji 
 rpc^pjly e?;hibite,d ^p the public an px|;raprdinaiy pictiire 
 of hig piin.d, in his " A^'i^'^\^9P^T^\ yisions of Early Fancy 
 in the Gay JVIprning of Youth," ^nd wljiph now were 
 " dreams in the evening of lifp." Ip t^iis picture ^le ha^ 
 thrown together all the arphitpctural designs his imaging,- 
 tipn had conceived, \>n% wljipjf repiajjj^^ upexeputp^. 
 The feeling is true, howevei; whimsici9;l sucjj unac- 
 cppjplisbpd J^p<5i?S iJ^Jgl^t- .WP^9:T ^bw ^brown togetfier 
 injQ one picturp. \x\ lite^rary history si^ch instapoes havp 
 occurred but tp.p pip<5[|^eptly : thp jmagipatiop of yoi^th, 
 mp^suring i?ei^l^pr ]t,imp nor E^l^ility, cresjtps wh^t neit})pf 
 time nor aibility can execute. Adam Smith, in the pref- 
 
THOUaHTS rriS-BXEOUTED. 167 
 
 {ice to the first edition of his "Theory of Sentiments," 
 announced a large work on law and government ; and in 
 a late edition he still repeated the promise, observing 
 that " Thii-ty years ago I entertained no doubt of being 
 able to execute everything which it announced." The 
 " Wealth of Nationp " was but a fragment of this greater 
 work. Surely men pf genius pf 9,11 others, may mourn 
 over the length of art and the brevity of life ! 
 
 Yet many glorious efforts, and even artificial inventions, 
 have been contrived to assist and save its moral and 
 literary existence in that perpetual race which genius 
 holds with time. "We trace its triumph in the studious 
 days q{ such men as Gibbon, Sir William Jones, and 
 Priestley, An invention by which the moral qualities 
 and the acquisitions of the literary character were com- 
 bined and advanced together, is what Sir Wilj^am Jones 
 ingeniously caUs his " Andrometer." In that scale of 
 human attainments and enjoyments which ought to ac- 
 company the eras of human life, it reminds us of what 
 was to be learned, and what to be practiced, assigning 
 to stated periods their appropriate pursuits. An occar 
 gional recurrence, even to so fanciful a standard, would be 
 like looking on a clock to remind the student how he 
 loiters, or how he advances in the great day's work. Such 
 romantic pl^ns have been often invented by the ardour 
 of genius. There was no communication between Sir 
 William Jones and Dr. Franklin ; yet, when young, the 
 self-taught philosopher of America pursued the same 
 genial and generous devotion to his own' morai and lit- 
 erary excellence, 
 
 " It was about this time I conceived," says Franklin, 
 "the bold ai^d arduous prpj.ect of arriving at moral 
 perfection," <^c. He began a daily journal, in which 
 against thirteen virtues accompanied by seven columns 
 to mark the days of the week, he dotted down wha,t he 
 considered to be his failures j he found himself fuller of 
 
168 LITERARY 0HARA(3TER. 
 
 faults than he had imagined, hut at length his blots 
 dinainished. This self-examination, or this " Faultbook," 
 as Lord Shaftesbury would have called it, was always 
 carried about him. These books still exist. An ad- 
 ditional contrivance was that of journalising his twenty- 
 four hours, of which he has furnished us both with de- 
 scriptions and specimens of the method ; and he clostis 
 with a solemn assuraiice, that "It may be well my 
 posterity should be informed, that to this little artifice 
 their ancestor owes the constant felicity of his life." 
 Thus we see the fancy of Jones and the sense of Frank- 
 lin, unconnected either by character or communication, 
 but acted on by the same glorious feeling to create their 
 own moral and literary character, inventing similar al- 
 though extragrdinary methods. 
 
 The niemorials of Gibbon and Priestley present us with. 
 the experience and the habits of the literary character. 
 " "What I have known," says Dr. Priestley, " with respect 
 to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration 
 and my contempt of others. Could we have entered 
 into the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, and have traced all 
 the steps by which he produced his great works, we 
 might see nothing very extraordinary in the process." 
 Our student, with an ingenuous simplicity, opens to us 
 that "variety of mechanical expedients by which he 
 secured and arranged his thoughts," and that discipline 
 of the mind, by means of a peculiar arrangement of 
 his studies for the day and for the year, in which he rival- 
 led the calm and unalterable system pursued by Gibbon, 
 Biiffon, and Voltaire, who often only combined the knowl- 
 edge they obtained by humble methods. They knew 
 what to ask for ; and where what is wanted may be found : 
 they made use of an intelligent secretary ; aware, as 
 Lord Bacon has expressed it, that some books " may be 
 read by deputy." 
 
 Buffon laid down an excellent rule to obtain originality, 
 
MODES OF STUDY. 169 
 
 when he advised the writer first to exhaust his own 
 thoughts, before he attempted to consult other writers ; 
 and Gibbon, the most experienced reader of all our 
 writers, offers the same important advice to an author. 
 When engaged on a particular subject, he tells us, "I 
 suspended my perusal of any new book on the subject, 
 till I had reviewed all that I knew, or believed, or had 
 thought on it, that I might be qualified to discern how 
 much the authors added to my original stock." The 
 advice of Lord Bacon, that we should pursue our studies 
 in whatever disposition the mind may be, is excellent. 
 If happily disposed, we shall gain a great step ; and if 
 indisposed, we " shall work out the knots and strands of 
 the mind, and make the middle times the more pleasant." 
 Some active lives have passed away in incessant com- 
 petition, like those of Mozart, Cicero, and Voltaire, who 
 were restless, perhaps unhappy,, when their genius was 
 quiescent. To such minds the constant zeal they bring 
 to their labour supplies the absence of that inspiration 
 which cannot always be the same, nor always at its 
 height. 
 
 Industry is the feature by which the ancients so 
 frequently describe an eminent character ; such phrases 
 as "incredibili industria ; diligentia singulari" are 
 usual. We of these days cannot conceive the industry of 
 Cicero; but he has himself told us that he. suffered no 
 moments of his leisure to escape from him. Not only 
 his spare hoiirs were consecrated to his books ; but even 
 on days of business he would take a few turns in his 
 wa,lk, to meditate or to dictate ; many of his letters -are 
 dated before daylight, some from the senate, at his meals, 
 and amid his morning levies. The dawn of day was 
 the summons of study .to Sir William Jones. John 
 Hunter, who was constantly engaged in the search and 
 consideration of new facts, described what was passing 
 iu his mind by a remarkable illustration:— he said to 
 
170 LITEilABT GHAR4CTBR. 
 
 ^bernethy, '-'.I^Jy mind js like a bge-Jiive,'' A flimile 
 wjiicli >vras singularly correct ; '-' for," ofesje-ryes Abernethy, 
 " in the midst of buzis and apparent confusion tbere was 
 •great order, regularity of struoture, and abundant foad, 
 coUepted with incesgiant iniiiJ^stry frpnj the choicest stores 
 of n9,t»re," Thug one m,*n pf geniii,? ig the ablest com- 
 mentator on the thoughts an4 leelings of another, When 
 we reflect on the magnitude of the l^boTjr.s of Cwsero and 
 the elder Pliny, on those of Erasmus, F^rmf^, B^ronius, 
 Lord B^con, TJsher, and B^,yle, we seen; »t the base of 
 these monuments pf study, we seem scarcely awafce to 
 admire. These were the laboripijis jnstructprg of manJond ; 
 their age has clpsefl, 
 
 Yet let not those pither artists of the mind, who wor^ 
 in the airy looms of fanpy and wit, iniagine that they are 
 weaving thejr webs, without the direction of a principle, 
 and without 9, secret habit which they have acquired, and 
 which some have imagined, by its quickness and facility, 
 ;to l?e an instinct. " H^bjt," says Beid, " differs from: 
 instinct, not in its nature, but in its origin ; the last being 
 natural, the first acquired^" What we are accustomed, 
 to do, gives a facility and proneness to do on like pc- 
 pasipns ; wd there may be even an art, luiperceived by 
 themselvBS, in opening iwd pursuing a scene pf pure 
 invention, and even in tlje happiest tnms of wit. One 
 who had all the experience of such an artist has employed 
 tbe very terms we have used, of "mechanical" and 
 ^'habitii^^l-" "Be assnred," says Goldsmith, ''that wit 
 is in some measure mechanical; and that a man long 
 habituate^ to icst/teh at even its resepiblance, will at \mP 
 be happy enough to possess the substance. By a long 
 }ia))it pf writing be acquires a justness of thinking, and 
 ^ m^^tery pf manijer whicji holi4^y writej-s, even witJj 
 ten times his genius, may vainly attempt to eqnal." The 
 wit of Butler was not extemporaneous, but painfully 
 elaborated from notes Tfliich he incessantly accurnulate(i j^ 
 
DEBAMS. Ifjl 
 
 and the familiar rime of 3Berni, the burlesque poet, iis 
 existing manuficripts will pmye, yer/e produced by per- 
 petual re-touches. Even in the sublime efforte pf im- 
 agination, this art of meditation may be practised ; and 
 Alfieri has shown us, that in 1ito8,e energetic tragic dra- 
 mas yrhiaix were ojfiten prodttCed in a state of enthusiasm, 
 he pursued a regulated process. '*A11 my tragedies 
 have been composed three times ;" and he describes the 
 three stages of conception, dey.elppiaent, and versifying, 
 'f After these three operations, I proceed, lijce other au- 
 thors, to publish, correct, or amen4,." 
 
 *! All is habit in mankind, even virtue itself !" exclaim.e4 
 Metastasio; and we may add, even the meditations of 
 genius. Some of its boldest conceptions are indeed for- 
 tuitous, startiQg up and vanishing alwiost in the percep- 
 tion ; like that giant form, sometimes seen amidst the 
 glaciers, afar from the opposite traveller, moving as lie 
 moves, stopping as \\e stops, yet, in a moraent lost, and 
 perhaps never more seen, although but his own reflection ! 
 Often in the stUl obscurity of the night, the ide3,s, the 
 Studies, the whole history of the day, is acted over 
 again. There are probably few mathematician^ ^ho 
 have not dreamed of an interesting problem, pbsjepy.es 
 Professor Dugald Stewart. In these vivid scenes we 
 are often so completely converted into spectators, that 
 a great poetical contemporary of our country thitiks that 
 even his dreams should not p^ss away unnqtieed, and 
 keeps what he calls a segister of nocturnals. Tasso 
 has recorded some of his poetical dreams, which were 
 often disturbed by waking himself in repeating a verse 
 aloud. "This night I awaked with this verse in my 
 mouth — 
 
 E i duo che manda il nerp adti^tp satplo. 
 
 The two, the dairk and burning soil has sent." 
 
 He discovered that the epithet UokTc was not §uita,ble; 
 
1Y2 LITERARY CHiEAOTBR. 
 
 "I again fell asleep, and in a dream I read in Strabo 
 that the sand of Ethiopia and Arabia is extremely 'white,, 
 and this morning I have found the place. You see what 
 learned dreams I have." 
 
 But incidents of this nature are not peculiar to this 
 great bard. The improvvisatori poets, we are told, can- 
 not sleep after an evening's effusion ; the rhymes are still 
 ringing in their ears, and imagination, if they have any, 
 will still haunt them. Their previous state of excitement 
 breaks into the calm of sleep ; for, like the ocean, when 
 its swell is subsiding, the waves still heave and beat. 
 A poet, whether a Milton or a Blackmore, wUl ever find 
 that his muse will visit his "slumbers nightly." His 
 fate is much harder than that of the great minister, Sir 
 Robert "Walpole, who on retiring to rest could throw 
 aside his political intrigues with his clothes; but Sir 
 Robert, to judge by his portrait and anecdotes of Jiim, 
 had a sleekiness and good-humour, and an unalterable 
 equanimity of countenance, not the portion of men of 
 genius : indeed one of these has regretited that his sleep 
 was so profound Ets not to be interrupted by dreams; 
 from a throng of fantastic ideas he imagined that he 
 could have drawn new sources of poetic imagery. The 
 historian De Thou was one of those great literary char- 
 acters who, all his life, was preparing to write the history, 
 which he afterwards composed ; omitting nothing, in his 
 travels and his embassies, which went to the formation of 
 a great man. De Thou has given a very curious account 
 of his dreams. Such was his passion for study, and his 
 ardent admiration of the great men whom he conversed 
 with, that he often imagined in his sleep that he was 
 travelling in Italy, Germany, and in England, where he 
 saw and consulted the learned, and examined their curious 
 libraries. He had all his lifetime these literary dreams, 
 but more particularly in his travels they reflected these 
 images of the day. 
 
TALUB OF MEDITATION. 173 
 
 If memory do not chain down these hurrying fading 
 children of the imagination, and 
 
 Suatch the faithless fugitives to light 
 
 ■with the beams of the morning, the mind suddenly finds 
 itself forsaken and solitary.* Rousseau has uttered a com- 
 plaint on this occasion. Full of enthusiasm, he devoted 
 to the subject of his thoughts, as was his custom, the 
 long sleepless intervals of his nights. Meditating in 
 bed with his eyes closed, he turned over his periods in a 
 tumult of ideas ; but when he rose and had dressed, all 
 was vanished ; and when he sat down to his breakfast he 
 had nothing to write. Thus genius has its vespers and 
 its vigils, as well as its matins, which we have been so 
 often told are the true hours of its inspiration; but 
 every hour may be full of inspiration for him who knows 
 to meditate. No man was more practised in this art of 
 the mind than Pope, and even the night was not an 
 unregarded portion of his poetical existence, not less 
 than with Leonardo da Vinci, who tells us how often he 
 found the use of recollecting the ideas of what he had 
 considered in the day after he had retired to bed, encom- 
 passed by the silence and obscurity of the night. Sleep- 
 less nights are the portion of genius when engaged in 
 its work ; the train of reasoning is still pursued ; the 
 images of fancy catch a fresh illumination ; and even a 
 happy expression shall linger in the ear of him who 
 turns about for the soft composure to which his troubled 
 spirit cannot settle. 
 
 But while with genius so much seems fortuitous, in its 
 great operations the march of the mind appears regular, 
 
 * One of the moat extraordinary instances of inspiration in dreams 
 is told of Tartini, the Italian musician, whose "Devil's Sonata" is 
 well Itnown to musicians. He dreamed that the father of evil played 
 this piece to him, and upon waiting he put it on paper. It is a strange 
 wild performance, possessing great originality and vig<>ur. — Ed. 
 
if4 HTEKAEt CHAEAC:P]^S. 
 
 and requires preparation. Th'e intellectual feealtieS are 
 not always co-existent, ot do not alwsiys act simultane- 
 ously. Whenever any particular faculty is HgHy active, 
 while the others are languid, the wort, as a work of 
 genius, may he very deficient. Hence the faculties, in 
 Whatever degree they exist",! ai^e unqluestionahly enlarged 
 by friectitation. It seems trivial ta observe that medita- 
 tion should precede composition, but w6 are iiot always 
 aware of its importance ; the truth is, that it is a diffi« 
 culty unless it be a- habit. "We write, and we fiiid we 
 have written ill ; we re-write, and feel we h^'& written 
 Well : in the Second act of composition we have' acquired 
 the necesSaty iheditation. StiU we rarely carry on our 
 meditation so fat as its practice wolild enable us. Many 
 works of mediocrity might have! approached to excellence, 
 had this a!rt of the mirid been exercised; Many volatile 
 writers might have reached even to deep thinking,' had 
 they bestowed a day of m-editation before a day of com'- 
 poSition, and thus engendered tlieir thoughts.' Many 
 productions of genius have originally been enveloped ia 
 feebleness and obscu-fity, Which have oiily been brought 
 t6 perfection by repeated acts of the mind. Thei*© is a 
 maxim of Confucius, which in the' translation' Seems- 
 quaint, bat which is pregnant with sense — 
 
 Labour, Wt slight not meditation ; 
 Meditate, but slight not laboui'. 
 
 FeWworks of imagrtitude presented themselves at once,' 
 in their extent and with their associations, to their 
 authors; Twb' or three' striking oircuniStanees, unob- 
 served before, are perhaps all which th'e man of genius 
 perceives. It is in revolving the subject that the whole 
 mind becomes gradually agitated; as d Sumiher land- 
 scapej at the break of day^is wrapped in mist: at first, 
 the sun strikes on a single object, but the light and' 
 warmth increasing, the Whole scene' glows in the noonday' 
 
VALIJB OP MiDITATlGSr. Ifg 
 
 6f imagination. How beautifully this State of the mind, 
 in the progress of composition, is described by Dfyden, 
 aUuding to his work, " when it was only a confused mass 
 of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark ; 
 when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the 
 sleeping images of things towards tlie light, there to b6 
 distinguished, and then either to be chosen or rejected 
 by the judgment !" At that moment, he adds, " I was in 
 that eagerness of imagination which, by over-pleasing 
 fanciful men, flatters them into the danger of writing." 
 Gibbon tells us of his history, " At the onset all was 
 dark and doubtful ; even the title of the! work, the true 
 era of thd decline aind fall of tk& empire, &c". I #si8 
 often tempted' to cast away the laboilr of seven yeiarfe." 
 Winckelmanri was laAg lost- in composing his " History 
 of Art ;" a hundred fruitless attempts were made, before 
 he cbuld discover a plan amidst the labyrinth. Slight 
 conceptions kindle' finished Worksv A lady asking for a 
 few verses on rtiral topiVjs of the' Abb6 de Lille, his 
 specimens pleased,' and sketches heaped on sketches pto- 
 du6ed "Les Jardins." In writing^ the "Pleasures of 
 Memory," as it happeii6d With "The Rape of the Lock," 
 the poet at first proposed a simple description in a, few 
 lines, till conducted by meditation the perfect composi- 
 tion of several years closed iw that fine poem. That 
 still valuable work JO' Art de Pens&r of the Port-Royal, 
 was ori^ally projected' tct teach A young nobleman all 
 that was practically Useful in the art of logic in- a few 
 days, and was intended to have been written in one 
 morning by the great Arnauld; but to that profouiid 
 thinker so many new ideas crowded in that slight tatek, 
 that he was compelled to call in his friend Nicolle ; and 
 thus a few priojected pages closed in a volume so ex- 
 cellent, that- our elegant metaphysician has recently Ae^ 
 eliared, that " it is hardly possible to estimate the merits 
 too highly." Pemberton, who knew Newton intimately, 
 
176 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 informs us that his Treatise on Natural Philosophy, full 
 of a variety of profound inventions, was composed by 
 him from scarcely any other materials than the few 
 propositions he had set down several years before, and 
 which having resumed, occupied him in writing one 
 year and a half. A curious circumstance has been pre- 
 served in the life of the other immortal man in phi- 
 losophy, Lord Bacon. "When young, he wrote a letter to 
 Father Fulgentio concerning an Essay of his, to which 
 he gave the title of "The Greatest Birth of Time," a 
 title which he censures as too pompous. The Essay 
 itself is lost, but it was the first outline of that great 
 design which he afterwards pursued and finished "in his 
 " Instauration of the Sciences." Locke himself has in- 
 formed us, that his great work on " The Human Under- 
 standing," when he first put pen to paper, he thought 
 " would have been contained in one sheet, but that the 
 farther he went on, the larger prospect he had." In this 
 manner it would be beautiful to trace the history of the 
 human mind, and observe how a Newton and a Bacon 
 and a Locke were proceeding for thirty years together, 
 in accumulating truth upon truth, and finally building 
 up these fabrics of their invention. 
 
 Were it possible to collect some thoughts of great 
 thinkers, which were never written, we should discover 
 vivid conceptions, and an originality they never dared to 
 pursue in their works ! Artists have this advantage over 
 authors, that their virgin fancies, their chance felicities, 
 which labour cannot afterwards produce, are constantly 
 perpetuated ; and those " studies," as they are called, are 
 as precious to posterity as their more complete designs. In 
 literature we possess one remarkable evidence of these 
 fortuitous thoughts of genius. Pope and Swift, being in 
 the country together, observed, that if contemplative 
 men were to notice "the thoughts which suddenly 
 present themselves to their minda when walking in the 
 
FIRST THOUGHTS. 177 
 
 fields, &c., they might find many as -well worth preserv- 
 ing as some of their more deliberate reflections." They 
 made a trial, and agreed to -write down such involuntary 
 thoughts as occurred during their ■ stay there. These 
 furnished out the " Thoughts " in Pope's and Swift's 
 Miscellanies.* Among Lord Bacon's Remains, we find a 
 paper entitled " Sudden Thoughts, set down for Profit." 
 At all hours, by the side of Voltaire's bed, or on his 
 table, stood his pen and ink with slips of paper. The 
 margins of his. books were covered with his "sudden 
 thoughts." Cicero, in reading, constantly took notes 
 and made comments. There is an art of reading, as well 
 as an art of thinking, and an art of writing. 
 
 The art of meditation may be exercised at all hours, 
 and in all places ; and men of genius, in their walks, at 
 table, and amidst aesemblieSj turning the eye of the mind 
 inwards, can form an artificial solitude ; retired amidst a 
 crowd, calm amidst distraction, and wise amidst folly. 
 When Domenichino was reproached for his dilatory 
 habits, in not finishing a great picture for which he had 
 contracted, his. reply described thisi method of study : 
 JEh I lo la sto continuamente dipingendo entro di me — ^I 
 am continually painting it within myself. Hogarth, with 
 an eye always awake to the ridiculous, would catch a 
 character on his thumb-naiL Leonardo da Vinci has left 
 a great number of little books which he usually carried 
 in his girdle, that he might instantly sketch whatever he 
 Tvished to recal to his recollection ; and Amoretti dis- 
 covered, that, in these light sketches, this fine genius 
 • was forming a system of physiognomy which he 
 frequently inculcated to his pupils, f Haydn carefully 
 
 *Thia anecdote is found in Euffhead'a "Life of Pope," evidently 
 given by 'Warburton, a3 was everytliing of personal knowledge in thalt 
 tasteless volume of a mere lawyer, who presumed to write the life of a 
 poet 
 
 f A collection of sixty-four of these sketches were published at 
 12 
 
178 LITERARY CHABAOTBK. 
 
 noted down in a pooket-'book tlie passages and ideas 
 which came to him in his walks or amid company. Some 
 of the great actions of men of this habit of mind were 
 first meditated on amidst the noise of a convivial party, 
 or the music of a concert. The victory of Waterloo 
 might have been organized in the ball-room at Brussels : 
 and thus Rodney, at the table of Lord Sandwich, while 
 the bottle was briskly circulating, being observed ar- 
 ranging bits of cork, and his solitary amusement having 
 excited inquiry, said that he was practising a plan to 
 annihilate an enemy's fleet. This proved to be that 
 discovery of breaking the line, which the happy audacity 
 of the hero afterwards executed. What situation is 
 more common than a sea-voyage, where nothing presents 
 itself to the reflections of most men than irksome observa- 
 tions on the desert of waters ? But the constant exercise 
 of the mind by habitual praetioe is the privilege of a 
 commandiag genius, and, in a similar situation, we 
 discover Cicero and Sir WUliam Jones acting alike. 
 Amidst the Oriental seas, in a voyage of 12,000 miles, 
 the mind of Jones kindled with delightful entbusiasm, 
 and he has perpetuated ttiose elevating feelings in his 
 discourse to the Asiatic Society ; so Cicero on board a 
 ship, sailing slowly along the coast, passing by a town 
 where his friend Trebatius resided, wrote a work which 
 the other had expressed a wish to possess, and of which 
 wish the -view of the town had reminded him. 
 
 To this habit of continuity of attention, tracing 
 the first simple idea to its remoter consequences, 
 the philosophical genius owes many of its discoveries^ ' 
 It was one evening in the cathedral of Pisa that Galileo 
 observed the vibrations of a brass lustre pendent from 
 the vaulted roof, which had been left swinging by one of 
 
 Paris 4b 1T30. Tbey are remarkable as deUneiations of mental 
 character in feature aa strongly felt as if done under the direction of 
 Lavater himself. — Es. 
 
UEEAT DISCOTEEIBS. 179 
 
 tTie vergers. The habitual meditation of genius com- 
 hined with an ordinary accident a new idea of science, 
 and hence conceived the invention of measuring time by 
 the medium of a pendulum. Who "but a genius of this 
 order, sitting in his orchard, and observing the descent of 
 an apple, could have discovered a new quality in mattet, 
 and have ascertained the laws of attraction, by perceiv- 
 ing that the same causes might perpetuate the regular 
 motions of the planetary system ; who but a genius of 
 this order, while viewing boys blowing eoap-bladders, 
 could have discovered the properties of Kght and colours, 
 and tlien anatomised a ray? Frantlin, on board a 
 ship, observing a partial stillness in the waves when tbe^ 
 threw down water which had been used for culinary 
 purposes, by the same principles of meditation was led 
 to the discovery of the wonderful property in oil of 
 calming the agitated ocean ; and many a ship has been 
 preserved in tempestuous weathisr, or a landing facili- 
 tated on a dangerous surf, by this solitary meditation 
 of genius. 
 
 Thus meditation draws out rff the most simple truths 
 the strictnesfi of philosophical demonstration, convert- 
 ing even the amusements of sch«ol-boya, or the most 
 ordinary domestic occurrences, into the principle of a 
 new science. The phenomenon of galvanism was fa- 
 miliar to Students ; yet was there but one man of genius 
 who could take advantage of an accident, give it his 
 name, and fix it as a science. It was while lying in his 
 bath, but still meditating on the means to detect the 
 fraud of tlie goldsmith who had made Hiero's crown, 
 that the most extraordinary philosopher of antiquity 
 was led to the investigation of a series of propositions 
 demonstrated in the two "books of Archimedes, De irtxi- 
 dentibtts influido, still extant ; and which a great mathe- 
 matician admires both for the strictnese and elegance df 
 the demonstrations. To as minute a domestic occurrence 
 
180 IITEEABT CHARACTER. 
 
 as Galvani's we owe the steam-ensrine. When the Mar- 
 quis of Worcester was a State prisoner in the Tower, he 
 one day observed, while his meal was preparing in his 
 apartment, that the cover of the vessel being tight, was, 
 by the expansion of the steam, suddenly forced off, and 
 driven up the chimney. His inventive mind was led on 
 in a train of thought with reference to the practical ap- 
 plication of steam as a first mover. His observations, 
 obscurely exhibited in his "Century of Inventions," 
 were successively wrought out by the meditations of 
 others, and an incident, to which one can hardly make 
 a formal reference without a risible emotion, terminated 
 in the noblest instance of mechanical power. 
 
 Into the stillness of meditation the mind of genius 
 must be frequently thrown ; it is a kind of darkness 
 which hides from us all surrounding objects, even in the 
 light of day. This is the first state of existence in genius. 
 In Cicero's " Treatise on Old Age," we find Cato admir- 
 ing Caius Sulpitius Gallus, who, when he sat down to 
 write in the morning, was surprised by the evening; 
 and when he took up his pen in the evening, was sur- 
 prised by the appearance of the morning. Socrates 
 sometimes remained a, whole day in immovable medita^ 
 tion, his eyes and countenance directed to one spot, as if 
 in the stillness of death. La Fontaine, when writing his 
 comic tales, has been observed early in the morning and 
 late in the evening in the same recumbent posture under 
 the same tree. This quiescent state is a sort of enthu- 
 siasm, and renders everything that surrounds us as dis- 
 tant as if an immense interval separated us from the 
 scene. Poggius has told us of Dante, that he indulged 
 his meditations more strongly than any man he knew ; 
 for when deeply busied in reading, he seemed to live 
 only in his ideas. Once the poet went to view a public 
 procession; having entered a bookseller's shop, and takeii 
 up a book, he sunk into a reverie ; on his return he de- 
 
ABSTRACTION OF MIND. Igl 
 
 clared that he had neither seen nor heard a single occur- 
 rence in the public exhibition, which Ijad passed un- 
 observed before him. It has been told of a modern as- 
 tronomer, that one summer night, when he was with- 
 drawing to his chamber, the brightness of the heavens 
 showed a phenomenon: he passed the whole night in 
 observing it ; and when they came to him early in the 
 morning, and found him in the same attitude, he said, 
 like one who had been recollecting his thoughts for a 
 few moments, " It must be thus ; but I'll go to bed be- 
 fore it is late." He had gazed the entire night in medita- 
 tion, and was not aware of it. Abemethy has finely 
 painted the situation of Newton in this state of mind. 
 I will not change his words, for his words are his feelings. 
 " It was this power of mind — which can contemplate 
 the greatest number of facts or propositions with ac- 
 curacy — ^that so eminently distinguished Newton from 
 other men. It was this power that enabled him to ar- 
 range the whole of a treatise in his thoughts before he 
 committed a single idea to paper. In the exercise of 
 this power, he was known occasionally to have passed 
 a whole night or day, entirely inattentive to surround- 
 ing objects." 
 
 There is nothing incredible in the stories related of 
 Bome-who have experienced this entranced state in study, 
 where the mind, deliciously inebriated with the object it 
 contemplates, feels nothing, from the excess of feeling, as 
 a phUosophey well describes it. The impressions from 
 our exterior sensations are often suspended by great 
 mental excitement. Archimedes, involvedin the investiga- 
 tion pf mathematical truth, and the painters Protogenes 
 and Parmegiano, found their senses looked up as it were 
 in meditation, so as to be incapable of withdrawing 
 themselves from their work, evea in the midst of the 
 terrors and storming of the place by the enemy. Marino 
 was so absorbed in the composition of his "Adonis," 
 
182 LIXEEARX GHARAOTEB. 
 
 that lie suffered his leg to be burned before the painful 
 sensation grew stronger than the intellectual! pleasure of 
 his imagination. Monsieur Thomas, a modern French 
 , writer, and an intense thinker, would sit for hours 
 against a hedge, composing with a low voice, taking the 
 same pinch of snuff for half an hour together without 
 being, aware that it had long disappeared. When he 
 quitted his apartment, after prolonging his studies there, 
 a visible alteration was observed in his person, and the 
 agitation of his recent thoughts was. still traced in his 
 air and manner. With eloquent truth Buffon described 
 those reveries of the student, which compress his day, 
 and mark the hours by the sensations of minutes I " In- 
 vention depends on patience : contemplate your subject 
 long ; it will gradually unfold till a sort of electric spark 
 convulses for a moment the brain, and spreads down to 
 the very heart a glow of irritation. Then come- the 
 luxuries of genius, the true hours for production and 
 composition — hours so delightful, that I have spent 
 twelve or fourteen successively at my writing-desk, and 
 still been in a state of pleasure." Bishop Horae, whose 
 literary feelings were of the most delicate and lively 
 kind, has beautifully recorded them in his progress 
 through a favourite and lengthened work — 'his Com- 
 mentary oh the Psalms. He alludes to himself in-ihe 
 third person ; yet who but the self-painter could have 
 caught those delicious emotions which are so evanescent 
 in the deep occupation of pleasant studies ? " He arose 
 fresh in the morning to his task ; the silence of the night 
 invited him to pursue it j and he can ti'uly say, that 
 food and rest were not preferred before it. Every part 
 iniproved infinitely upon his acquaintance with it,, and no 
 one gave him uneasiness but the last,, for then he grieved 
 that his work was done." 
 
 This eager delight of< pursuing study, this impatience 
 of interruption, and this'- exultation iji progress, are alike 
 
ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 183 
 
 finely described by Milton in a letter to bis friend 
 Diodati. 
 
 " Suflh is tbe character of my mind, tbat no delay, 
 none of tbe ordinary cessations for rest or otherwise, 
 I bad nearly said care or thinking of the very subject, 
 can hold me back from being hurried on to the destined 
 point, and from completing the great circuit, as it were, 
 of the study in which I am engaged." 
 
 Such is tbe picture of genius viewed in the stillness of 
 MEDITATION ; but there is yet a more excited state, when, 
 as if consciousness were mixing with its reveries, in the 
 allusion of a scene, of a person, of a passion, the emotions 
 of the soul affect even the organs of sense. This excite- 
 ment is experienced when the poet in the excellence of 
 invention, and the philosopher in the force of intellect, 
 alike share in the hours of inspiration and the enthusiasm: 
 of genius, * 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 The enthusiasm of genius. — A state of mind resembling a waking 
 dream distinct ftom reverie. — The ideal presence distinguished fronj 
 tlie real presence. — The senses are really affected ia the ideal world 
 proved by a variety of instances. — Of the rapture or sensation of 
 deep study in art^ in science, and literature. — Of perturbed feelings 
 in delirium. — In extreme endurance of attention. — And in visionary 
 illusions. — Enthusiasts in literature and art — of their self-immolaT 
 tions. 
 
 "TTTE left the man of genius in the stillness of medita-" 
 I r tion. We have now to pursue his history through 
 that more excited state which occurs in the most active 
 operations of genius, and which the term reverie inade* 
 quately indicates. Metaphysical distinctions but ill de- 
 scribe it, and popular language affords no terms for those 
 
184 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 faculties and feelings which escape the observation of the 
 multitude not affected by the phenomenon. 
 
 The illusion produced by a drama on persons of great 
 sfensibility, when all the senses are awakened by a mix- 
 ture of reality with imagination, is the effect experienced 
 by men of genius in their own vivified ideal world. 
 Real emotions are raised by fiction. In a scene, ap- 
 parently passing in their presence, where the whole train 
 of circumstances succeeds in all the continuity of nature, 
 and where a sort of real existences appear to rise up 
 before them, they themselves become spectators or 
 actors. Their sympathies are excited, and the exterioi: 
 organs of sense are visibly affected — they even break 
 out into speech, and often accompany their speech with 
 gestures. 
 
 In this equivocal state the entlmsiast of genius pro- 
 duces his masterpieces. This waking dream is distfnct 
 from reverie, where, our thoughts wiandering without 
 connexion, the faint impressions are so evanescent as to 
 occur without even being recollected. A da,j of reverie 
 is beautifully painted by Rousseau as distinct from a day 
 of thinking : " J'ai des journees delicieuses, en-ant sans 
 souci, sans projet, sans affaire, de bois en bois, et de 
 rocher en rocher, rSvant toujours et ne pensant point." 
 Par different, however, is one closely-pursued act of 
 meditation, carrying the enthusiast of genius beyond the 
 precinct of actual existence. The act of contemplation 
 then creates the thing contemplated. He is now the 
 busy actor in a world which he himself only views; 
 alone, he hears, he sees, he touches, he laughs, he weeps ; 
 his brows and lips, and his very limbs move. ' 
 
 Poets and even painters, who, as Lord Bacon describes 
 witches, "are imaginative," have often involuntarily 
 betrayed, in the act of composition, those gestures which 
 accompany this enthusiasm. Witness Domenichino en- 
 raging himself that he might portray anger. Nor were 
 
ACTOES OF GENIUS. 185 
 
 these creative gestures quite unkno-wn to QuintUian, who 
 has nobly compared them to the lashings of the lion's 
 tail, rousing him to combat. Actors of genius have ac- 
 customed themselves to walk on the stage for an hour 
 before the curtain was drawn, that they might fill their 
 minds with all the phantoms of the drama, and so sus- 
 pend all communion with the external world. The great 
 actress of our age, during representation, always had 
 the door of her dressing-room open, that she might listen, 
 to, and if possible watch the whole performance, with 
 the same attention as was experienced by the spectators. 
 By this means she possessed herself of all the illusion 
 of the scene ; and when she herself entered on the stage, 
 her dreaming thoughts then brightened into a vision, 
 where the perceptions of the soul were as firm and clear 
 as if she were- really the Constance or the Katherine 
 whom she only represented.* 
 
 Aware of this peculiar faculty, so prevalent in the more 
 vivid exercise of genius. Lord Kaimes seems to have 
 been the first who, in a work on criticism, attempted to 
 name the ideal presence, to distinguish it from the real 
 presence of things. It has been called the representative 
 faculty, the imaginative state, and many other states 
 and faculties. Call it what we will, no term opens to us 
 the invisible mode of its operations, no metaphysical 
 definition expresses its variable nature. Conscious of 
 the existence of such a faculty, our critic perceived that 
 the conception of it is by no means clear when described 
 \rx words. 
 
 " Has not the difference beitween an actual thing, and its 
 image in a glass, perplexed some philosophers ? and it is 
 well known how far the ideal philosophy has been car- 
 ried by so fine a genius as Bishop Berkeley. , " AH are. 
 pictures, alike painted on the retina, or optical sen-- 
 
 * The lato Mrs. Siddons. She herself communicated this striking ■ 
 circumstanoe to me. 
 
186 LITBEAET CHAEACTEB. 
 
 eorium !"• exdaimed the enthusiast Baray, who only saw 
 pictures in nature, and nature in pictures. This faculty, 
 has had a strange influence over the passionate lovers of 
 Statues. We find unquestionable evidence of the vivid- 
 ness of the representative feculty, or the ideal presence, 
 vying with that of reality. Evelyn has described one of 
 this cast of mind, in the librarian of the Vatican, who 
 haunted one of the finest collections at Rome. To these 
 •statues he would frequently talk as if they were living 
 persons, often kissing and embracing them. A similar 
 circumstance might be recorded of a man of distinguished 
 talent and literature among ourselves. Wondrous stories 
 are told of the amatorial passion for marble statues ; but 
 the wonder ceases, and the truth is established, when the 
 irresistible ideal presence is comprehended ; the visions 
 which now bless these lovers of statues, in the modern 
 land of sculpture, Italy, had acted with equal force in an- 
 cient Greece. "The Last Judgment," the stupendous 
 ideal presence of Michael Angelo, seems to have com- 
 municated itself to some of his beholders : " As I stood 
 before this picture," a late traveller tells us, " my blood 
 chilled as if the reality were before me, and the very 
 sound of the trumpet seemed to pierce m;y ears." 
 
 Cold and barren tempers without imagination, whose 
 impressions of objects never rise beyond those of mem- 
 ory and reflection, which know only to compare, and not 
 to excite, will smile at this equivocal state of the ideal 
 presence ; yet it is a real one to the enthusiast of genius, 
 and it is his happiest and peculiar condition. Destitute 
 of this faculty, no metaphysical aid, no art to be taught 
 him, no mastery of talent, will avail him : nnblest with 
 it, the votary will find each sacrifice lying cold on 
 the altar, for no accepting flame from heaven shall kin- 
 dle it. 
 
 This enthusiasm indeed can only be discovered by men 
 of genius themselves ; yet when most under its influence^! 
 
SENSITIVENESS. 187 
 
 they can least perceive it, as the eye which sees all things 
 cannot view itself; or, rather, such an attempt would be 
 like searching for the principle of life, which were it found 
 would cease to be life. From an enchanted man we 
 must not expect a narrative of his enchantment ; for if 
 he could speak to us reasonably, and like one of our- 
 selves, in that case he would be a man in a state of dis- 
 enchantment, and then would perhaps yield us no better 
 account than we may trace by our own observations. 
 
 There is, however, something of reality in this state of 
 the ideal presence ; for the most familiar instances wiU 
 show how the nerves of each external sense are put in, 
 motion by the idea of the object, as if the real object had 
 been presented to it. The difference is only in the de- 
 gree. The senses are more concerned in the ideal world 
 than at first appears. The idea of a thiBg will make us 
 shudder ; and the bare imagination of it will often pro- 
 duce a real pain. A curious consequence may be deduced 
 from this principle; Milton, lingering amid the fresh- 
 ness of nature in Eden, felt all the delights of those ele- 
 ments which he was creating ; his nerves moved with the- 
 images which excited them. The fierce amd wild Dante, 
 amidst the abysses of his "Inferno," must often hav& 
 been startled by its horrors, and often left his bitter and 
 gloomy spirit in the stings he inflicted on the great 
 criminal. The moveable nerves, then, of the man of 
 genius are a reality ; he sees, he hearsi, he feels, by each. 
 How mysterioas to us is the operation of this faculty ! 
 
 A Homer and a Richardson,* like nature, open a vol- 
 ume large as life itself— embracing a circuit of human 
 existence ! This state of the mind has even a reality ia 
 
 • Eichardson assembles a family about him, writing down what 
 they said, seeing their very manner of saying, living with thepi as 
 efteu and as long as he wills— -with such a personal unity, that an In- 
 genious lawyer once told mo that he required no stronger evidence of 
 a fact in any court of law than a circumstantial scene in Richardson, 
 
188 lilTBRABT CHARACTER. 
 
 it for the generality of persona. In a romance or a drama, 
 tears are often seen in the eyes of the reader or the spec-, 
 tator, whoj'hefore they have time to recollect that the 
 whole is fictitious, have been surprised for a moment by 
 a strong conception of a present and existing scene. 
 
 Can we doubt of the reality of this faculty, when the. 
 visible and outward frame of the man of genius bears 
 witness to its presence ? When Fielding said, " I do not 
 doubt but the most pathetic and affecting scenes have, 
 been writ with tears," he probably drew that discovery 
 from an inverse feeling to his own. Fielding would have 
 been gratified to have confirmed the observation by facts 
 which never reached him. Metastasio, in writing the 
 ninth scene of the second act of bis Olympiad, found 
 himself suddenly moved — ^shedding tears. The imagined 
 sorrows had inspired real tears; and they afterwards 
 proved contagious. Had our poet not pei;petuated his 
 surprise by an interesting sonnet, the circumstance had. 
 passed away with the emotion, as many such have. Pope 
 could never read Priam's speech for the loss of his son 
 without tears, and frequently has been observed to weep 
 over tender and melancholy passages. Alfieri, the most 
 energetic poet of modern times, having composed, withn 
 out a pause, the whole of an act, noted in the margin — 
 " Written under a paroxysm of enthusiasm, and while 
 shedding a flood of tears." The impressions which the 
 frame experiences in this state, leave deeper trapes behind 
 them than those of reverie. A circumstance accidentally 
 preserved has informed us of the tremors of Dryden after 
 having written that ode,* which, as he confessed^ he had 
 pursued without the power of quitting it ; but these tre- 
 mors were not unusual with him — for in the preface to his 
 
 * This famous and unparalleled ode was probably afterwards re. 
 touehed; but Joseph Warton discovered in it the rapidity of the 
 thouffhts, and the glow and the expressiveness of the images; which 
 are the certain marks of the first ekeich of a master. 
 
EFFECT OF GREAT "WORKS. 189 
 
 " Tales," he tell us, that " in translating Homer he found 
 greater pleasure than in Virgil ; but it was not a pleasure 
 without pain ; the continual agitation of the spirits must 
 needs be a weakener to any constitution, especially in age, 
 and many pauses are required for refreshment betwixt the 
 heats." 
 
 We find Metastasio, like others of the brotherhood, 
 susceptible of this state, complaining of his sufferings 
 during the poetical sestus. " When I apply with atten- 
 tion, the nerves of my sensorium are pijt into a violent 
 tumult ; I grow as red as a drunkard, and am obliged to 
 quit my work." When Buffon was absorbed on a subject 
 which presented great objections to his opinions, he felt 
 his head burn, and saw his countenance flushed ; and this 
 was a warning for him to suspend his attention. Gray 
 could never compose voluntarily: his genius resembled 
 the armed apparition in Shakspeare's master-tragedy. 
 " He would not be commanded." When he wished to 
 compose the Installation Ode, for a considerable time he 
 felt himself without the power to begin it : a friend call- 
 ing on him. Gray flung open his door hastily, and in a 
 hurried voice and tone, exclaiming in the first verse of 
 that ode — 
 
 Hence, avauut I 'tis holy ground I — 
 
 his friend started at the disordered appearance of the 
 bard, whose orgasm had disturbed his very air and coun- 
 tenance. * 
 
 Listen to one labouring with all the magic of the spell. 
 Madame Roland has thus powerfully described the ideal 
 presence in her first readings of Telemachus and Tasso : — 
 "My respiration rose^ I felt a rapid fire colouring my 
 face, and my voice changing had betrayed my agitation. 
 I was Eucharis for Telemachus, and Erminia for Tancred. 
 However, during this perfect transformation, I did not 
 yet think that I myself was anything, for any one : the 
 
190 LITEEABT CHAEACTKK. 
 
 ■whole had no connexion with myself. I sought for noth- 
 ing around me; I was they; I saw only the objects 
 which existed for them ; it was a dream, without being 
 awakened." 
 
 The description which so calm and exquisite an investi- 
 gator of taste and philosophy as our sweet and polished 
 Reynolds has given of himself at one of these moments, 
 is too rare not to be recorded in his own words. Allud- 
 ing to the famous "Transfiguration," our own Raffaelle 
 Bays — " When I have stood looking at that picture from 
 figure to figure, the eagerness, the spirit, the close un- 
 affected attention of each figure to the principal actiori, 
 my thoughts have carried me away, that I have forgot 
 myself; and for that time might fee looked upon as an 
 enthusiastic madman ; for I could really fancy the whole 
 action was passing before my ey«s." 
 
 The .efiect which the study of Plutarch's Illustrioua 
 Men produced on the mighty mind of Alfieri, during a 
 whole winter, while he lived as it were among the heroes 
 of antiquity, he has himself described. Alfieri wept and. 
 i*aved with grief and indignation that he was born under 
 a government which favoured no Roman heroes and 
 sages. As often as he was struck with the great deeds 
 of these great men, in his extreme agitation he rose from 
 his seat as one possessed. The feeling of genius in 
 Alfieri was suppressed for more than twenty years, by 
 the discouragement of his uncle: but as the natural 
 temperament cannot be crushed out of>the soul of genius, 
 he was a poet without writing a single verse; and as a, 
 great poet, the ideal presence at times became ungovern- 
 able, verging to madness. In traversing the wilds of . 
 Arragon, his emotions would certainly have g'iven birth 
 to poetry, could he have expressed himself in verse. It 
 was a complete State of the imaginative existence, or this 
 ideal prfeSeiiccS; for he proceeded along the wilds of ; 
 Arragon ini a reverie, weeping and laughing by turns,' 
 
EFFECTS OF GBEAT TVOEKS. 191 
 
 He considerpd this as a folly, because it ended in nothing 
 but in laughter and tears. He was not aware that he 
 was then yielding to a demonstration, could he have 
 judged of himself, that he possessed tliose dispositions 
 of mind and that energy of passion which form the 
 poetical character. 
 
 Grenius creates by a singje conception; the statuary 
 conceives the statue at once, which he afterwards exe- 
 ctites by the slow process of art ; and the architect con- 
 trives a whole palace in an instant. In a single principle, 
 opening as it were on a sadden to genius, a great and 
 new system of things is discovered. It has happened, 
 sometimes, that this single conception, rushing over the 
 whole concentrated spirit, has agitated the frame convul- 
 sively. It comes like a whispered secret from Nature. 
 When Malebranche first took up Deseartes's Treatise on 
 Man, the germ of his own subsequent philosophic system, 
 such was his intense feeling, that a violent palpitataon of 
 the heart, more than once, obliged him to lay down the 
 volume. When the first idea of the " Essay on the Arts 
 and Sciences " rushed on the mind of Rousseau, a feverish 
 symptom in his nervous system approached to a slight 
 delirium. Stopping under an oak, he wrote with a pencil 
 the Prosopopeia of Fabricius. '*I still remember my 
 solitary transport at the discovery osf a philosophical 
 argument against the doctrine of transubstantiatioffl," 
 «xclaimed Gibbon in his Memoirs. 
 
 This quick sensibility of genius has suppressed ike 
 voice of poets in reciting their most pathetic passages. 
 Thomson was so oppressed by a passage in Virgil or 
 Milton when he attempted to read, that " his voioe sunk 
 in ill-articulated sounds from the bottom of his breast." 
 The tremulous figures of the ancient Sibyl appear to 
 bave been viewed in the land of the Muses, by the ener- 
 getic description which Paulus Jovius gives us of the 
 impetus and afflatus of one of the Italian improvvifiatorjii 
 
192 LITBEART OHABACTER. 
 
 some of whom, I have heard from one present at a 
 similar exhibition, have not degenerated in poetic inspi- 
 ration, nor in its corporeal excitement. " His eyes fixed 
 downwards, kindle as he gives utterance to his effusions, 
 the moist drops flow down his cheeks, the veins of his 
 forehead swell, and wonderfully his learned ear, as it 
 were, abstracted and intent, moderates each impulse of 
 his flowing numbers." * 
 
 This enthusiasm throws the man of genius amid Nature 
 into absorbing reveries when the senses of other men are 
 overcome at the appearance of destruction; he continues 
 to view only Nature herself. The mind of Pliny, to add 
 one more chapter to his mighty scroll, sought Nature 
 amidst the volcano in which he perished. Vernet was 
 on board a ship in a raging tempest where all hope was 
 given up. The astonished captain beheld the artist of 
 geruus, his pencil in his hand, in calm enthusiasm sketch- 
 ing the terrible world of waters — studying the wave 
 that was rising to devour him.f 
 
 There is a tender enthusiasm in the elevated studies 
 of antiquity. Then the ideal presence or the imaginative 
 existence prevails, by its perpetual associations, or as the 
 late Dr. Brown has, perhaps, more distinctly termed them, 
 suggestions. "In contemplating antiquity, the mind 
 itself becomes antique," was finely observed by Livy, 
 long ere our philosophy of the mind existed as a system. 
 This rapture, or sensation of deep study, has been de- 
 Bcribed by one whose imagination had strayed into the 
 occult learning of antiquity, and in the hymn^ of Or- 
 
 * The passage ia ourioua: — Canenti deflxi exardent ooull, siidores 
 manant, frontia venee oonturaescunt, et quod mirum est, eraditse aures, 
 tanquam alienee et intentEe, omnem impetum profluentium numerorum 
 exaotisaima ratione moderantur." 
 
 ■)■ Vernet was the artist whose sea-ports of France still decorate the 
 Louvre. He was marine painter to Louia SV. and grandfather of the 
 celebrated Horace Vernet, whose recent death has deprived France of 
 her beat painter of battle-scenes. — Ed. 
 
ENTHUSIASK 193 
 
 pheus it seemed to him that he had lifted the veil from 
 Nature. Hia feelings were associated with her loneli- 
 ness. I translate his words : — " When I took these dark 
 mystical hymns into my hands, I appeared as it were to 
 be descending into an abyss of the mysteries of venera- 
 ble antiquity ; at that moment, the world in silence and 
 the stars and moon only, watching me." This enthusi- 
 asm is confii'med by Mr. Mathias, who applies this de- 
 scription to his own emotions on his first opening the 
 manuscript volumes of the poet Gray on the philosophy 
 of Plato ; " and many a learned man," he adds, " will 
 aqknowledge as his own the feelings of this animated 
 scholar." 
 
 Amidst the monuments of great and departed nations, 
 our imagination is touched by the grandeur of local 
 impressions, and the vivid associations, or suggestions, 
 of the manners, the arts, and the individuals, of a great 
 people. The classical author of Anacfaarsis, when in 
 Italy, would often stop as if overcome by his recollec- 
 tions. Amid camps, temples, circuses, hippodromes, and 
 public and private edifipes, he, as it were, held an interior 
 converse with the manes of those who seemed hovering 
 about the capital of the old world ; as if he had beejn a 
 citizen of ancient Rome travelling in the modern. So 
 men of genius have roved amid the awful ruins ti^l the 
 ideal presence has fondly built up the city anew, and 
 have become Romans in the Rome of two, thousand 
 years past. Pomponius Lsetus, who devoted his life to 
 this study, was constantly seen wanderin,g amidst the 
 vestiges of this " throne of the world." There, in many 
 a reverie, as his eyes rested on the mutilated arch 
 and the broken column, abstracted and immovable, he 
 dropped tears in the ideal presence of Rome and of the 
 Romans.* Another enthusiast of this class was Bosius, 
 
 * Shelley caught much of his poetry io wandering among the ruina 
 of the palace of the Cassara on the Palatine HUl ; and the iuiprpssitk 
 13 
 
194 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 who sought beneath Rome for another Rome, in those 
 catacombs built by the early Christians for their asylum 
 and their sepulchre. His work of "Roma Sotteranea" 
 is the production of a subterraneous life, passed in fervent 
 and perilous labours. Taking with him a hermit's meal 
 for the week, this new Pliny often descended into the 
 bowels of the earth, by lamp-light, clearing away the sand 
 and ruins till a tomb broke forth, or an inscription became 
 legible. Accompanied by some friend whom his enthu- 
 siasm had inspired with his own sympathy, here he dic- 
 tated his notes, tracing the mouldering sculpture, and 
 catching the fading picture. Thrown back into the primi- 
 tive ages of Christianity, amid the local impressions, the 
 historian of the Christian catacombs collected the memo- 
 rials of an age and of a race which were hidden beneath 
 the earth.* 
 
 The same enthusiasm surrounds the world of science 
 with that creative imagination which has startled even 
 men of science by its peculiar discoveries. Werner, the 
 mineralogist, celebrated for his lectures, appears, by some 
 accounts transmitted by his auditors, to have exercised 
 this faculty. Werner often said that "he always de- 
 pended on the muse for inspiration." His unwritten lec- 
 ture was a reverie — till kindling in his progress, blending 
 science and imagination in the grandeur of his concep- 
 tions, at times, as if he had gathered about him the very 
 elements of nature, his spirit seemed to be hovering over 
 the waters and the strata. With the same enthusiasm 
 of science, Cuvier meditated on some bones, and some 
 
 made by historic ruina on the mind of Byron is powerfully evinced in 
 his " Childe Harold."— Ed. 
 
 * A large number of these important memorials have been since 
 removed to the Galkria Lapidaria of the Vatican, and arranged on the 
 walls by Mariui. They are invaluable aa mementoes of the early 
 Church at Rome. Aringhi has also devoted a work to their elucida- 
 tion. The Rev. 0. Maitland's " Church in the Catacombs " in an able 
 general summary, clearly displaying their intrinsic historic value.— rEp. 
 
WERNER AND CtTVTER. 195 
 
 fragments of Tbones, which could not belong to any- 
 known class of the animal kingdom. The philosopher 
 dwelt on these animal ruins till he constructed numerous 
 species which had disappeared from the globe. This sub- 
 lime naturalist has ascertained and classified the fossil 
 remains of animals whose existence can no longer be 
 traced in the records of mankind. His own language 
 bears testimony to the imagination which carried him on 
 through a ' career so strange and wonderful. " It is a 
 rational object of ambition in the mind of man, to whom 
 only a short space of time is allotted upon earth, to have 
 the glory of restoring the history of thousands of ages 
 lohich preceded the existence of his race, and of thousands 
 of animals that never were contemporaneous with his spe- 
 cies." Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagina- 
 tion, in the enthusiasm of genius. Even in the practical 
 part of a science, painful to the operator himself, Mr. Aber- 
 nethy has declared, and eloquently declared, that this 
 enthusiasm is absolutely requisite. " We have need of 
 enthusiasm, or some strong incentive, to induce us to 
 spend our nights in study, and our days in the disgust- 
 ing and health-destroying observation of human diseases, 
 which alone can enable us to understand, alleviate, or 
 remove them. On no other terms can we be considered 
 as real, students of our profession — to confer that which 
 sick kings would fondly purchase with their diadem — 
 that which wealth cannot purchase, nor state nor rank 
 bestow — ^to alleviate the most insupportable of human 
 afflictions." Such is the enthusiasm of the physiologist 
 of genius, who elevates the demonstrations of anatomical 
 inquiries by the cultivation of the intellectual faculties, 
 connecting "man with the common Master of the uni- 
 verse." 
 
 This enthusiasm inconceivably fills the mind of genius 
 in all great and solemn operations. It is an agitation 
 amidst calmness, and is required not only in the fine arts, 
 
196 HTERAET CHARAOTEE. 
 
 but wherever a great and continued exertion of the soul 
 must be elnployed. The great ancients^ who, if they were 
 not always philosophers, were always men of genius, sawj 
 or imagihed they saw, a divinity within the man. This 
 enthusiasm is alike experienced in the silence of study 
 and amidst the roar of cannon, in painting a picture or in 
 scaling a rampatt. View De Thou, the historian, after 
 his m'orning prayers, imploring the Divinity to purify his 
 heart from partiality and hatred, and to open his spirit in 
 developing the truths amidst the contending factions of 
 his times ; and Haydn, employed in his " Creation," earn- 
 estly addressing the Creator ere he struck his instrument. 
 In moments like these,, man becomes a perfect unity-^one 
 thought and one act, abstl-aoted from all other thoughts 
 and all other acts. This intensity of the mind was felt 
 by Gray in his loftiest excursions, and is perhaps the 
 same power which impels the villager, when, to overcome 
 his rivals in a contest for leaping, he retires back some 
 steps, collects all exertion into his mind^ and clears the 
 eventful bound. One of our admirals in the reign of 
 Elizabeth held as a maxim, that a height of passion^ 
 amounting to frenzy, was necessary to qualify a man for 
 the command of a fleet ; and Nelson, decorated by aU his 
 honours about him, on the day of battle^ at the sight of 
 those emblems of gloiy emulated himsel£ This enthu- 
 siasm was necessary for his genitis, and made it effective. 
 But this enthusiasm, prolonged as it often has been by 
 the operation of the iffiiaginative existeilce, becomes a 
 state of perturbed feeling, and can only be diStinguiBhed 
 from a disordered intellect by the power of volition pos- 
 sessed by a sound mind of withdrawing from the ideal 
 "World into the world of sense. It is but a, step which 
 may carry us from the wanderings of fancy into the aber- 
 rations of delirium-. The endurance of attention, even in 
 minds of the highest order, is limited by a law of nature; 
 and when thinking is goaded on to exhaustiouj confusion 
 
POWER OP THOUSHT. 197 
 
 of ideas ensues, as straining any one of our linjbs by 
 excessive exertion produces tremor and torpor. 
 
 With curious art the brain too finely wrought, 
 Preys on hersolf and is destroyed by Thought ; 
 Constant attention wears the active mind. 
 Blots out her powers, and le^ives a blaiil^ bpliinil-:— 
 The greatest genius to. this ftte may bQw. 
 
 Even minds less susceptible than high genius may be- 
 come overpowered by their imagination. Often, in the 
 deep silence around us, we seek to relieve ourselves by 
 some voluntary noise or action which piay direct our at-; 
 tention to an exterior object, and bring us back to the 
 world, which we had, as it were, left behind us. The cir- 
 cumstance is sufficiently familiar; as well as another} 
 that whenever we are absorbed in profound contemplai 
 tion, a startling noise scatters the spirits, ?ind painfully 
 agitates the whole frame. The nerves are then in a state 
 of the' utmost relaxation. There may be an agony in 
 thought which only deep thinkers experience. The ter^ 
 rible effect of metaphysical studies on Beattie has beea 
 told by himself. " Since the ^ Essay on Tinitb ' was prinfrr 
 ed in quarto, I have never dared to read it over. I 
 durst not even read the sheets to see whether there were 
 any errors in the print, and was obliged to get a friend 
 to do that office for me. These studies came in time to 
 have dreadful effects upon my nei-vous system ; and I 
 cannot read what I then wrote without some degree of 
 horror, because it recalls to my mind the horrors that I 
 have sometimes felt after passing a long evening in those 
 severe studies." 
 
 Goldoni, after a rash exertion of writing sixteen plays 
 in a year, confesses he paid the penalty of the fblly. He 
 flew to Genoa, leading a life of delicious vacuity. To 
 pass the day without doing anything, was all the enjoy- 
 ment he was now capable of feeling. Bijt long after he 
 said, " I felt at that time, and have ever since continued 
 
198 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 to feel, the consequences of that exhaustion of spirits I 
 sustained in composing my sixteen comedies." 
 
 The enthusiasm of study was experienced hj Pope in 
 his self-education, and once it clouded over his fine 
 intellect. It was the severity of his application which 
 distorted his body; and he then partook of a calamity 
 incidental to the family of genius^ for he sunk into that 
 state of exhaustion which Smollett experienced during 
 half a year, called a coma vigil, an affection of the .brain, 
 where the principle of life is so reduced, that all ex- 
 ternal objects appear to be passing in a dream. Boer- 
 haave has related of himself, that having imprudently 
 indulged in intense thought on a particular subject, he 
 did not close his eyes for six weeks after ; and Tissot, in 
 his work on the health of men of letters, abounds in 
 similar cases, where a complete stupor has affected. the 
 unhappy student for a period of six months. 
 
 Assuredly the finest geniuses' have not always the 
 power to withdraw themselves from that intensely inter- 
 esting train of ideas, which we have shown has not been 
 removed from about them by even the violent stimuli of 
 exterior objects ; and the scenical illusion which then 
 occurs, has been called the hajlucinatio studiosa, or false 
 ideas in reverie. Such was the state in which Petrarch 
 found himself, in that minute narrative of a vision in 
 which Laura appeared to him ; and Tasso, in the lofty 
 conversations he held with a spirit that glided towards 
 him on the beams of the sun. In this state was Male- 
 branche listening to the voice of God within him ; and 
 Lord Herbert, when, to know whether he should publislj 
 his book, he threw himself on his knees, and interrogated 
 the Deity in the stillness of the sky.* And thus Pascal 
 
 * In his curious autobiograpliy he has given the prayer he userl, endi 
 ing, " I am not satisfied whether I shall publish this book de ■ veritaie-; 
 if it be for thy glory, I beseech theo give me some sign from heaven; 
 if not I shall suppress it." His lordship adds, " I had no sooner spoken 
 
YISIONARIES OP GENIUS. I99 
 
 Started at times at a fiery gulf opening hj Hs side. Spi- 
 nello having painted the fall of the rebellious angels, had 
 so strongly imagined the illusion, and more particularly 
 the terrible features of Lucifer, that he was himself struck 
 with such horror as to have been long afflicted with the 
 presence of the demon to which his genius had given 
 birth. The influence of the same ideal presence operated 
 on the religious painter Angeloni, who could never rep- 
 resent the sufferings of Jesus without his eyes overflowing 
 with tears. Descartes, when young, and in a country 
 seclusion, his brain exhausted with meditation, and his 
 imagination heated to excess, heard a voice in the air 
 which called him to pursue the search of truth ; nor did 
 he doubt the vision, and this delirious dreaming of genius 
 charmed him even in his after-studies. Our Collins and 
 Cowper were often thrown into that extraordinary state 
 of mind, when the ideal presence converts us into vision- 
 aries ; and their illusions were as strong as Swedenborg's, 
 who saw a terrestrial heaven in the glittering streets of 
 his "New Jerusalem ; or Jacob Behmen's, who listened to 
 a celestial voice tUlhe beheld the apparition of an angel; 
 or Cardan's, when he so carefully observed a number of 
 little armed men at his feet ; or Benvenuto Cellini's, 
 whose vivid imagination and glorious egotism so fre- 
 quently contemplated " a resplendent light hovering over 
 his shadow." 
 
 Such minds identified themselves with their visions ! 
 If we pass them over by asserting that they were insane, 
 we are ohly cutting the knot which we cannot untie. We 
 
 these ■words but a loud, though gentle noise came from the heavens 
 (for it was like nothing on earth) which did so comfort and cheer me, 
 mat I took my petition as granted, and tliat I had the sign I demanded^ 
 whereupon also I resolved to print my book. This (how strange soever 
 it may seem) I protest before the eternal God is true, neither am I any 
 way Buperstltiously deceived therein, since I. did not only clearly hear 
 the noise, but in the serenest sky that ever I saw, being without, all 
 cloud, did to mj thinking see the phice fiom whence it came." — En. 
 
200 LITBBART OHARACTBR. 
 
 have no right to deny what some maintain, that a sym- 
 pathy of the corporeal with the incorporeal nature of man, 
 his imaginative with his physical existence, is an excite- 
 ment which appears to have been experienced by persons 
 of a peculiar organization, and which metaphysiteians in 
 despair must resign to the speculations of enthusiasts 
 themselves, though metaphysicians reason about phe- 
 nomena far removed from the perceptions of the eye. 
 The historian of the mind cannot omit this fact, unques- 
 tionable, however incomprehensible. According to our 
 own conceptions, this state must produce a strange myste- 
 rious personage : a concentration of a human being within 
 himself, endowed with inward eyes, ears which listen to in- 
 terior sounds, and invisible hands touching impalpable ob- 
 jects, for whatever they act or however they are acted on, 
 as far as respects themselves all must have passed within 
 their own minds. The Platonic Dr. More flattered him- 
 self that he was an enthusiast without enthusiasm, which 
 seems but a suspicious state of convalescence. " I must 
 ingenuously confess," he says, " that I have a natural touch 
 of enthusiasm in my complexion, but such as I thank God 
 was ever governable enough, and have found at length 
 perfectly subduable. In virtue of which victory I know 
 better what is in enthusiasts than they themselves ; and 
 therefore was able to write with life and- judgment, and 
 shall, I hope, contribute not a little to the peace and quiet 
 of this kingdom thereby." Thus far one of its votaries : 
 and all that he vaunts to have acquired by this mysterious 
 fq,culty of enthusiasm is the having rendered it " at length 
 perfectly subduable," Yet those who have written on 
 " Mystical devotion," have declared that, " it is a sublime 
 state of mind to which whole sects have aspired, and some 
 individuals appear to have attained."* The histories of 
 
 * Charles Butler has drawn up a aenaible essay on " Mystical Devo- 
 tion." He was a Roman Catholic. Norris, and Dr. Henry More, and 
 Bishop Berlteley, may be consulted by the curious. 
 
ENTHUSIASM. 201 
 
 great vjsionarieSi, were they correctly detailed, would 
 probably prove how their delusions consisted of the ocu- 
 lar spectra of their brain and the accelerated sensations of 
 their nerves, Bayle has ooi\}ured up an amusing theory 
 of apparitions, to show that Hobbes, who was subject to 
 occasional terrors, might fear that a certain combination 
 of atoms agitating his brain might so disorder his mind 
 as to expose him to spectral visions ; and so being very 
 timid, and distrusting his own imagination, he was averse 
 at times to be left alone. Apparitions often happen in 
 dreams, but they may happen to a man when awake, for 
 reading and hearing of them would revive their images, 
 and these images might play even an incredulous phi- 
 . losopher some unlucky trick. 
 
 But men of genius whose enthusiasm has not been past 
 recovery, have experienced this extraordinary state of 
 the mind, in those exhaustions of study to which they 
 unquestionably are subject. Tissot, on "The Health of 
 Men of Letters," has produced a terrifying number of 
 eases. They see and hear what none but themselves do. 
 Genius thrown into this peculiar state has produced some 
 noble effusions. Kotzebue was once absorbed in hypo- 
 chondriacal melancholy, and appears to have meditated 
 on self-destruction; but it happened that he preserved 
 his habit of dramatic composition, and produced one of 
 Ms most energetic dramas— that of " Misanthropy and 
 Kepentance." He tells us that he had never experienced 
 such a rapid flow of thoughts and images, and he believed, 
 ;jsrhat a physiological history would perhaps show, that 
 there are some maladies, those of the brain and the 
 nerves, which actually stretch the powers of the mind 
 beyond their usual reach. It is the more vivid world 
 of ideal existence. 
 
 But what is more evident, men of the finest genius have 
 experienced these hallucinations in society acting on their 
 moral habits. They have insulated the mind. With^ 
 
202 LITBEAET CHARACTER. 
 
 them ideas have become realities, and suspicions certain- 
 ties ; while events have heen noted down as seen and 
 heard, which in truth had never occurred. Rousseau's 
 phantoms scarcely ever quitted him for a day. Barry 
 imagined that he was invisibly persecuted by the Royal 
 Academy, who had even spirited up a gang of house- 
 breakers. The vivid memoirs of Alfieri will authenticate 
 what Donne, who himself had suffered from them, calls 
 " these eclipses, sudden offuscations and darkening of the 
 senses." Too often the man of genius, with a vast and 
 solitary power, darkens the scene of life ; he builds a 
 pyramid between himself and the sun. Mocking at the 
 expedients by which society has contrived to protect its 
 feebleness, he would break down the institution from 
 whichhe has shrunk away in the loneliness of his feelings. 
 Such is the insulating intellect in which some of the most 
 elevated spirits have been reduced. To imbue ourselves 
 with the genius of their works, even to think of them, is 
 an awful thing ! In nature their existence is a solecism, 
 as their genius is a paradox ; for their crimes seem to be 
 without guilt, their curses have kindness in them, and if 
 they afflict mankind it is in sorrow. 
 
 Yet what less than enthusiasm is the purchase-price of 
 high passion and invention ? Perhaps never has there 
 been a man of genius of this rare cast, who has not be- 
 trayed the ebullitions of imagination in some outward 
 action, at that period when the illusions of life are more 
 real to genius than its realities. There is a fata mor- 
 gana, that throws into the air a pictured land, and the 
 deceived eye trusts tUl the visionary shadows glide away. 
 "I have dreamt of a golden land," exclaimed Fuseli, 
 " and solicit in vain for the barge which is to carry me to 
 its shore." A slight derangement of our accustomed 
 habits, a little perturbation of the faculties, and a roman- 
 tic tinge on the feelings, give no indifferent promise of 
 genius; of that generous temper which. knowing nothing 
 
enthusiasm:. 203 
 
 of the baseness of mankind, "With indefinite views carries 
 on some glorious design to oharm the world or to make 
 it happier. Often we hear, from the confessions of men 
 of genius, of their having in youth indulged the most 
 elevating and the most chimerical projects ; and if age 
 ridicule thy imaginative existence, be assured that it is 
 the decline of its genius. That virtuous and tender en- 
 thusiast, F6nelon, in his early youth, troubled his friends 
 with a classical and religious reverie. He was on the 
 point of quitting them to restore the independence of 
 Greece, with the piety of a missionary, and with the taste 
 of a classical antiquary. The Peloponnesus opened to 
 him the Church of Corinth, where St. Paul preached, the 
 Pirseus where Socrates conversed; while the latent poet 
 was to pluck laurels from Delphi, and rove amidst the 
 amenities of Tempe. Such was the influence of the ideal 
 presence; and barren will be his imagination, and luck- 
 less his fortune, who, claiming the honours of genius, has 
 never been touched by such a temporary delirium. 
 
 To this enthusiasm, and to this alone, can we attribute 
 the self-immol^ion of men of genius. Mighty and labo- 
 rious works have been pursued as a foi-lom hope, at the 
 certain destruction of the fortune of the individual. Vast 
 labours attest the enthusiasm which accompanied their 
 ptogfess. Such men have sealed their works with their 
 blood : they have silently borne the pangs of disease ; 
 they have Isarred themselves from the pursuits of fortune; 
 they have torn themselves away from all they loved in 
 life, patiently suffering these self-denials, to escape from 
 interruptions and impediments to their studies. Martyrs 
 of literature and art, they behold in their solitude the 
 halo of immortality over their studious heads — that fame 
 which is "a life beyond life." Van Helmont, in his 
 library and in his laboratory, preferred their busy soli- 
 tude to the honours and the invitations of Rodolphus II., 
 there writing down what he daily experienced during 
 
204 LITERAEY CHAEAGTER. 
 
 thirty years ; nor 'would the enthusiast yield up to the 
 emperor one of those golden and visionary days ! Milton 
 ■would not desist from proceeding with one of his works, 
 although warned by the physician of the certain loss of 
 his sight. He declared he preferred his duty to his eyes, 
 and doubtless his faijie to his comfort. Anthony Wood, 
 to preserve the lives of others, voluntarily resigned his, 
 own to cloistered studies ; nor did the literary passion 
 desert him in his last moments, when with his dying 
 hands the hermit of literature still grasped his beloved 
 papers, and his last mortal thoughts dwelt on his " Athenaa 
 Oxonienses." Moreri, the founder of our great biogra-s 
 phical collections conceived the design -with such enthu'^ 
 siasm, and found' such seduction in the laboHr, that he 
 willingly withdrew from the popular celebrity he had 
 acquired as a preacher, and the preferment -which a min^ 
 ister of state, in whose house he resided, would have 
 opened to his vie\vs,* After the first edition of his 
 "Historical Dictionary," he had nothing so much at, 
 heart as its improvement. His unyielding application 
 was converting labour into death ; but collecting his last 
 renovated vigour, with his dying hands he gave the vol- 
 ume to the world, though he did not live to witness even 
 its publication. All objects in life appeared wean to him, 
 compared with that e:salted delight of addressing, to th§ 
 literary men of his age, the history of their brothers. 
 Such are the men, as Bacon says of himself, who are 
 "the servants of posterity," 
 
 Who scorn delights, and live laborious days I 
 
 The same enthusiasm inspires the pupils of art con-i 
 Bumed by their own ajrdour. The young and classical 
 
 * Louis Moreri was borti in Provence in 1643, and died in 1680, at 
 the early age of 37, while engaged on a second edition of his great 
 worlc. The minister alluded to in the text was M. de Pompoune, Sec- 
 retary of State to Louis XFV. until the yea? 1679.— »Bd. 
 
ENTHUSIASM. 205 
 
 sculptor who raised the statue of Charles 11., placed in 
 the centre of the (Royal Exchange, was, in the midst of 
 his work, advised by his medical friends to desist ; for 
 the energy of his labour, with the strong excitement ' of 
 his feelings, already had made fatal inroads in his consti- 
 tution: but he was' willing, he said, to die at the foot of 
 his statue. The statue was raised, and the young sculp- 
 tor, with the shining eye and hectic fltish of consumption, 
 beheld it there — retui-ned home — and died. Drouais, a 
 pupil of David, the French painter, was a youth of fortune, 
 but the solitary pleasure of his youth was his devotion to 
 Raphael ; he was at his studies from four in the morning 
 till night. " Painting or nothing !" was the cry of this 
 enthusiast of elegance ; " First fame, then amusement," 
 was another. His sensibility was great as his enthusiasm ; 
 and he cut in pieces the picture for which David declared 
 he would inevitably obtain the prize. " I have had my 
 reward in your approbation ; but next year I shall feel 
 more certain of deserving it," was the reply of this young 
 enthusiast. Afterwards he astonished Paris with his 
 "Marius;" but while engaged on a subject which he 
 could never quit, the principle of life itself was drying up 
 in his veins. Henry Headley and Kirke White were tbe 
 early victims of the enthusiasm of study, and are mourned 
 by the few' who are organized like themselves. 
 
 'Twas thine own genius gave the final blow, 
 ■And help'd to plant the wound that laid thee low ; 
 So the strucic eagle, stretch'd upon the plain, 
 No more thtbugh rolling Clouda to Soar again, 
 VieW'd his own feathe*' on the fatal dart, 
 •And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heaft ; 
 Keen were his panga, but keener far to feel 
 He nursed the pinion which impell'd the steel, 
 ■While the same plumage that had warm'd his nest, 
 Drank the last life-drop of his bleeding breast. 
 
 One of our former great students, when reduced in health 
 
206 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 by excessive study, was entreated to abandon it, and in 
 the scholastic language of the day, not to perdere suh- 
 stantiam propter accidentia. With a smile the martyr 
 of study repeated a verse from Juvenal : 
 
 Neo propter vitam Vivendi perdere qausas. 
 No I not for life lose that for which I live I 
 
 Thus the shadow of death falls among those who are 
 existing with more than life about them. Yet " there is 
 no celebrity for the artist," said Gesner, " if the love of 
 his own art do not become a vehement passion ; if the 
 hours he employs to cultivate it be not for him the most 
 delicious ones of his life ; if study become not his true ex- 
 istence and his first happiness ; if the society of his 
 brothers in art be not that which most pleases him ; if 
 even in the night-time the ideas of his art do not occupy 
 his vigils or his dreams ; if in the morning he fly not to 
 his work, impatient to recommence what he left unfinished. 
 These are the marks of him who labours for true glory 
 and posterity ; but if he seek only to please the taste of 
 his age, his works will not kindle the desires nor touch 
 the hearts of those who love the arts and the artists." 
 
 Unaccompanied by enthusiasm, genius will produce 
 nothing but uninteresting works of art ; not a work of art 
 resembling the dove of Arohytas, which beautiful pieee 
 of mechanism, while other artists beheld flying, no one 
 cbuld frame such another dove to meet it in the air. 
 Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which 
 hovers over the production of genius, throwing the reader 
 of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very ideal 
 presence whence these works have really originated. A 
 great work always leaves us in a state of musing. 
 
JBALOTJSY OF GENIUS. £07 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Of the jealousy of Genius. — ^Jealousy often proportioned to the degree 
 of genius. — A perpetual feveramong Authors and Artists. — ^Instances 
 of its incredible excess among brothers and benefactors. — Of a pe- 
 culiar species, where the fever consumes the sufierer, without its 
 malignancy. 
 
 JEALOUSY, long supposed to be the offspring of little 
 minds, is not, however, confined to them. In the 
 literary republic, the passion fiercely rages among the 
 senators as well as among the people. In that curious 
 self-description which Linnseus comprised in a single 
 page, written with the precision of a naturalist, that 
 great man discovered that his constitution was liable to 
 be afflicted with jealousy. Literary jealousy seems often 
 proportioned to the degree of genius, and the shadowy 
 and equivocal claims of literary honour is the real cause 
 of this terrible fear ; for in cases where the object is more 
 -"jraipable and definite than intellectual excellence, jeal- 
 ousy does not appear so strongly to affect the claimant 
 for admiration. The most beautiful woman, in the sea- 
 son of beauty, is more haughty than jealous; she rarely 
 encounters a rival ; and while her claims exist, who can 
 contend with a fine feature or a dissolving glance? 
 But a man of genius has no other existence than in 
 the opinion of the world ; a divided empire would 
 obscure him, and a contested one might prove his 
 annihilation. 
 
 , The lives of authors and artists exhibit a most painful 
 disease in that jealousy which is the perpetual fever of 
 their existence. "Why does Plato never mention Xeno- 
 phon, and why does Xenophon inveigh against Plato, 
 studiously collecting every little rumour which may de- 
 tract from his fame ? They wrote on the same subject ! 
 
20S LltiSRAET CHAHACTES. 
 
 The studied affectation of Aristotle to differ from the 
 doctrines of his master Plato while he was following 
 them, led him into ambiguities and contradictions which 
 have been remarked. The two fathers of our poetry, 
 Chaucer and Gower, suffered theif friendship to be inter- 
 rupted towards the close of their lives. Chaucer bitterly 
 reflects on his friend for the indelicacy of some of his 
 tales : " Of all such cursed stories I say fy !" and Grower, 
 evidently in return, erased those verses in praise of his 
 friend which he had inserted in the first copy of his 
 "Confessio Amantis." Why did Corneille, tottering to 
 the grave, when Racine consulted him on his first tragedy, 
 advise the author never to write another? Why does 
 Voltaire continually detract from the sublimity of Cor- 
 neille, the sweetness of Racine, and the fire of Cr6billon ? 
 Why did Dryden never speak of Otway with kindjieas 
 but when in his grave, then acknowledging that Otway 
 excelled him in the pathetic ? Why did Leibnitz speak 
 slightingly of Locke's Essay, and meditate on nothing 
 less than the complete overthrow of Newton's system? 
 Why, when Boccaccio sent to Petrarch a copy of Dante, 
 declaring that the work was like a first light which had 
 illuminated his mind, did Petrarch boldly observe that 
 he had not been anxious to inquire after it, for intending 
 himself to compose it in the vernacular idiom, he had no 
 wish to be considered as a plagiary ? and he only .allows 
 Dante's superiority from having written in the vulgar 
 idiom, which he did not consider an enviable merit. Thus 
 frigidly Petrarcli could behold the solitary JEtna before 
 him, in the " Inferno," while he shrunk into himself with 
 the painful consciousness of the existence of another poet, 
 obscuring his own majesty. It is carious to observe 
 Lord Shaftesbury treating with the most acrimonious 
 contempt the great writers of his own times— Oowley, 
 Dryden, Addison, and Prior. We cannot imagine that 
 his lordship was so entirely destitute of every feeling of 
 
JEALOUSY OF AUTHORS. 209 
 
 wit and genius, as would appear by this damnatory criti- 
 cism on all the wit and genius of his age. It is not, in- 
 deed, difficult to comprehend a diflferent motive for this 
 extravagant censure in the jealousy which even a great 
 writer often experiences when he comes in contact with 
 his living rivals, and hardily, if not impudently, practises 
 those arts of critical detraction to raise a moment's delu- 
 sion, which can gratify no one hut himself. 
 
 The moral sense has often been found too weak to 
 temper the malignancy of literary jealousy, and has im- 
 pelled some men of genius to an incredible excess. A 
 memorable example offers in the history of the two bro- 
 thers. Dr. William and John Hunter, both great charac- 
 ters fitted to be rivals ; but Nature, it was imagined, in 
 the tenderness of blood, had placed a bar to rivalry. 
 John, without any determined pursuit in his yoilth, was 
 received by his brother at the height of his celebrity ; the 
 doctor initiated him into his school; they performed 
 their experiments together ; and WUliam Hunter was the 
 first to announce to the world the great genius of his 
 brother. After this close connexion in all their studies 
 and discoveries. Dr. William Hunter published his mag- 
 nificent work — the proud favourite, of his heart, the as- 
 sertor of his fame. Was it oi'edible that the genius of 
 the celebrated anatomist, which had been nursed under 
 the wing of his brother, should turn on that wing to clip 
 it ? John Hunter put in his claim to the chief discovery ; 
 it was answered by his brother. The Royal Society, 
 to whom they appealed, concealed the documents of this 
 unnatural feud. The blow was felt, and the jealousy of 
 literary honour for ever separated the brothersi — the 
 brothers of genius. 
 
 Such, too, was the jealousy which separated Agostino 
 
 and Annibal Carraoci, whom their cousin Lndovico for 
 
 so many years had attempted to unite, and who, during 
 
 the time their academy existed, worked together, com- 
 
 15 
 
210 LITEEAET CHAEA-OTER. 
 
 billing their separate powers.* The learning and the 
 philosophy of Agostino assisted the invention of the 
 master genius, Annibal ; but Annibai was jealous of the 
 more literary and poetical character of Agostino, and, by 
 his sarcastic humooiir, frequently mortified his learned 
 brother. Alike great artists, when once employed on the 
 same work, Agostino was thought to have excelled his 
 brother. Annibal, sullen and soomful, immediately 
 broke with him, and their patron. Carding Earnese, was 
 compelled to separate the brothers^ iPheir fate is strike 
 ing : Agostino, divided from his brother Annibal, SKnk 
 into dejection and melanciholy, and perished by a prema-- 
 ture death, while Annibal closed his days not long after 
 in a state of distraction. The brothers of JTature aud 
 Art could not live together, and oorald mot live separate. 
 The history qf artists abounds with instances of jeal- 
 ousy, perhaps more than that of any other class of mein 
 of genius. Hudson, the master of IReynalds, reould -not 
 endure the -sight of his rising pupil, and would not 
 suffer him t;o conclude the term of Ms appremticeship ; 
 even the mild and elegant Reynolds himself became so 
 jealous of Wilson, that he took every opportunity of 
 depreciating his singular excellence. Stung by the mad' 
 ness of jealousy, Barry one day addressing Sir Joshua 
 on his lectures, burst out, ■" S-uch poor flimsy stuff as your 
 discourses I" elenohing "hi« fist in the agony of (the conr 
 vulsion. After the death of the great artist, Barry be^ 
 stowed on him the most ardent eiilogium, and deeply 
 grieved over the past. 'But the 'race of genius bom too 
 " near the sun " have found /their increased sensibility 
 fliame into Crimes of a deeper dye' — crimes attesting ^;he 
 treaphery and the violence of the professors of an art 
 which, it appears, in softening the isouls of others, does 
 not necessarily mollify those of the artists .thecBiseliVea. 
 
 * See an article on -the Carracoi in " SuriosJties of Literature," .vol, SI 
 
"He dreadful stiOry of Andre?. 4«!l Castagoo Sieemg jtiojt 
 doubtfiil. Haying been .taught the discoyejr.y of paioting 
 in oii by Pomeflico Yenjetiano, yet, stiU .enyjpus of jt^e 
 merit of the generous friend viho Jja.d cpnfided tb^t great 
 secret to him, Apdrea with his o^ hand secretly assas- 
 sinated him, that be n?%b* remain jfitbout a rival. The 
 horror of bis crime only appeared in his confession on his 
 death-bed. Domeniehino seems to have been poisoned for 
 the preference he .obtained oyer the Neapolitan artists, 
 ■which raised thejm. to a man {igainst l\im, and reduced 
 him to the necessity of preparing his food with his own 
 baud. On bis las't return to Naples, Passeri says, " 2^on 
 fu mai pi'Ci vechcto da huon occhio da qudli Napoletani : 
 e li Pittori lo defestj^va^Q perfihh egli era ritomato — mori 
 con qualche sospetto ,di veleno, e gitesio n,o^ h inverisimile 
 percJj^ I'inferessg & un pfirjidfl tiranno." So that the 
 Neapolitans honoured Genius at Naples by poison, which 
 they might have forgqttesQ had it flourished at Rome. 
 Tbe famous .cartoon of tb.e bs^ttle of Pisa, a -york of Mi- 
 chael Angelo, which he produced in a glorious .competi- 
 tion with the B^pnier .of paii;iti,ug, L.eo,n9.;i;d9 da Vinci,' and 
 in which he had struck out (the i,i,e^ jof a new style, is 
 only known by ^ pript which has preserved the wonder- 
 ful eoipposition ; for the original, it is said, was cut into 
 pieces by the mad jealousy of Baccio Bandiiielli, whose 
 whole l^fe was mjide mise;pa.ble by his consciousness of a 
 superior rival. 
 
 In the jealQ^sy,o/ genius, however, there is a peculiar 
 case whei-e the fever silently cpnsumes the sufferer, with- 
 out possessing the malignant character of the disease. 
 Even the gentlest temper declines under its slow wast- 
 ings, ^.ndtbis infeqtion may happqn ajinong dear friqn^s, 
 whenever a man of genius loses ,1;hfit self-opbiiprn ,whicb 
 animates hi^ sqbjtary labqiW"? aiid,cfln^tjitiu.tes his happi- 
 ness. Perhaps when at the .height of :h4s .class, he sud- 
 denly views himself eclipsed , by. anq1i(^€^r,genhi^.-:;Tajn^jth.at 
 
212 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 genius his friend ! This is the jealousy, not of hatred, 
 but of despair. Churchill observed the feeling, hut 
 probably included in it a greater degree of malignancy 
 than I -would no-w describe. 
 
 Envy which turns pale, 
 And^ sickens even if a friend prevail. 
 
 Swift, in that curious poem on his own death, said of 
 
 Pope that 
 
 He can in one couplet &x 
 •More sense than J can do in six. 
 
 The Dean, perhaps, is not quite serious, but probably is 
 in the next lines — 
 
 It gives me such a jealous fit, 
 
 I cry " Pox take him and his wit." 
 
 If the reader pursue this hint throughout the poem, these 
 compliments to his friends, always at his own expense, 
 exhibit a singular mixture of the sensibility and the 
 frankness of true genius, which Swift himself has honestly 
 
 confessed. 
 
 What poet would not grieve to see ' 
 
 His brother write as well as he?* 
 
 Addison experienced this painful and. mixed emotion 
 in his intercourse with Pope, to whose rising celebrity 
 he soon became too jealously alive.f It was more 
 tenderly, but not less keenly, felt by the Spanish artist 
 Castillo, a man distinguished by every amiable disposi- 
 tion. He was the great painter of Seville ; but when 
 some of his nephew Murillo's paintings were shown to 
 him, he stood in meek astonishment before them, and 
 
 * The plain motive of all these dislikes is still more amusing, as given 
 in, this couplet of the same poem: — 
 
 "If with such genius heavSn has blest 'em. 
 Have 1 not reason to detest 'em." — Ed. 
 f See article on Pope and Addison in " Quarrels of Authors." 
 
"WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 213 
 
 turning away, he exclaimed with a sigh — "Yd murio 
 CastiUol'''' Castillo is no more! Returning home, the 
 stricken genius relinquished his pencil, and pined away 
 in hopelessness. The same occurrence happened to 
 Pietro Perugino, the master of Raphael, whose general 
 character as a painter was so entirely eclipsed by his far- 
 renowned scholar; yet, while his real exceUenoes in the 
 ease of his attitudes and the mild grace of his female 
 countenances have been passed over, it is probable that 
 Raphael himself might have caught from them his first 
 feelings of ideal beauty. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV... 
 
 Want of mutual esteem among men of genius often originates in a defi- 
 ciency of analogous ideas. — ^It is not always envy or jealousy which 
 induces men of genius to undervalue each other. 
 
 AMONG men of genius, that want of mutual esteem, 
 usually attributed to envy or jealousy, often orig- 
 inates in a deficiency of analogous ideas, or of sympathy, 
 in the parties. On this principle, several curious phe- 
 nomena in the history of genius may be explained. 
 
 Every man of genius has a manner of his own; a 
 mode of thinking and a habit of style, and usually 
 decides on a work as it approximates or varies from his 
 own. When one great author depreciates another, his 
 depreciation has often no worse source than his own 
 taste. The witty Cowley despised the natural Chaucer; 
 the austere classical Boileau the rough sublimity of Cr4- 
 billon ; the refining Marivaux the familiar Molilre. Field- 
 ing ridiculed Richardson, whose manner so strongly con- 
 trasted with his own ; and Richardson contemned Field- 
 ing, and declared he would not last. Cumberland escaped 
 
214 LiTEBAEY CMrACTEE; 
 
 a fit of unforgi'veiieSs, not fiving to read his own char- 
 ^6'ter by Bigiolp "Watson, Whose logical head trifed the 
 lighter elegancies of that polished nlali by his own nervotts 
 genius, destitute of the bfeauiiful in taste^ There was no 
 envy in the breast of Johnson wheh he advised Mrs. 
 "Thrale not to p"urchai§e' " Graiy's Letter^," as trifling and 
 dull, no inbre than there was in Gray him&elf when he 
 guiik the poetical chafafe'ter of ShehstOne, aiid debaised 
 Ms simplicity and purity of feeling by art image of ludi- 
 cr6tis Cont6rii;^t; I have hfeard that Wilies; a mere wit 
 and elegant scholar, used to trestt Gibbon a& a irifere 
 bookmaker ; and applied to that philosophical historiaQ 
 the verse by which Voltaire described, with so much 
 caustic facetiousness, the genius of the Abbd Trablet^^^ 
 
 II i ooMpU^i compile, oompM. 
 
 The deficient sympathy in these men of genius for 
 modes of feeling opposite to their own was the real csitise 
 of their Opinions; and thus it happeiis that even su- 
 perior genius is so often liable to be unjust and false in 
 its dbcisions. 
 
 The game principle operates Still more strikingly in 
 the remarkable contempt of men of genitiS for those pur- 
 gtiits which require talents distinct from their own; and 
 a ca,8t of mind thrown by nature into another mould. 
 Heflce we must not be surprised at the poetical antipa- 
 thies of Selden and Locke, as well as Longuerue aiid 
 Bufibh. Ifewton called poetry " ingenious nonsense.'' 
 On the other side; poets undervalue the pursuits of the 
 antiquary, the naturalist, and the metaphysician, form- 
 ing their estimate by their own favourite scale of imagina- 
 tion. As we can only understand in the degree we coni- 
 jprehend, and feel in the degree in -vvhich We sympathize, 
 we ma,f be sure that in both these cases the parties will 
 be found altogether deficient in those qualities of genius 
 which constitute the excellence of the other. To this 
 
EEEJUDIOES OB GENIUS. gig 
 
 cause, rather than to the one the friends of Mickle ascribed 
 to Adam Smith, namely, a personal dislike to the poet, 
 may we place the severe mortification -which the unfor- 
 tunate translator of Camoens suffered from the person to 
 whom he dedicated " The Lusiad." The Dnke of Buc- 
 cleugh was the ptipil of the great political economist^ 
 and so little valued an epic poem, that his Grace had not 
 even the curiosity to Open the leaves of the presentation 
 copy. 
 
 A professor of poUte literature cond«mnfid the study of 
 botany, as adapted to mediocrity of talent, and only de- 
 manding patience ; but Linnaeus showed how a man of 
 genius becomes a creator even in a science which seems 
 to depend only on order and method. It will not be a 
 question with some whether a man must be endowed 
 with the energy and aptitude of genius, to excel in anti- 
 quarianism, in natural history, and similar pursuits. The 
 prqudices raised against the claims of such to the honours 
 of genius have probably arisen from the secluded nature 
 of their pursuits, and the little knowledge which the men 
 of wit and imagination possess of these persons, who live 
 in a society of their own. On this subject a very curious 
 circumstance has been revealed respecting Peireso, whose 
 €nthusia6m for science was long felt throughout Europe, 
 His name was known in every country, and his death was 
 lamented in forty languages ; yet was this great literary 
 character unknown to several men of genius in his own 
 country ; Rochefoucauld declared he had never heard of 
 his name, and Malherbe wondered why his death created 
 80 universal a sensation. 
 
 Madame De Stael was an experienced observer of the 
 habits of the literary character, and she has remarked 
 how one student usually revolts from the other when 
 their occupations are different, because they are a recipro- 
 cal annoyance. The scholar has nothing to say to the 
 poet, the poet to the naturalist • and even among men of 
 
216 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 science, those who are dififerently occupied avoid each 
 other, taking little interest in what is out of their own 
 circle. Thus we see the classes of literature, like the 
 planets, revolving as distinct worlds ; and it would not 
 he less absurd for the inhabitants of Venus to treat with 
 contempt the powers and faculties of those of Jupiter, 
 than it is for the men of wit and imagination those of the 
 men of knowledge and curiosity. The wits are incapable 
 of exerting the peculiar qualities which give a real value 
 to these pursuits, and therefore they must remain igno- 
 rant of their nature and their result. ' / 
 It is not then always envy or jealousy which induces 
 men of genius to undervalue each other ; the want of 
 sympathy will sufficiently account for the want of' 
 judgment. Suppose Newton, Quinault, and Machiavel 
 accidentally meeting together, and unknown to each 
 other, would they not soon have desisted from the vain 
 attempt of communicating their ideas ? The philosopher 
 would have condemned the poet of the Graces as an in- 
 tolerable trifler, and the author of " The Prince" as a dark 
 political spy. Machiavel would have conceived Newton 
 to be a dreamer among the stars, and a mere almanack- 
 m.aker among men ; and the other a rhymer, nauseously 
 dfmcereux. Quinault might have imagined that he was 
 seated between two madmen. Having annoyed each 
 other for some time, they would have relieved their ennui 
 by reciprocal contempt, and each have parted with a de- 
 termiijation to avoid hence forward two such disagreeable . 
 companions. 
 
SELF-PRAISE. 217 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 Self-praise of genius. — Tiie love of praiae instinctive in the nature of 
 genius. — ^A high opinion of themselves necessary for their great 
 designs. — ^The 'Ancients openly claimed their own praise. — And 
 several Modems. — An author knows more of his merits than his 
 readers. — And less of his defects. — Authors versatile in their admi- 
 ration and their malignity. 
 
 VANITY, egotism, a strong sense of their own suffi- 
 ciency, form another accusation against men of genius ; 
 but the complexion of self-praise must alter with the occa- 
 sion ; for the simplicity of truth may appear vanity, and the 
 consciousness of superiority seem envy — to Mediocrity. 
 It is we who do nothing, and cannot even imagine any- 
 thing to he done, who are so much displeased with 
 self-lauding, self-love, self-independence, self-admiration, 
 which with the man of genius may often he nothing but 
 an ostensible modification of the passion of glory. 
 
 He who exults in himself is at least in earnest ; but he 
 who refuses to receive that praise in public for which he 
 has devoted so much labour in his privacy, is not ; for he 
 is compelled to suppress the very instinct of his nature. 
 yjf^e censure no man for loving fame, but only for showing 
 us how much he is possessed by the passion : thus we 
 allow him to create the appetite, but we deny him its ali- 
 ment. Our effeminate minds are the willing dupgs of 
 what is called the modesty of genius, or, as it has been 
 termed, " the polished reserve of modern times ;" and this 
 from the selfish principle that it serves at least to keep out 
 of the company its painful pre-eminence. But this " pol- 
 ished reserve," like something as fashionable, the ladies' 
 rouge, at first appearing with rather too much colour, 
 will in the heat of an evening die away till the true com- 
 plexion come out. What subterfuges are resorted to by 
 
218 LITERABY dHiiEACTEE. 
 
 these pretended modest men of genius, to extort that 
 praise from their private circle which is thus openly de- 
 nied them ! They have heen, taken by surprise enlarg- 
 ing their own panegyric, which might rival Pliny's on 
 Trajan, for care and copiousness j or impudently veiling 
 themselves with the transparency of a third person j or 
 never prefixing their' name to the volume, which they 
 would not easily forgive a friend to pass unnoticed. 
 
 Self-love is a principle of action ; but among no class 
 of human beings has nature so profusely distributed this 
 principle of life and action as through the whole sensitive 
 family of genius. It reaches even to a femiwine suscepti- 
 bility. The lave of praise is instinctive in their nattti'e. 
 Pi-aise with them is the etidence of the past and the 
 pledge of the futures The generoiis qmalities and the 
 virtues of a man of genius are really produced by i^e 
 applause conferred on him. " To him whom the world 
 admires, the happiness of the World milst be dear," said 
 Madame De StaeL Romney, the painter, held as a 
 maxim that every diffidetit artist required "almost a 
 daily portion of cheering applause." How often do such 
 find their powers paralysed by the depression of coH& 
 dence or the appearance of neglect ! When the North 
 Americans Indians, amid theit circle, chalit their gods 
 and their heroes^ the honest savages laud the living wor- 
 thies) as well as their departed ; and when, as Ave are 
 told, an auditor hears the shout of his. own name ; he an^ 
 swer? by a cry of pleasure and of pride. The savage and 
 the man of genius are here true to nature, but plejtsure 
 and pride in his own name must raise no emotion in the 
 breast of genius amidst a polished circle, To bring him-' 
 self down to their usual mediocrity, he must start at an 
 expressioa of fegard, and turn away even from one of his 
 own votaries. Madame De Stael, an exquisite judge of 
 the feelings of the literary character, was aware of this 
 change, which has rather occurred in our manuers than 
 
SELF-PRAISE. 219 
 
 in' men of genius themselves. " Envy," say's tliat eloquent 
 ■Writer, " aiiictfi'g the Gtefeks, existed sometitaes bet-ween 
 rivals; it has now passed to the Spe6tatO'r9; and by a 
 sti-ange singularity the mass of inen are jealons of the 
 efforts which are tried to add to their pleasures o* to 
 merit theii' approbation." 
 
 But this, it seems, is not ^1-frays the ease ivith men of 
 genius, since the accTiS&tioW we are noticing has been so 
 ofteU reiterated. Take froii some that supreifte confi- 
 dence ih thdftiselves, that pride of exultation,- and you 
 crush the germ of their e'iceilence. Maiiy vast designs 
 must have perished in the coheeption, had not their 
 authors breathed this Vit^l air of self-delight; this crea- 
 tive spirit, so operative in great tndeftakingSi "We have 
 Recently seen this principle in the literacy character 
 unfold itself in the life Of the late Bishop of Landaff. 
 Whatever he did, he felt it was done as a inaster: what- 
 ever he wfote, it was, as he once declared,' the best work 
 On the subject ftit writteii.- With this feeling he emu- 
 lated Oicero in retirement at in action. " When I am 
 dead, yoti will riot soon ineet With another John Hun- 
 ter," feaid the grfeat anfttdmist to one of his garrulous 
 friends. An apology is formed by his biographer for re- 
 lating the fact, but the weakness is only in the apology. 
 When Hogarth %-sia engaged in his wOrk of the Mariage 
 drla-Mode, he said to Reynolds, " I shall very soon gratify 
 the world with sueh a sight as they have never seen 
 equalled." — " One of Ms foibleSj" adds Northcote, " it is 
 Well -known, was the excessive high opinion he had of his 
 own abilities." Sd pronounced Northcote^ who had not 
 an atom of his genius. Was it a foible in Hogarth to 
 cast the glove, when he always more than redeemed the 
 pledge? Comeille has given a very noble full-length 
 of the sublime egotism which accompanied him through 
 life ;* but I doubt, if we had any such author in the pres^ 
 
 * See it Versified in " Curiosities tit Literature," Vol. 1., p. 431. 
 
220 LITERAET CHARACTER. 
 
 ent day, whether he would dare to he so just to himself, 
 and so hardy to the puhlio. The self-praise of Buffon 
 at least equalled his genius ; and the inscription beneath- 
 his statue in the library, of the Jardin des Plantes, which 
 I have been told was raised to him in his lifetime, exceeds 
 all panegyric ; it places him alone in nature, as the first 
 and the last interpreter of her works. He said of the 
 great geniuses of modern ages, that "there were not 
 more than five ; ^Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, 
 and Myself." With this spirit he conceived and termi- 
 nated his great works, and sat in patient meditation at , 
 his desk for half a century, till all Europe, even in a state 
 of war, bowed to the modern Pliny. 
 
 Nor is the vanity o« Buffon, and Voltaire, and Rous- 
 seau purely national ; for men of genius in all ages have 
 expressed a consciousness of the internal force of geijius. 
 No one felt this self-exultation more potent than our 
 Hobbes ; who has indeed, in his controversy with Wallis, 
 asserted that there may be nothing more just than self- 
 commendation.* There is a curious passage in the " Pur- 
 gatorio" of Dante, where, describing the transitory 
 nature of literary fame, and the variableness of human 
 opinion, the poet alludes with confidence to his own future 
 greatness. Of two authors of the name of Guido, the 
 one having eclipsed the other, the poet writes :— 
 
 Cosi ha tolto I'uno all' altro Guido 
 La Gloria della lingua ; e forse e nato 
 CM I'uno e VaXiro cctccird d/i nido. 
 
 Thus has one Guido from the other snatched 
 The letter'd pride ; and he perhaps is born. 
 Who shaU drive dtheirfrom their nest.\ 
 
 De Thou, one of the most noble-minded of historians, 
 in the Memoirs of his own life, composed in the third 
 person, has surprised and somewhat puzzled the critics, 
 
 I 
 
 * See " Quarrels of Authors," p. 471. f Gary. 
 
SELF-PRAISE. 221 
 
 by that frequent distribution of self-commendation which 
 they knew not how to reconcile with the modesty and 
 gravity with which the President was so amply endowed. 
 After his great and solemn labour, amidst the injustice of 
 his persecutors, this eminent man had sufficient experi- 
 ence of his real worth to assert it. Kepler, amidst his 
 sublime discoveries, looks down like a superior being on 
 other men. He breaks forth in glory and daring egotism : 
 " I dare insult mankind by confessing that I am he who 
 has turned science to advantage. If I am pardoned, I 
 shall rejoice ; if blamed, I shall endure. The die is cast ; 
 I have written this book, and whether it be read by pos- 
 terity or by my contemporaries is of no consequence ; it 
 may well wait for a reader during one century, when 
 God himself during six thousand years has not sent an 
 oljserver like myself." He truly predicts that " his dis- 
 coveries would be verified in succeeding ages ;" and pre- 
 fers his own glory to the possession of the electorate of 
 Saxony. It was this solitary majesty, this futurity of 
 their genius, which hovered over the sleepless pillow of 
 Bacon, of Newton, and of Montesquieu ; of Ben Jonson, 
 of Milton, and Corneille ; and of Michael Angelo. Such 
 men anticipate their contemporaries ; they know they are 
 creators, long before they are hailed as such by the tardy 
 consent of the public. These men stand on Pisgah 
 heights, and for them the sun shines on a land which 
 none can view but .themselves. 
 
 There is an admirable essay in Plutarch, " On the 
 manner by which we may praise ourselves without ex- 
 citing envy in others." The sage seems to consider self- 
 praise as a kind of illustrious impudence, and has one 
 very striking image : he compares thesei eulogists to fam- 
 ished persons, who finding no other food, in their rage 
 have eaten their own flesh, and thus shockingly nour- 
 ished themselves by their own substance. He allows 
 persons in high office to praise themselves, if by this 
 
228 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 fh&Y can repel calumny an(J accjisations, as did Pericles 
 before the Athenians : hut the flomans found fault ynth 
 Cicero, who so frequently remiijded them of his exertions 
 in the conspiracy of CatiUpe ; whUe, when Scipio tol4 
 them thg,t " they shwld not presume to judge <jf a citizen 
 to whom they owed the power ,gf judging all men," the 
 people covered themselyes with -flowers, and followed 
 him to the capitol to join in a thanksgi-^'ing tp Joy.e, 
 " Cjcaro," adds Plutarch, "praised himself without neces- 
 eity. Scapio was in personal danger, and this took ;away 
 what is cdious in gelf-pj-aise." An author seems some- 
 times to OQCupy the situation of a person in high ojSce'-; 
 ^ind there may he occasions when with a noble simplicity, 
 if he appeal ito his works, of whieh all men may judge, 
 he may be permitted /to asseirt or to maiiitain his claii);is. 
 It has at least been <the pjracjtice of men of gepius, fop in 
 this yery essay we $nd Timotheus, Euripides, and Pindar 
 censured, though they desery^d all (the ipraige ;1ih6y .gave 
 themselves. 
 
 Epicurus, writing to a minister of state, deoLares, ^•' If 
 you desire glory, notching can bestow it piore than ,the 
 letters I write to you :" and Seneca, in quoting ,<jhe&9 
 words, adds, "What Epicurus promised tp his frpi^ij^Pj, 
 that, my Lucilius, I promise you." Orna mef was the 
 constant cry of Cicero ; and he desires the hjStoria,n 
 Iiucceius to write separately the conspiracy of Catiline, 
 and to publish quickly, that while he yet liy^^ he migh}} 
 taste the sweetness of his glory. Horaqe and .Ovid were 
 iequaBy sensible to their immortaility ; bi*t vhat apcK^erm 
 poet would be tolerated with such an ayowal? Y,6^ 
 Dryden honestly declares that it was better .for him. -tp 
 own this failing of vanity, than the world -tjo .do it for 
 him ; and adds, ■'' Eor wjhat other reason have I spent my 
 life in so unprofitable a gtudy.? Why am I grown old .in 
 seeking so barren a reward as fame ? The ,same pa^fcs 
 and application which have made me a poet might have 
 
raised me to any honours of thg gown." Was not Cer- 
 vantes very sensible to Ms own merits when a rival 
 started up ? ajid did Jie not assert them too, and distin- 
 guish hi? owin work ,by a handsome compliment ? Lope 
 de Yega celebrated his own poetic po'wers luader the 
 tpseudonyme of a pretended editor, Thojnas jBrajrguillos. 
 I regret that his noble biogj-apher, than whom iio one can 
 more truly sympathise with tihe emotions of genius, has 
 i^ensiyed the bard fpr his queruloijs or his intrepid tone, 
 and for the quaiat eonceit of his title-page, where his 
 detractor is introduced as a beetle in a veg.a or g9,rd^, 
 attae'king its flowers, but .expiring in the very sw^et^ess 
 )m would sujure. SSve inscription lundef Bojleau's pgr- 
 trait, which gives a pEcfeiriesice to the Fsenich satirist over 
 Juvenal ;and Horace, is knowin to have been written by 
 Mmsdlf. Ilfor was ^Sutler Jess proud jof his own merits ; 
 for he has done ample justice ito his '•' Hudibras," and 
 traced out, with great s^-deKght, its variety of excel- 
 lences,. Eiichardso>n, the giovelist, exhibits one of the 
 jnoat strikiDg instances of what is called literary vanity, 
 ;the delight ^f an author in his works ; he has pointed out 
 iSill the beauties ,of his three great works, in various man- 
 ners.* He always taxed a visitor by one of Ijis long 
 letters. It was this intense aeif-deJight which produced 
 his ViOiluminous labours. 
 
 There are certain authors whose very ;eKistence seems 
 to require a high oonoeptioa ^of their own talents ; and 
 who must, as some animals appear to do, furnish the 
 /means of life out of their own substance. These men of 
 (genius open their career with pectdiar tastes, .or with a 
 predilection for some great work .of no immediate inter- 
 est ; in a word, with many .unpopular dispositions. Yet 
 we see them magnanimous, though /defeated, proceeding 
 with the public feeing against them. At length we 
 
 *:J;]iave obperreli Ihqpi in'SQariq^ieaiofljiteratuve," vol. U., p. 0^ 
 
224: LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 view them ranking -with their rivals. Without having 
 yielded up their peculiar tastes or their incorrigible 
 viciousnesB, they have, however, heightened their indi- 
 vidual excellences. No human opinion can change their 
 self-opinion. Alive to the consciousness of their powers, 
 their pursuits are placed above impediment, and their 
 great views can suffer no contraction'; possunt quia posse 
 videntur. Such was the language Lord Bacon once ap- 
 plied to himself when addressing a king. " I know," said 
 the great philosopher, " that I am censured of some con- 
 ceit of my ability or worth ; but I pray your majesty im- 
 pute it to desire — possunt quia posse videntur." These 
 men of genius bear a charmed mail on their breast;; 
 " hopeless, not heartless," may be often the motto of 
 their ensign ; and if they do not always possess reputar 
 tion, they still look onwards for fame ; for these do not 
 necessarily accompany each other. ' 
 
 An author is more sensible of his own merits, as he also 
 is of his labour, which is invisible to all others, while he 
 is unquestionably much less sensible to his defects than 
 most of his readers. The author not only comprehends 
 his merits better, because they have passsed through a 
 long process in his mind, but he is familiar with every 
 part, while the reader has but a vague notion of the 
 whole. Why does an excellent work, by repetition, rise 
 in interest ? Because in obtaining this gradual intimacy 
 with an author, we appear to recover half the genius 
 which we had lost on a first perusal. The work of genius 
 too is associated, in the mind of the author, with much 
 more than it contains ; and the true supplement, which 
 he only can give, has not always' accompanied the work 
 itself. We find great men often greater than the books 
 they write. Ask the man of genius if he have written all 
 that he wished to have written ? Has he satisfied him- 
 self in this work, for which you accuse his pride ? Has 
 he dared what required intrepidity to achieve ? Has he 
 
SELF-PRAISE. 2^5 
 
 evaded difficulties which he should have overcome ? The 
 mind of the reader has the limits of a mere recipient, 
 ■while that of the author, even after his work, is teeming 
 with creation. " On many occasions, my soul seems to 
 know more than it can say, and to be endowed with a 
 mind by itself, far superior to the mind I really have," 
 said Marivaux, with equal truth and happiness. 
 
 With these explanations of what are called the vanity 
 and egotism of Genius, be it remembered, that the sense 
 of their own sufficiency is assumed by men at their own 
 risk. The great man who thinks greatly of himself, ia 
 not diminishing that greatness in heaping fuel on his 
 fire. It is indeed otherwise with his unlucky brethren, 
 with whom an illusion of literary vanity may end in the 
 aberrations of harmless madness ; as it happened to Per- 
 cival Stockdale. After a parallel between himself and 
 Charles XIL of Sweden, he concludes that " some parts 
 Avill be to his advantage, and some to mine /" but in re- 
 gard to fame, the main object between himself and 
 Charles XIL, Percival imagined that " his own will not 
 probably take its fired and immovable station, and shine 
 with its expanded and permanent splendour, till it con- 
 secrates his ashes, till it illumines his tomb." After this 
 the reader, who may never have heard of the name of 
 Percival Stockdale, must be told that there exist his own 
 " Memoirs of his Life and "Writings." * The memoirs of 
 a Scribbler who saw the prospects of life close on him 
 ■while he imagined that his contemporaries were unjust, 
 are instructive to literary men. To correct, and to be 
 corrected, should be their daily practice, that they may 
 be taught not only to exult in themselves, but to fear 
 themselves. 
 
 It is hard to refuse these men of genius that aura 
 vitalis, of which they are so apt to be liberal to others. 
 
 * I have sketched a character of PefOival Stockdale, iu " Calamities 
 of Authors" (pp. 218-224); it was taien ad vivum. 
 15 
 
226 IITEEARY" CHAEACTEE. 
 
 Are they not accused of the meanest adulations ? Wien 
 a young writer experiences the notice of a person of some 
 eminence, he has expressed himself in language which 
 transcends that of mortality. A finer reason than reason 
 itself inspires it. The sensation has been expressed with 
 all its fulness by Milton : — 
 
 The debt immense of endless gratitude. 
 
 Who ever pays an " immense debt " in small sums ? 
 Every man of genius has left such honourable traces of 
 his private affections ; from Locke, whose dedication of 
 his great work is more adulative than could be imagined 
 from a temperate philosopher, to Churchill, whose warm 
 eulogiums on his friends beautifully contrast with his 
 satire. Even in advanced age, the man of genius dwells 
 on the praise he caught in his youth from veteran genius, 
 which, like the aloe, will flower at the end of life. When 
 Virgil was yet a youth, it is said that Cicero heard one of 
 his eclogues, and exclaimed with his accustomed warmth, 
 
 Magna spes altera Eomae I 
 
 " The second hope of mighty Rome !" intending by the 
 first either himself or Lucretius. The words of Cicero 
 were the secret honey on which the imagination of Virgil 
 fed for many a year ; for in one of his latest productions, 
 the twelfth book of the ./Eneid, he applies these very 
 words to Ascanius. So long had the accents of Cicero's 
 praise lingered in the poet's ear ! 
 
 This extreme susceptibility of. praise in men of genius 
 is the same exuberant sensibility which is so alive to cen- 
 sure. I have elsewhere fully shown how some have died 
 of criticism.* The self-love of genius is perhaps much 
 more delicate than gross. 
 
 But this fatal susceptibility is the cause of that strange 
 facility .which has often astonished the world, by the 
 
 * In the article entitled " Anecdotes of Censured Authors," in toI. 
 i. of " Curiosities of Literature." 
 
SENSITTVBNBSS OF GENIUS. 227 
 
 sudden transitions of sentiment -vrhicli literary characters 
 have frequently exhibitod. They have eulogised men 
 and events which they had reprobated, and reprobated 
 what they had eulogised. The recent history of political 
 revolutions has ftirnished some monstrous examples of 
 this subservience to power. Guicciardini records one of 
 Ms own times, which has been often repeated in ours. 
 Jovianus Pontanus, the Secretary of Ferdinand, King of 
 Naples, was also selected to be the tutor of the prince, 
 his son. When Charles VIII. of France invaded Naples, 
 . Pontanus was deputed to address the French conqueror. 
 , To render himself agreeable to the enemies of his coun- 
 try, he did not avoid expatiating on the demerits of his 
 expelled patrons : " So difficult it is,"- adds the grave 
 and dignified historian, " for ourselves to observe that' 
 moderation and those precepts which no man knew bet- 
 ter than Pontanus, who was endowed with such copious 
 literature, and composed with such facility in moral phi- 
 losophy, and possessed such acquirements in universal 
 erudition, that he had made himself a prodigy to the eye, 
 ' of the world."* The student, occupied, by abstract pur- 
 suits; may not indeed always take much interest in the 
 change of dynasties ; and perhaps the famous cancelled 
 dedication to Cromwell, by the learned orientalist. Dr. 
 Castell,f who supplied its place by another to Charles II., 
 ought not to be placed to the account of political tergiv- 
 ersation. But the versatile adoration of the continental 
 savans of the republic or the monarchy, the consul or the 
 emperor, has inflicted an unhealing wound on the literary 
 character ; since, like Pontanus, to gratify their new 
 master, they had not the greatness of mind ta save them- 
 selves from ingratitude to their old. 
 
 * Guicciardini, Book IL 
 
 f For the melancHoly history of this devoted aoholaf , see note to the 
 article on " The Rewards of Oriental Students," in "Calamities of Au- 
 thors," p. 1S9. 
 
228 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 Their vengeance, as quickly kindled, lasts as long. 
 Genius is a dangerous gift of nature. The same efferves- 
 cent passions from a Catiline or a Cieero. Plato lays 
 ■great stress on his man of genius possessing the most 
 vehement passions, but he adds reason to.restrain them. 
 It is Imagination which by their side stands as their 
 good or evil spirit. Glory or infamy is but a different 
 direction of the same passion. 
 
 How are we to describe symptoms which, flowing from 
 one source, yet show themselves in such opposite forms 
 as those of an intermittent fever, a silent delirium, or a 
 horrid hypochondriasm ? Have we no other opiate to still 
 the agony, no other cordial to warm the heart, than the 
 great ingredient in the recipe of Plato's visionary man 
 of genius — calm reason ? Must men, who so rarely 
 obtain this tardy panacea, remain with all their tortured 
 and torturing passions about them, often self-disgusted, 
 self-humiliated ? The enemies of genius are often connect- 
 ed with their morbid imagination, These originate in 
 .casual slights, or in unguarded expressions, or in hasty 
 opinions, or in witty derisions, or even in the obtruding 
 goodness of tender admonition. The man of genius broods 
 over the phantom that darkens his feelings: he mul- 
 tiplies a single object; he magnifies the smallest ; and 
 suspicions become certainties. It is in this unhappy 
 state that he sharpens his vindictive fangs, in a libel 
 called his " Memoirs," or in another species of public 
 outrage, styled a " Criticism." 
 
 We are told that Comines the historian, when residing 
 at the court of the Count de Charolois, afterwards Duke 
 of Burgundy, one day returning from hunting, with in- 
 considerate jocularity sat down before the Count and 
 ordered the prince to pull off his boots. The Count 
 would not affect greatness, apd having executed his com- 
 mission, in return for the princely amusement, the Count 
 dashed the boot on Comines' nosCj which bled ; and from 
 
SENSITrVENESS OF GENItTS. 229 
 
 that time, he was mortified at the court of Burgundy, 
 by retaining the nickname of the hooted head. The 
 hlow rankled in the heart of the man of genius, and the 
 Duke of Burgundy has come down to us in Comines' 
 " Memoirs," blackened by his vengeance. Many, un- 
 known to their readers, like Comines, have had a booted 
 head ; but the secret poison is distilled on their lasting 
 page, as we have recently witnessed in Lord Walde- 
 grave's " Memoirs." Swift's perpetual malevolence to 
 Dryden originated in that great poet's prediction, that 
 " cousin Swift would never be a poet ;" a prediction which 
 the wit never could forget. I have elsewhere fully writ- 
 ten a tale of literary hatred, where is seen a man of 
 genius, in the character of Gilbert Stuart, devoting a 
 whole life to harassing the industry or the genius which 
 he himself could not attain.* 
 
 A living Italian poet of great celebrity, when at the 
 court of Rome, presented a magnificent edition of his 
 poetry to Pius VI. The bard, Mr. Hobhouse informs us, 
 lived not in the good graces of his holiness, and although 
 the pontiff accepted the. volume, he did not forbear a 
 severity of remark which could not fall unheeded by the 
 modern poet ; for on this occasion, repeating some verses 
 of Metastasio, his holiness drily added, " l&o one now-ar 
 days writes like that great poet." Kever was this to be 
 erased from memory ; the stifled resentment of Monti 
 vehemently broke forth at the moment the French car- 
 ried off Pius VI. from Rome. Then the long indignant 
 secretary poured forth an invective more severe " against 
 the great harlot," than was ever traced by a Protestant 
 pen — Monti now invoked the rock of Sardinia ; the poet 
 bade it fly from its base, that the last of monsters might 
 not find even a tomb to shelter him. Such was the curse 
 of a poet on his former patron, now an object of misery, 
 a return for " placing him below Metastasio !" 
 * See "CAlamities of Authors," pp. 131-139. 
 
230 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 The French Revolution affords illustrations of the 
 ■worst human passions. When the wretched Collot 
 D'Herhois was tossed up in the storm to the summit of 
 power, a monstrous imagination seized him ; he project- 
 ed razing the city of Lyons and massacring its inhabit- 
 ants. He had even the heart to commence, and to con- 
 tinue this conspiracy against human nature ; the ostensi- 
 ble crime was royalism, but the secret rnotive is said to 
 have been literary vengeance ! As wretched a poet and 
 actor as a man, D'Herbois had been hissed off the thea- 
 tre at Lyons, and to avenge that ignominy, he had 
 meditated over this vast and remorseless crime. Is there 
 but one Collot D' Herbois in the universe ? 
 
 Long since this was written, a fact has been recorded 
 of Chenier, the French dramatic poet, which parallels the 
 horrid tale of Collot D'Herbois, which some have been 
 willing to doubt from its enormity. It is said, that this 
 monster, in the revolutionary period, when he had the 
 power to save the life of his brother Andr6, while his 
 father, prostrate before a wretched son, was imploring 
 for the life of an innocent brother, remained silent ; it is 
 further said that he appropriated to himself a tragedy 
 which be found among his brother's manuscripts. " Fra- 
 tricide from literary jealousy," observes the relator of 
 this anecdote, "was a crime reserved for a modern 
 French revolutionist." * There are some pathetic stan- 
 zas which Andre was composing in his last moments, 
 ■when awaiting his fate ; the most pathetic of all stanzas 
 is that one which he left unfinished — 
 
 Pent-^tre, avant que I'heure en eerole promeneo 
 
 Ait po^e, sur I'eraail brillant, 
 Dans les Boixante paa oh aa route eat bom6e, 
 
 Son pied aonore et vigilant, 
 Le sommeil du tombeau preasera ma paupiSre— 
 
 * Edinhwrgh Review, xxx. 159. • -" 
 
DOMESTIC LIFE. 231 
 
 At this unfinished stanza was the pensive poet sum- 
 moned to the guUlotine ! 
 
 CHAPTER XVL 
 
 Tlie domestic life of genius. — Defecta of great compositions attributed 
 to domestic infelicities. — The home of the literary character should 
 be the abode of repose and silence. — Of the Father. — Of the Mother. 
 — Of family genius. — Men of genius not more respected than other 
 men in their domestic circle. — The cultivators of science and art do 
 not meet on equal terms with others, in domestic life. — Their neg- 
 lect of those around them. — ^Ofteu accused of imaginary crimes. 
 
 WHEN" the temper and the leisure of the literary char- 
 acter are alike broken, even his best ■works, the too 
 faithful mirrors of his state of mind, will participate in 
 its inequalities ; and surely the incubations of genius, in 
 its delicate and shadowy combinations, are not less sensi- 
 ble in their operation than tiie composition of sonorous 
 bodies, where, while the warm metal is settling in the 
 mould, even an unusual vibration of the air during the 
 moment of fusion will injure the tone. 
 ' Some of the conspicuous blemishes of several great 
 compositions may be attributed to the domestic infeli- 
 cities of their authors. The desultory life of Camoens 
 is imagined to be perceptible in the deficient connexion 
 of his epic ; and Milton's blindness and divided family 
 prevented that castigating criticism, which otherwise 
 had erased passages which have escaped from his revis- 
 ing hand. He felt himself in the situation of his Samson 
 Agonistes, whom he so pathetically describes — 
 
 His foes' derision, captive, poor, and blind. 
 
 Even Locke complains of his " discontinued way of 
 writing," and " writing by incoherent parcels," from the 
 
232 LITEEABT CHAEACTER. 
 
 avocations of a busy and unsettled life, which undoubt- 
 edly produced a deficiency of method in the disposition 
 of the materials of his great work. The careless rapid 
 lines of Dry den are justly attributed to his distress, and 
 indeed he pleads for his inequalities from his domestic 
 circumstances. Johnson often silently, but eagerly, 
 corrected the "Ramblers" in their successive editions, 
 of which so many had been despatched in haste. The 
 learned Greaves offered some excuses for his errors in his 
 edition of "Abulfeda," from "his being five years en- 
 cumbered with lawsuits, and diverted from his studies." 
 When at length he returned to them, he expresses his 
 surprise " at the pains he had formerly undergone," but 
 of which he now felt himself unwilling, he knew not how, 
 of again undergoing." Goldoni, when at the bar, aban- 
 doned his comic talent for several years; and having 
 resumed it, his first comedy totally failed : " My head," 
 says he, " was occupied with my professional employ- 
 ment ; I was uneasy in mind and in bad humour." A law- 
 suit, a bankruptcy, a domestic feud, or an indulgence in 
 criminal or in foolish pursuits, have chilled the fervour 
 of imagination, scattered into fragments many a noble 
 design, and paralysed the finest genius. The distrac- 
 tions of Guido's studies from his passion for gaming, and 
 of Pannegiano's for alchemy, have been traced in their 
 works, which are often hurried over and unequal. It is 
 curious to observe, that Cumberland attributes the excel? 
 lence of his comedy. The West Indian, to the peculiarly 
 happy situation in which he found himself at the time of 
 its composition, free from the incessant avocations which 
 had crossed him in the writing of The brothers. " I was 
 master of my time, my mind was free, and I was happy 
 in the society of the dearest friends I had on earth. The 
 calls of office, the cavillings of angry rivals, and the 
 gibings of newspaper critics, could not reach me on the 
 banks of the Shannon, where all within-doors was love 
 
DOMESTIC INFELICITY. 233 
 
 and affection. In no other period of my life have the 
 same happy circumstances combined to cheer me in any 
 of my literary lahours." 
 
 The best years of Mengs' life were embittered by his 
 father, a poor artist, and who, with poorer feelings, con- 
 verted his home into a prison-house, forced his son into 
 the slavery of stipulated task-work, while bread and 
 w4iter were the oiily fruits of the fine arts. In this 
 domestic persecution, the son contracted those morose 
 and saturnine habits which in after-life marked the char- 
 acter of the ungenial Mengs. Alonso Cano, a celebrated 
 Spanish paipter, would have carried his art to perfection, 
 had npt the unceasing persecution of the Inquisitors 
 entirely deprived him of that tranquillity so necessary to 
 the very existence of art. Ovid, in exile on the barren 
 shores of Tomos, deserted by his genius, in his copious 
 Tristia loses much of the luxuriance of his fancy. 
 
 We have a remarkable evidence of domestic unhappi- 
 ness annihilating the very faculty of genius itself, in the 
 case of Dr. Brook Taylor, the celebrated author of the 
 "Linear Perspective." This great mathematician in 
 early life distinguished himself as an inventor in science, 
 and the most sanguine hopes of his future discoveries 
 were raised both at home and abroad. Two unexpected 
 events in domestic life extinguished his inventive facul- 
 ties. After the loss of two wives, whom he regarded 
 with no common affection, he became unfitted for pro- 
 found studies ; he carried his own personal despair into 
 his favourite objects of pursuit, and abandoned them. 
 The inventor of the most original work suffered the last 
 fifteen years of his life to drop away, without hope, and 
 without exertion ; nor is this a solitary instance, where 
 a man of genius, deprived of the idolised partner of his 
 existence, has no longer been able to find an object in his 
 studies, and where even fame itself has ceased to ia- 
 terest. The reason which Rousseau alleges for the cyni- 
 
234 LITBRAET CHARACTER. 
 
 cal spleen -vrliic]! so frequently breathes forth in his 
 ■works, shows how the domestic character of the man of 
 genius leaves itself in his productions. After describing 
 the infelicity of his domestic affairs, occasioned by the 
 mother of Theresa, and Theresa herself, both women of 
 the lowest class and the worst dispositions, he adds, on 
 this wretched marriage, "These unexpected, disagree- 
 able events, in a state of my own choice, plunged me 
 into literature, to give a new direction and diversion to 
 my mind; and in all my first works I scattered that 
 bilious humour which had occasioned this veiry occupa- 
 tion." Our author's character in his works was the 
 very opposite to the one in which he appeared to these 
 low people. Feeling his degradation among them, for 
 they treated his simplicity as utter silliness, his personal 
 timidity assumed a tone of boldness and originality in 
 his writings, while a strong personal sense of shame 
 heightened his causticity, and he delighted to contemn 
 that urbanity in which he had never shared, and which 
 he knew not how to practise. His miserable subser- 
 vience to these people was the real cause of his oppressed 
 spirit calling out for some undefined freedom in society ; 
 and thus the real Rousseau, with all his disordered feel- 
 ingsj only appeared in his writings. The secrets of his 
 heart were confided to his pen. 
 
 " The painting-room must be like Eden before the 
 Fall ; no joyless turbulent passions must enter there " — 
 exclaims the enthusiast Richardson. The home of the 
 literary character should be the abode of repose and of 
 silence. There must he look for the feasts of study, in 
 progressive and alternate labours ; a taste " which," says 
 Gibbon, "I would not exchange for the treasures of 
 India." Rousseau had always a work going on, for 
 rainy days and spare hours, such as his " Dictionary of 
 Music :" a variety of works never tired ; it was the 
 single one which exhausted. Metastasio looks with 
 
LOTB OF LITERAET LABOUR. 235 
 
 delight on his variety, which resembled the fruits in the 
 garden of Armida — 
 
 E mentre spunta I'un, I'altro mature. 
 
 While one matures, tlie other buds and blows. 
 
 Nor is it always fame, or any lower motive, which 
 may induce the literary character to hold an unwearied 
 pen. Another equally powerful exists, which must re- 
 main inexplicable to Ihim who knows not to escape from 
 the listlessness of life — it is the passion for literary occu- 
 pation. He whose eye can only measure the space occu- 
 pied by the voluminous labours of the elder Pliny, of a 
 Mazzuchelli, a Muratori, a Montfaucon, and a Gough, all 
 men who laboifred from the love of labour, and can see 
 nothing in that space but the industry which filled it, is 
 like him who only views a city at a distance — the streets 
 and the edifices, and all the life and population within, 
 he can never know. These literary characters projected 
 their works as so many schemes to escape from unin- 
 teresting pursuits ; and, in these folios, ho-w jiany evils 
 of life did they bury, while their happiness expanded 
 with their volume ! Aulus Gellius desired to live, no 
 longer than he was able to retain the faculty of writing 
 and observing. The literary character must grow as 
 impassioned with his subject as iElian with his " History 
 of Animals ;" " wealth and honour I might have obtained 
 at the courts of princes ; but I preferred the delight of 
 multiplying my knowledge. I am aware that the avari- 
 cious and the ambitious will accuse me of folly ; but I 
 have always found most pleasure in observing the nature 
 of animals, studying their character, and writing their 
 history." 
 
 Even with those who have acquired their celebrity, the 
 love of literary labour is not diminished — a circumstance 
 recorded by the younger Pliny of Livy. In a preface to 
 one of his lost books, that historian had said that he had 
 
236 LITERARY OHARAOTER. 
 
 obtained sufficient glory by his former •writings on the 
 Roman history, and might now repose in silence ; but his 
 mind was so restless and so abhorrent of indolence, that 
 it only felt its existence in literary exertion. In a simi- 
 lar situation the feeling was fully experienced by Hume. 
 Our philosopher completed his history neither for money 
 nor for fame, having then more than a sufficiency of both ; 
 but chiefly to indulge a habit as a resource against indo- 
 lence.* These are the minds which are without hope if 
 they are without occupation. 
 
 Amidst the repose and silence of study, delightful to 
 the literary character, are the soothing interruptions of 
 the voices of those whom he loves, recalling him from his 
 abstractions into social existence. These re-animate his 
 languor, and moments of inspiration are caught in the 
 emotions of affection, when a father or a friend, a wife, a 
 daughter, or a sister, become the participators of his own 
 tastes, the companions of his studies, and identify their 
 happiness with his fame. A beautiful incident in the do- 
 mestic life of literature is one which Morellet has revealed 
 of Marmontel. In presenting his collected works to his 
 wife, she discovered that the author had dedicated his 
 volumes to herself; but the dedication was not made pain- 
 ful to her modesty, for it was not a public one. Nor was it 
 so concise as to be mistaken for a compliment. The theme 
 
 * This appears in one of his interesting letters first published in the 
 Literary Gazelle, Oct. 20, 1821. — [It is addressed to Adam Smith, dated 
 July 28, 1759, and he says, "I signed an agreement with Mr. Millar, 
 where I mention that I proposed to write the History of England from 
 the beginning till the aocession of Henry VII. ; and he engages to give 
 me 14002. for the copy. Tliis is the first previous agreement ever I 
 made with a bookseller. I shall execute the work at leisure, without 
 fatiguing myself by such ardent application as I have hitherto em- 
 ployed. It is chiefly as a resource against idleness that I shall under- 
 take the work, for as to money I have enough ; and as to reputation 
 what I have wrote already will be sufficient, if it be good; if not, it is 
 not likely I shall now write better."] 
 
FAMILY AFrECTION. 237 
 
 was copious, for the heart overflowed in the pages conse- 
 crated to her domestic virtues ; and Marmontel left it as a 
 record, that their children might learn the gratitude of 
 their father, and know the character of their mother, when 
 the -writer should be no more. Many readers were perhaps 
 surprised to find in N^e«ker's Comte rendu au Hoi, a politi- 
 cal and financial work, a great and lovely character of 
 domestic excellence in his. wife. This was more obtru- 
 sive than Marmontel's private dedication ; yet it was not 
 the less sincere. If Necker failed in the cautious reserve 
 of private feelings, who will censure ? Nothing seems 
 misplaced which the heart dictates. 
 
 If Horace were dear to his fhends, he declares they 
 owed him to his father : — 
 
 purua et insona 
 (XJt me coUaudem) si vivo et cania amicis, 
 Gauaa fuit Pater his. 
 
 If pure and innocent, if dear (forgive 
 These little praises) to my friends I live, 
 M7 father was the cause. 
 
 This intelligent father, an obscure tax-gatherer, discovered 
 the propensity of Horace's mind ; for he removed the boy 
 of genius from a rural seclusion to the metropolis, anx- 
 iously attending on him to his various masters. Grotius, 
 like Horace, celebrated in verse his gratitude to his ex- 
 cellent father, who lj.ad formed him not only to be a man 
 of learning, but a great character. Vitruvius pours forth 
 a 'grateful prayei: to the memory of his parents, who 
 had instilled into his soul a love for literary and philo- 
 sophical subjects ; and it is an amiable trait in Plutarch 
 to have introduced his father in the Symposiacs, as an 
 elegant critic and moralist, and his brother Lamprias, 
 whose sweetness of disposition, inclining to cheerful rail- 
 lery, the Sage of Cheronsea has immortalised. The father 
 of Gibbon urged him to literary distinction, and the 
 
238 LITEBART CnARACTEE. 
 
 dedication of the "Essay on Literature" t6 that father, 
 connected with his subsequent labour, shows the force 
 of the "excitement. The father of Pope lived long enough 
 to witness his son's celebrity. 
 
 Tears such as tender fathers shed, 
 
 Warm from my eyes descend, 
 For joy, to think when I am dead, 
 
 My son shall have mankind his Friend.* 
 
 The son of Buffon one day surprised his father by the 
 sight of a column, which he had raised to the memory of 
 his father's eloquent genius. " It will do you honour," 
 observed the Gallic sage.f And when that son in the 
 revolution was led to the guillotine, he ascended in 
 silence, so impressed with his father's fame, that he only 
 told the people, " I am the son of Buffon !" 
 
 Fathers absorbed in their occupations can but rarely 
 attract their offspring. The first durable impression's of 
 our moral existence come from the mother. The first 
 prudential wisdom to which Genius listens falls from her 
 lips, and only her caresses can create the moments of ten- 
 derness. The earnest discernment of a mother's love sur- 
 vives in the imagination of manhood. The mother of 
 Sir William Jones, having formed a plan for the educa- 
 tion of her son, withdrew from great connexions that she 
 might live only for that son. Her great principle of edu- 
 cation, was to excite by curiosity ; the result could not fail 
 to be knowledge. " Read, and you will know," she con- 
 stantly replied to her filial pupil. And we have his own 
 acknowledgment, that to this maxim, which produced 
 the habit of study, he was indebted for his future attain- 
 ments. Kant, the German metaphysician, was always 
 
 * These lines have been happily applied by Mr. Bowles to the father 
 of Pope. — The poet's domestic affections were as permanent as they 
 were strong. 
 
 f It still exists in the gardens of the old ohatean at Montbard. It 
 is a pillar of marble bearing this inscription : — " Excelsas turris humilis 
 columna, Parenti suo Alius Buffon. 1785." — Ed. 
 
FAMILY AFFECTION. 239 
 
 fond of declaring that he owed to the ascendancy of his 
 mother's character the severe inflexibility of his moral 
 principles. The mother of Bums kindled his genius by 
 reciting the old Scottish ballads, while to his father he 
 attributed his less pleasing cast of character. Bishop 
 Watson traced to the affectionate influence of his mother, 
 the religious feelings which he confesses he inherited 
 from her. The mother of Edgeworth, confined through 
 life to her apartment, was the only person who studied 
 his constitutional volatility. When he hastened to her 
 death-bed, the last imperfect accents of that beloved 
 voice reminded him of the past and warned him of the 
 future, and he declares that voice "had a happy influ- 
 ence on his habits," — as happy, at least, as his own vola- 
 tile nature would allow. " To the manner in which my 
 ■mother formed me at an early age," said Napoleon, " I 
 principally owe my subsequent elevation. My opinion 
 is, that the future good or bad conduct of a child en- 
 tirely depends upon the mother." 
 
 There is this remarkable in the strong affections of the 
 mother in the formation of the literary character, that, 
 without even partaking of, or sympathising with the 
 pleasures the child is fond of, the mother will often cher- 
 ish those first decided tastes merely from the delight of 
 promoting the happiness of her son ; so that that genius, 
 which some would produce on a preconceived system, or 
 implant by stratagem, or enforce by application, with her 
 may be only the watchful labour of love.* One of our 
 most eminent antiquaries has often assured me that his 
 great passion, and I may say his genius, for his curious 
 
 * Kotzebue has noted the delicate attention of his mother in not only 
 fostering his genius, but in watching its too rapid development. He 
 says: — "If at any time my imagination was overheated, my mother 
 always contrived to select something for my evening reading which 
 ^ might moderate this ardour, and make a gentler impression on my too 
 irritable fancy." — Ed.. 
 
240 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 knowledge and kis yast researches, he attributes to ma- 
 ternal affection. "When his early taste for these studies 
 was thwarted by the very different one of his fkther, the 
 mother silently supplied her son with the sort of treas- 
 ures he languished for, blessing the knowledge, which 
 indeed she Could not share with him, but which she 
 beheld imparting happiness to her youthful antiquary. ' 
 
 There is, what may be called, family genius. In the 
 home of a man of genius is diffused an electrical atmos- 
 phere, and his own pre-eminence strikes out talents in 
 alL "The active pursuits of my father," says the daugh- 
 ter of Edgeworth, " spread an animation through the 
 house by connecting children with all that was going on, 
 and allowing them to join in thoiight and conversation ; 
 sympathy and emulation excited mental exertion in the 
 most agreeable manner." Evelyn, in his beautiful retreat 
 at Saye's Court, had inspired his family with that variety 
 of taste which he himself was spreading throughout the 
 nation. His son translated Rapin's " Gardens," which 
 poem the father proudly preserved in his " Sylva ;" his 
 lady, ever busied in his study, excelled in the arts her 
 husband loved, and designed the frontispiece to his 
 "Lucretius:" she was the cultivator of their celebrated 
 garden, which served as "an example" of his great 
 work on "forest trees." Cowley, who has commemo- 
 rated Evelyn's love of books and gardens, has delight- 
 fully applied them to his lady, in whom, says the bai-d, 
 Evelyn meets both pleasures : — 
 
 The fairest garden in her looks,. 
 And in her mind the wisest books, 
 
 The house of Haller resembled a temple consecrated to 
 science and the arts, and the votaries Were his own 
 family. The universal acquirements of Haller were 
 possessed in some degree by every one under hig, roof; 
 and their studious delight in transcribing manuscripts, 
 
FAMILT AFFECTION. 241> 
 
 in consulting authors, in botanising, drawing and colour- 
 ing the plants under his eye, formed , occupations -which 
 made the daughters happy and the sons eminent.* The 
 painter Stella inspired his family to copy his fanciful , in- 
 ventions, and the playful graver of Claudine Stella, his 
 niece, animated his " Sports -of Children." I have seen 
 a print of Coypel in his studio^ and- by his side his. little 
 daughter,:who is- intensely watching , the progress of her 
 father's ipenoil.. The artist has represented himself, in 
 the act ofosuspending I'his labour to look on his. child. 
 At'that moment, his thoughts were divided, between 
 two objects of his love.- The .character and , the works 
 of ithe late Elisiabeth ■ Hamilton were formed entirely by 
 her .brother; Admiring the man she rloved,, she imitated 
 what she admired ; and while the'brother was, arduously 
 completing the version of the Persian Hedaya, the sister, 
 who had associated with" his morning: tasks and. his even- 
 ing conversations, was recalling. all -^the ideas, and pourr 
 traying-her fraternal' master in her .'■ Hindoo Rajah.." 
 
 Nor are therie . wanting instances ^ where this family 
 GENIUS has been carried ■ down through successive gen- 
 erations: the; volume of the father ;has been continued 
 by a son, or a relative. . The: history of .the femily of the 
 Zwingers is a combination- of i studies and inherited 
 tastes. Theodore published; in 1697', a folio herba,!, of 
 which his son .Frederic gave an enlarged edition in 17,44 ; 
 and the family was honoured by; their name having been 
 given to a genus of planfe dedicated'to their memory, 
 and known in botany by the; name of the Zwingera. In 
 ■ hifetory and in literature; the family name was . equally 
 
 * Haller's death (a. D. IWT) was as remarkable for its calm philoso- 
 phy, as his life for its happiness. He was a professional surgeon, and 
 continued to the last an attentive and rational observer of the symp- 
 toms of the disease Which was bringing him to the grave. He. trans- 
 mitted to the University of Gottingen a soientiflo analysis af his oaae ; 
 and died feeling his own pulse. — Ed. 
 16 
 
2-i2 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 eminent; tlie same Theodore continued a great ■work, 
 "The Theatre of Human Life," which? had been hegun 
 by his father-in-law, and which for the thirds time was 
 enlarged by another son. Among the historians of Itaiy, 
 it is delightful to contemplate this family genius trans- 
 mitting itself with unsullied probity ' among the three 
 Villanis, and the Malaspinis, and the two Portas. ; The 
 history of the' learned family of the Stephens, presents a 
 dynasty of literature; and to distinguisL the numerous 
 inembers, they have been designated! as Henryi I. and 
 Henry II.,-^a» Rbbel-t I., the H., and the HI.* Qur 
 country may exult in having .possessed many literary 
 families^ — the Wartons, the father and . two sons : the 
 Bumeys, more in number; and the nephews of Milton, 
 whose humble torch at least waS' lighted at the altar of 
 the great bard.f 
 
 No event in literary history is more impressive than 
 the fate of Quintilian ; it.was in the midstiof his elaborate 
 work, which was coniposed to form the literary character 
 of a son, that he experienced the most terrible affliction 
 in the domestic life of ganius-^the successive ideaths 
 of' his wife and his only child. It was a moral earth- 
 quake with a single survivor amidst the >mins.. An awful 
 burst of parental ' arid literary, affliction breaks forth in 
 Quintilian's lamentation, — '^My wealth,, and my writings 
 'the' fnjits of a long and^ painfiil life, must. now be.re- 
 'served only for strangers ; all' I possess is.fbr aliens, and 
 no longer mine !" We feel the united agony of the hus- 
 band, the fiither, and the^ man of genius ! 
 
 Deprived of these social consolations, we see Johnspn- 
 call about him those whose calamities exiled them from 
 Boeiety, and his roof lodges the blind, the lame and the 
 
 * For an acooumt of them and their works, see " Curiosities of Liter- 
 'ature," vol. i., p- 36, 
 t Tlie PhiUipg. 
 
PtTBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE. 213 
 
 •poor for the hjeart must possess something it can call tits 
 own, to be kind to. 
 
 In' domestic life, the iAbh6 De- St. Pierre enlarged its 
 moral vocabulary, by fixing in his. language two signifi- 
 cant words. One. served to : explain the virtue most 
 familiar to him hienfaisance ; and that irritable vanity 
 which magnifies its ephemeral feme, the sage redueed 
 to a mortifying dimijwitive — la glcfnole! ' 
 
 . Itihas often excited surprise, tihat men of' genius are 
 not more r&verenced than oliwr men in their domestic 
 
 ■circle. The ) disparity between the public and. jthe pri- 
 vate esteem of the, same man is often striking. , In 
 privacy we> discover that the comiC' genius is not always 
 cheerful, that the sage is sometimes ridiculous, and the 
 poet seldom delightful. The golden hour of invention 
 must . terminate like other hours, and when the man of 
 
 igenius Teturnssto the cares,' ttha, duties, the vexatieus, 
 
 ■ and the amusements of life, bis tcompanions Ijiehold him as 
 one of, themselves — ^the creature of habits and infirmities. 
 In the business of life, the cultivators of science and 
 the arts, with all their, simplicity of feeling,, -and gener- 
 ous openness about th^m, do not meet on lequaL terms 
 with other men. Tteir frequent? abstractions ealling- Off 
 the mind' to whatever, lentersi into its lonely pursuits, 
 render them greatly' inferior to; others in . practical, and 
 
 .immediate observation. Studious men have beeai re- 
 
 ) preached as being «o deficient in the, knowledge of , the 
 human character, that they are usually - disqualified ,:fbr 
 
 -the management of public- business. Their confidence 
 in their Mends has no bound, while they i become .the 
 easy dupes of the (.designing. A.iftiend, who was in 
 office with the late Mr.,, -Cumberland,. assures me .that he 
 was so intractable to the forms of business, and so easily 
 induced to do more, or to do less than he ought, that 
 he was compelled to perform the official business of ;1^is 
 literary man, to free himself from ' his , lannoyance ; and 
 
244 llTERART OHARACTEB. 
 
 yet Cumberland' could not be' reproached with any 
 deficiency in a knowledge of the • human ''chara'ctel', 
 which he was always touching with caustic pleasantry. 
 
 Addison and Priot' ' were unskilful statestnen * and 
 Malesherbes confessed, a few daysbefore' bis death, thd,t 
 Turgot and himself, men of genius and philosophers, 
 from whom the' nation had expected much,' had bAdljr 
 administered the affairsof the state; fot " knowing m'en 
 bat by books, afld uisMlfiil in business, 'We could not 
 form the king t»o the government.'" A- man of genius 
 may know the "whole map of the' World of human nature'; 
 •but, like the greaitgeographerj^may be apt tobe'dostin 
 the wood which any one in the' neighbOnrhood kilows 
 better than him. 
 
 " The convfersatibn of a poet," says'Goldsmith, " is that 
 of a man of sense, while his' actions! are those of a. fool." 
 Genius, careless of the future, and' often absent in;>the 
 present, avoidsi too deep a comming<ling in the minor 
 cares 'of life. Henee'it becomes a victim to common 
 fools and vulgar villains. " I •love' my family's welfare, 
 but I cannot 'be so foolish as to make mysfelf the slave 
 to; the minute affairs of fa' house," said Montesquieu. 
 The story told of a man of learning is probably true, 
 however ridiculous it may appear. Deeply occupied in 
 his library, one, rushing in; informed him- that; the house 
 was on fire : " Go to my -wife — these 'matters belong to 
 her!" pettishly replied the intewuptsd student: Badon 
 sat 'at' one end of his table wrapt in many a reverie, 
 wiile at the other the creatures about him^ were traffick- 
 ing with his honour, and ruiniflg his ; good name : "I 
 am' better fitted for- this," said i that 'great man onee, 
 holding out a book,."than forthe lifel ha-\«e of late led. 
 Nature has not fitted 'me for that ; knowing myself "by 
 inward calling tO' be fitt'er to hold a' book than to play 
 a part." , 
 
 Buffoo-i who eonsumed'hi'smiarningff'in hisi old tower xjf 
 
DOMESTIC- UFB. 245 
 
 Mont'bard, at the end of his garden,* -with all nature open- 
 ing to him, formed all his ideas of, what was passing befqre 
 him, frpm the arts ,of a pliant Capuchinj and the opm- 
 toents of a perruquier on the scandalous chronicle of the 
 village. Thfise.hwmble, confidants .he treated as chil: 
 dren, but the children were commanding rth^ great, man ! 
 Young, whose satires give, the very, anatomy of human, 
 foibles,^ was wholly governed , by his housekeeper. SW 
 thought and aqted for him,,which. probably, greatly as- 
 sisted the " Night Thoughts," .but, his curate exposed the 
 domesticeconomy of a man of geniuaby a.satiripal.novel. 
 Jf I am truly informed, in that gallery of satirical portr.aits 
 in his "Love of Fame," Young ha?. omitted one (of.the 
 most striking — his own ! While the poet's , eye. was 
 glancing .from "earth to, heaven," he, totally i overlooked 
 the lady -wiiomhe mfirxied, and who soon .became t^e 
 object of his contempt ; Biad. not pply his wife, but his 
 only son, who wben he returned, home for the vacation 
 from Winchester, school, was only admitted into the 
 presence of his ppetjcal father on the first and the last 
 day; and whpse unhappy , life is,. attributed to tihis, un- 
 natural neglect.: f — a lamentable ■ domestic catastrophe, 
 which, I fear,.has. too frequently occurred amidst the 
 ^rdpur and occupations , of liljerary glory. Much^ too 
 much, .of the tender-domesticity of life-is violated by 
 literary characters. , ,A11 that, lives, under their eye, all 
 that should be guided .by ,theii|. hand, the , recluse; and 
 abstraicted men of, genius .must Ipave to their own, direc- 
 tion>, ,But let.it not be; forgotten, that, if such -.neglect 
 others, they also neglect ,tiiemselYes, and .are! deprived 
 
 • For someaocount of thi8,pl8ce, see the chapter on "JiiteraTy.J^Si- 
 dences" in vol. ill., p. 395, of "Curiosities of Literature." 
 
 f These facts are drawn from a manuscript of the late Sir Herbert 
 Croft, who regretted tliat Dr. Johnson would not suffer him to give 
 this account during the doetor's lifetime/ iu his Life of Young, but 
 ^hich it bad always been his intention to haTe added; to it. 
 
•246 LITERA:Rr CLMB^CTEB. 
 
 of those falnily enjoyments for which few meii have 
 warmer sympathies.- While the literafy character burns 
 with the ambition of Taising a great literary name, he 
 is too often forbidden ■ to tasite ' of this domestic inter- 
 course, or to indulge thfe 'vetSatile curiosity of his pri- 
 vates amuSements-^for he is bhained to'his great labour. 
 Robertson felt this while employed on his histories, and 
 he at length rejoiced when, after many years of devoted 
 toil, he returned tri the' 'luxury of 'reading for his' own 
 amusement and to the conversation of "his friends.' ' " Such 
 a sacrifice," observes his philosophical biographer, " must 
 be more or less made* hy all ''who devote themselves to 
 letters, whether with a view to emolument or to faine; 
 nor would it perha'ps bfeeasy to make it, were it not for 
 the prospect (seldom, alas !' 'realised) of earning by thfeir 
 exertions that learned and honourable leisure whicli^ he 
 was so fortunate as to attain:" 
 
 But men of genius have often been accused of imaginary 
 Crimes. ■ Their very eminence attracts the lie' of Calumny j 
 which traditioh 'often conveys beyond the possibility of 
 refutation. Sometimes they are reproachM as wanting 
 inaflFection, when they displease their fathers by making 
 an obscure name celebhitedj The'family of Descarte^ 
 lamented,'as a bl6t in their efecUtcheon,'that Descartes', 
 who was born a gentleman, should becorhe a phildsopher ■ 
 and this ele'vated' genius was' -refused the - satisfaction of 
 embracing an unforgiving parent, while hi^' dwarfi'sh bro- 
 ther, with a mind diminutive as his person, ridiculed his 
 philosophic relative, and turned to advantage his philo- 
 eophie disposition. The daughter of Addison was edu- 
 cated with a perfect contempt of authors, and blushed to 
 bear a name ni6i:e'illuStrious than that of all the Warr 
 Avicks, on her alliance to which noble family she prided 
 herself The children of Milton, far from solacing the 
 age of their blind parent^ became inipatient for his death, 
 embittered his last hours with scorn and disaffection, arid 
 
LITERABT POYERTT. 247 
 
 combined to cheat and rob .himj. Milton, having enriched 
 our national ppetiy by .two immortal epics, with patient 
 gfief blessed the single female, who did not entirely aban- 
 don him, and the, obscure ^atic who was pleased with 
 his poems because they were religious. What felicities ! 
 what laurels! An(i. now we,have recently learned,, t^iat 
 the daughter pf Madame de Sevign6 lived on ill. terms 
 with her mother, pf whose enchanting genius she appears 
 to have been insensible I The unquestionable documents 
 are two letters hitherto cautiously secrete^,, j The daugh- 
 ter was in the house of her mother, when an extraordinary 
 letter, was addr.6ssed to her from the chg-mber of Madame 
 de S^vignS after a. sleepless night. . In this she describes, 
 with her peculiar felicity, the ill-trea,tment she received 
 from the daughter she idolised ; it is a kindling efiTusion 
 of maternal, reproach, and tenderness, and genius.,* 
 
 Some have been deemed disagreeable companions,; be- 
 cause they felt the weariness of .dulness, or th,e, imperti- 
 nence pf intrusion; described as bad husbapds, : when 
 united to women, who, without a, kindred feeling,. had the 
 mean art to prey upon their infirmities ; or as ba^ fa,thers, 
 because their, offspring ,have pot always reflected th^ 
 tnpral beauty of their own page. But the magnet loses 
 noticing of its virtue, even when the particles about it,. 
 incapable themselves of , being attracted,, are not acted 
 on by its occult property. , , , 
 
 CHAPTER XVII., 
 
 The poverty of Literary men. — Poverty, a relatiye qnality. — Of the 
 poverty of literary men , in what degree .desiDabJe.— ^Extreme poverty, 
 — Task- work. — Of gratuitioua works. — A projept toi provide against the 
 worst state of poverty among literary men. 
 
 POVERTY is. a state not so fa,tal. to genius, as it is 
 usually conceived to be. We shall, find that it has 
 * Lettres iueditesde Madame de Sevigne, pp. 201 and 203. ,■ , 
 
248 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 been sometimes vohintarily chosen ; and that to connect 
 too closely great fortune with great genius, creates one 
 of those powerful but imhappy alliances, where the one 
 party must necessarily act contrary to the- interests of 
 the othfer. 
 
 Poverty is a relaitive quality, like cold and heat; which' 
 are but the int'i-ease ot the diminution in our own sensa- 
 tions. The positive idea must arise from comparison. 
 There is'a sta;te of poverty reserved even for 'the wealuhy 
 man, the instailt that he comes in hateful contact with 
 the enormous capitalist. 'But there is a "poverty neither 
 vulgar nor'tferrifying, asking no favours, and on no terms 
 receiving iany; a poverty which annihilates its ideal evils; 
 and, bec'oming'even a source of pride, will confer inde^ 
 pendence, that first Step to genius. ' 
 
 Among the continental-nations, to 'accumulatewealth, 
 in- the spirit of a Capitalist does not seem to form the 
 prime object of domestic life. 'The traffic <)f money is 
 with them left to the traffickers, their merchants, and 
 their financiers. In our country the- commercial character 
 has so closely interwoven and identified itself with the 
 national one, and its peculiar-views have so -terminated 
 all our pursuits, that every rank is alike influenced by its 
 sprit, and things are valued by a market-price which natu- 
 rally adtnits of no such- appraisement. ' In a country where 
 "The Wealth of Nations" has been fixed as the' firet 
 principle of political existence, wealth has raised an aris- 
 tocracy more noble than nobility, more celebrated than 
 genius, more popular than patriotism ; but however it 
 may partake at times of a generous nature,iit. hardly: looks 
 beybnd'its own narrow pale. ■ It is curious to notice'that 
 Montesquieu, who was in England, observed, that " If I 
 had been born here, nothing could have consoled me in 
 failing toi accumulate a large fortune ; but I do not lament 
 the mediocrity of' tny circumstances in' 'France." ' The 
 sources of our national wealth have greatly multiplied, 
 
LITEHART POTERTT. 249 
 
 andi the evil has consequently increased^ since the -vjsit 
 of the great philosopher. 
 
 The cares of property, the daily concerns of a family, 
 the pressure of such minute disturbers of their studies, 
 have induced some great minds to regret the abolition 
 of, thpse Dionastic orders, beneath whose undisturbed 
 shade wei"e producedthe. mighty labours of a Montfaucon, 
 a Calmet, a Florez, and the still , unfinished volumes of 
 the Beaedictines, Often has the literary character, 
 amidst the bijsied delights of study^ sighed "to bid a 
 farewell sweet " to the turbulence of society. It. was not 
 discontent, nor apy undervaluing of general sociejty, but 
 the pure e<nth.usiasm of ithe library, which once. ; i^^i^ed 
 the st,Hdious Evelyn to- -sketch a retreatof this nature, 
 which he addressed to his friend, the illustrious Boyle. 
 He proposed to form "A college wherC; perisans; of the 
 same turn of mind might enjoy the pleasure of agreeable 
 society, and at the same time pass their days without 
 care or interruption."* This-, abandonment of their, life 
 to their genius. has, indeed, often cost them- too dear, fr^ox 
 the days of Sophocles, who, ardent in his old age, ne- 
 glected, his family afiairs, and.- was brought -befpra Ms 
 judges by his relations, as- one fallen iajto a second child- 
 hood. The aged, poet brougljt but one solitary. witness 
 in his, favour-^an iunfini^hed* .tragedy; -.i^hich, Slaving 
 read, the judges rose befpre. him, and retorted the charge 
 on liis accusers. ,„ ,, 
 
 A, parallel circumstance occurred, tot the^bbe Cotin, 
 the victim of a, rhyme of the satirical Boileau. . Studioi\s, 
 
 * lliia romantic literary" rfetreat is one of those-' -delightful 'reVerifes 
 ■which- the elegant-taste of Evelyn abounded with. It may be found 
 aitfiiUilength.inithe fifth TCilume! of Boyle's- Works,. not lia. the eeeond, 
 as the Biog. Brit. says. His ladjr was to live among the society. "If 
 I and my wife take up two apartments, for we are to be decently asun- 
 der, however I -stipulate, and her inclination '-will greatly suit with it,' 
 that shall be no im'pEdiment to the -Soeiety, but a iDonSiderablei advan- 
 tage to the economic, part," .&9. . . . , , 
 
250 LITEEAUT CHARACTER. 
 
 and without fortune, Cotin had lived contented 'till he- 
 incurred the unhappiness of inheriting a large • estate.- 
 Then a world of cares opened on him ; his rents were not 
 paid, and his creditors increased.- i Dragged from; his 
 Hebrew and Greek, poor Cotin resolved to make over his 
 entire fortune to one of his heirs, on condition of mainte- 
 nance. His other relations assuming that- a man who 
 parted with his estate in his lifetime must necessarily bo 
 deranged, brought the learned Cotin into court. Cotiii 
 had nothing to say in his own favour, but .(requested his 
 judges would allow him to address them from the ser- 
 mons which he- preached. The good sense, the ■ sound 
 reasoning, and the erudition of the preacher were such; 
 that the whole bench unanimously declared- that they 
 themselves might be considered as madmen, were they 
 to condemn a man of letters who was- desirous of escaping 
 from the incumbrance of a fortunewhich had only inter- 
 rupted- his studies. 
 
 There may then be sufficient motives to induce such a 
 man to make a state of mediocrity his choice. If he lose 
 his happiness, he mutilates his geniusi, • Groldoni, with all 
 the simplicity of his feelings"and habits^ in reviewing his 
 life,- tells us how he was always . relapsing into his old 
 propensity of comic writing; "but the thought of this 
 does not disturb me," says he; "for though in any other 
 situation I might have been in easier circumstances, I 
 should never have been so happy." Bayle is- aparenfr 
 of • the modern litera-ry character ; he pursued the same 
 course, and early in life adopted the principle, " Neither 
 to fear bad fortune nor have any ardent desires for good." 
 Acquainted with 'the passions only as their histarian, and 
 living only for literatui'e,- he sacrificed to it the two great 
 acquisitions of human pursnits^-fortune and a family: 
 but in what country had Bayle not a family and a pos- 
 session in his fame ? Hume and Gibbon had the most, 
 perfect coilception of the literary character, and they, 
 
LITEElET rOTERTT. 251 ; 
 
 were aware of this important principle in its habits-^- • 
 "My own revenue^" said Hume, " will be sufficient for a 
 man of letters, who surely needs less' money,' both for his 
 entertainment and credit, than other people;'' Gtibbon 
 observed of 'himself — ^"Perhaps the golden mediocrity 
 of my fortune has contributed to fofrtifyuiy appMciation.''' 
 The state of poverty, then, desirable ■ in the domestic » 
 life of genius; is' one in which "the cares of property 
 never intrude, arid the want of wealth is never perceived; ■ 
 This is not indigence ; that state which; however 'digni- 
 fied the man of genius hitilself may be, must inevitably; 
 degrade ! for the! heartless will gibe, and 6ven the eom- 
 passianate tiitn aside With contempt. This literary out*' 
 Cast will soon be forsaken even by himself! his own 
 intellect will be clouded over, and his limbs shrink in the 
 palsy of bodily misery and shame — 
 
 Malesuada Fames, et turpis Bgestas 
 Tenibiles visa formse. 
 
 Not that in this history of men of genius we are with- 
 out illustrious examples of those who^ have even.karnt 
 to mant, that they .might emancipate theii-, genius from 
 their necessities ! 
 
 We see Rousseau rushing out of the palace of the 
 financier, selling his watch, copying music by the sheet, 
 and by the mechanical industry of two hours, purchasing 
 ten for genius. We may smile at the enthusiasm, of 
 young Barry, who finding. himself too constant a haunter 
 of taverns, imagined that this expenditure of time was 
 bccasioned by having money ; and to put an end to the 
 conflict, he threw the little he, possessed at, once into the 
 Liffey ; but let us not forget that Barry, in the maturity 
 of life, confidently began a labour of years,* .and one of 
 the noblest inventions in his. art — a great poem in a pic- 
 
 * His series qf pictures for the walls of the meeting-room of the 
 Society of Arts in the Adelphi'. — Efi. 
 
252 LITERAET CHARACTER. 
 
 ture^-with no; other resource than what he found l^y 
 secret labours through the night, in famishing the shops 
 ■with' those slight and saleable ■ sketches which' secured 
 uninterrupted mornings for his genius. Spinosa, a name 
 as celebratedy and perhaps as calumniated, as Epicurus, 
 lived in all sorts of abstinence, even of honours, of- pen- 
 sions, and of presents; which; however disguised by 
 kindness, he would not accept, so fearful was this philoso- 
 pher of a chain ! Lodging in a cottage :and obtaining a 
 livelihood by polishing optical glasses, he declared that' 
 he had never, spent more than he earned, and certainly, 
 thought that there was such a thing as superfluous earn- 
 ings. 'At his- death his small accounts showed how he 
 had subsisted on a few pence arday,- and , 
 
 Enjoy' d, spare feast T i radish and an egg. 
 
 '" 1* 
 
 Poussin persisted in refusing a higher price than that 
 affixed to the back of his pictures, at the time he was 
 living without a domestic. The great oriental scholar, 
 Attquetirde' Perron,'is a recent example bf th^ literary 
 character carrying his indifference to privations -to' the 
 very cytlicism of poverty ; aid he seems td exult over his 
 destitution with the same pride as others- would expiatiate 
 over their ptDssessions. Yet we must "not' forget, to use 
 the words of Lord Bacon, that "jildging that' means Wferc 
 to be spelit upon learning, and not learning to be applied 
 tb means," De Petron refused the offer of thirty thousand 
 livres* for his copy of 'the ' "Zend-avesta." Writing 
 to some Bi'amins,* he describes his life' at' Paris to be 
 much like their own. "I subsist on 'the produce of my 
 literary labours without revenue, establishment, or place. 
 I have no wife nor children ; alone, absolutely free,- but 
 always the friend of men bf probity. ''In a perpetual 
 war with my senses, I triumph over the' attractions of 
 the vorld or I contemn them." 
 
 This ascetic existence is not singular. ^ Parini, a great 
 
LITERARY" POVERTY. 253 
 
 modern poet of Italy, whom the Milanese point out to 
 strangers as the glory of their city, lived in the same 
 state of unrepining poverty. Mr. Hobhouse has ^ given 
 us this self-portrait of the poet : — 
 
 Me, Hon nato a pefcotere 
 Le dure illustri porte, 
 Nudo accorra, ma libero 
 II regno dellamorte.. 
 
 ' Naked, but free'! . A life ■ of hard deprivations was 
 loB'g that of the' illustrious 'Linnsens. Without fortune, 
 to that great mind it' never seemed necessary to acquire 
 any-. Peregrinating on'fdotwith a stylus, a magnifying- 
 glass, and a basket for plants, he shared the rustic meal 
 of the peasant. Never was glory obtained at a cheaper 
 rate! exclaims one of his eulogists. Satisfied' with the 
 least of the ■ little,' he only felt one perpetiial want^-that 
 of completing his Flors. Not that Linn«eus', was insensi- 
 ble to his' situation, for he ga,ve his name to a little flower 
 in Lapland — the Ziinnaea JioireaMs, 'ivora the fanciful 
 analogy he discovered/ between its character and his own 
 early fate, "a little northern plant flowering early,, de- 
 pressed, abject,' and long overlooked," The. want of 
 fortune, however, did not deprive this' man of genius of 
 his true glory, nor of that statue raised to him in the 
 gardens of the University of Upsal, nor of that solemn 
 eulogy delivered by a crowned head, nor of those medals 
 which his nation struck to commemorate the gemius.. of 
 the three kingdoms of nature ! • 
 
 This, then, is the race who have often smiled at the 
 light regard ^of their good 'neighbours when contrasted 
 with their own' celebrity; for'in poverty and in solitude 
 such men are not separated from their fame ; that is ever 
 proceeding, ever raising a secret, but constant, triumph 
 in theit minds.* 
 
 • Spagnoletto, while sign-painting at Rome, attracted by his ability 
 the notice of a cardinal, Who ultimately gave hiin a home in hia 
 
254 LITERARY CHARACTER 
 
 Yes ! Genius, undegraded and unexhausted, may in- 
 deed even in agarret glow indts cai-eer; but it must fee 
 on the principle which induced Rousseau solemnly to -re- 
 nounce writing "par mkier." This in the Joximal de 
 Spavans he once attempted, but found himself quite 
 inadequate to " the profession." * In a garret, the author 
 of the " Studies of- Nature," as he exultingly tells lis, 
 arranged his work. " It was in a little garret, in the 
 new street of St. Etienne du Mont, where I resided four 
 years, in the midst of physical and . domestic afflictions. 
 Bnt;th«re I enjoyed ithe most exquisitei pleasures of my 
 ■life, amid' profound solitude and an enchanting horizon. 
 There I put the i finishing , hand to. my ' Studies of 
 Nature,' and, there; I published them." Pope, one day 
 .taking his usual walk with Harte in the Haymarket, 
 desiredrhim to enter a little shop,, where going up three 
 pair of- stairs into > a;, small room. Pope said, '.' In this 
 gai-ret Addison wrote, i his ■'•Campaign!*" To the ; feel- 
 ings of the poet this garret had become a consecrated 
 «pot ; Genius seemed more itself,- plafced in contrast with 
 its miserable locality ! 
 
 The man of genius wrestling with oppressive fortune, 
 who follows the avocations of an author as a precarious 
 source of existence, should take as the model of the 
 authorial life, that of Dr. Johnson. , The dignity, of the 
 iiterary character was as deeply associated with his feel- 
 ings, and the" reverence, thyself "as present to his, mind, 
 when doomed to be one of the Jlelots of literature, by 
 Osborn, ,Cave, and MUler, as when, in the honest triumph 
 of Genius, he 'repelled a tardy adula,tion of the lordly 
 Chesterfield. Destitute of this ennobling principle, the 
 
 palace; but the artist, feeling , that his poverty was necessary to his 
 industry and independence, fled to Naples, and recommenced a life of 
 labour. — Ed. 
 
 * Twice he repeated this resolution. See his ■Works, vol. xxxi., p. 
 283 ; TOl. xxiii, p. 90. 
 
INiFLOENGE OP- NECBSSITT. -£55 
 
 author sinks into the trihe of those rabid adventurers of 
 the pen who have masked' the degraded form of the 
 literary character under the assunied title of " authors by 
 profession"* — ^the Guthries, the Kalphs, and the Am- 
 hursts.f There- are -worse evils for the literary man," 
 says a living author, -who himself is the true model of the 
 great literary character, "than nieglect, poverty, im- 
 prisonment, and death. There are even more pitiable 
 objects than Chatterton himself -with the poison at his 
 lips." " I should ' die -with hunger -were I at peace -with 
 the -world !" exclaimed a corsair of literature — and 
 dashed his pen into the black flood before him of soot 
 and gall. 
 
 In substituting fortune for the object of his ' designs, 
 the man of genius deprives himself of those heats of in- 
 spiration reserved for him -who lives for himself;' the 
 rnollia tempora fundi of Art. K he be subservient to 
 the public taste, -without daring to raise it to his own, 
 the creature of his times has not the choice of his sub- 
 jects, which choice is itself a sort of invention. A task- 
 worker ceases to think his own thoughts. The stipulated 
 price and time are weighing on his pen or his pencil, 
 while the hour-glass is dropping its hasty sands. If the 
 man of genius would be' wealthy and even' luxurious, 
 another fever besides the thii'St of glory torments him. 
 Such insatiable desires create many fears, and a mind in 
 fear is a mind in slavery. In one of Shakspeare's son- 
 nets he pathetically laments this compulsion of his neces- 
 sities which forced' him to the trade of pleasing the 
 public; and he illustrates this degradation by a novel 
 image. " Chide Fortune," cries the bard, — 
 
 * Prom an original letter which I have published from Guthrie to a 
 minister of state,' this modern phrase appears to have been his own 
 invention. The principle unblushiilgly avowed, required the sanction 
 ■of a respectable designation. I have preserved it in " Calamities of 
 Authors." 
 
 f For some account of these men, see " Calamities of Authors." 
 
256 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds, 
 
 That ;did not better for myiKe proyidei 
 
 Than public means which public manners breeds ; 
 
 Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ; 
 
 And Almost thence tny nature is' subdued 
 
 Td what it wmha in, like the dtes's hand. 
 
 Such is the fate of that author, who, in his variety of 
 ' task-works, blue, , yellow, and re,(i, Jives witho,ut ever 
 having shown his own natural coiaplexion. We. hear 
 the eloquent truth from one ,who has alike shared in the 
 bliss of composition, and the misery of its " daily bread." 
 "A single hour of composition won from the business of 
 the day, is worth more than the whole day's toil. of him 
 who works at.the trade of literature : in the one case, the 
 spirit comes joyfully to refresh it@elf,.like a hart to ..the 
 waterbrooks ; in the other, it pursues its. miserable way, 
 panting and ja,ded, with the dogs of hunger and necessity 
 behind/'* We trace the fate of all task-wprk in the. his- 
 tory of Poussin, when, called on to reside at the French 
 court. Labouring without intermission, sometimes on 
 one thing and soijietimes .on another, and. hurried on in 
 things which required both time and thought, he saw too 
 clearly the fatal tendency p£ suph a life, ^.nd exclaimed, 
 w.itji ill-suppressed bitterness^ " If . I stay long in this 
 country, I shall turn dauber like the rest here." The 
 great artist abruptly returned to .Rome to r.egain the 
 possession of his. own thoughts. . , , 
 
 It, has. been a question with some, more indeed abroad 
 than at home, whether the art of instructing mankind by 
 the press would not .be less suspiciojis in its charaoter, 
 were it less interested in one of its prevalent motives ? 
 Some noble self-denials of this kind aije recorded. ,. The 
 principle of emolument willprqducq the industry which 
 furnishes works. for popular demand; but it is only the 
 principle of honour which can produce the lasting works 
 
 * Quarterly Sevieu), vol. viii., p. 538. 
 
BOOKSELLERS' PATKONAGE. 237 
 
 of genius. Boileau seems to censure Racine for having 
 accepted money for one of his dramas, while he, who was 
 not rich, gave away his polished poems to the public. 
 He seems desirous of raising the art of writing to a more 
 disinterested profession than any other, requiring no 
 fees for the professors. Olivet presented his elaborate 
 edition of Gicero to the world, requiring no other remu; 
 neration than its glory. Milton did not compose his im- 
 mortal work for his trivial copyright ;* and Linnseus sold 
 his labours for a single ducat. The Abbe Mably, the 
 author of many political and moral works, lived on little, 
 and would accept only a few presentation copies from the 
 booksellers. But, since we have become a nation of 
 •book-collectors, and since there exists, as Mr. Coleridge 
 describes it," a reading public," this principle of honour 
 is altered. Wealthy and even noble authors are proud 
 to receive the largest tribute to their genius, because 
 this tribute is the certain evidence of the number who 
 ^ay it. The property of a book, therefore, represents to 
 the literary candidate the collective force of the thousands 
 of voters on whose favour his claimfi can only exist. 
 This change in the aifairs of the literary republic in our 
 country was felt by Gibbon, who has fixed on " the pa- 
 tronage of booksellers " as the standard of public opinion : 
 " the measure of their liberality," he says, " is the least 
 ambiguous test of our common success." The philoso- 
 pher accepted it as a substitute for that ", friendship or 
 favour of princes, of which he could not boast." The 
 same Opinion was held by Johnson. Yet, looking on 
 the present state of English literature, the most profuse 
 
 * The agreement maiJe with Simmons, the publisher, was 5t down, 
 and 51. more when 1500 copies were sold, the same sum to be paid for 
 the second . and third editions, each of the same number of copies. 
 Milton, only lived during the publication of two editions, and his widow 
 ,.parted with, all her right in the work to the same bookseller for eight 
 pounds. Her autograph receipt was in the possession of the late Daw- 
 sou Turner. — 'Ed. 
 It 
 
258 LITERAEY CHABACTEK. 
 
 perhaps in Europe, -we cannot refrain from thinking that 
 the " patronage of booksellers " is frequently injurious to 
 the great interests of literature. 
 
 The dealers in enormous speculative purchases are 
 only subservient to the spirit of the times. If they are 
 the purveyors, they are also the panders of public taste; 
 and their vaunted patronage only extends to popular 
 subjects ; while their urgent demands are sure to produce 
 hasty manufactures. A precious work on a recondite 
 subject, which may have consumed the life of its author, 
 no bookseller can patronise; and whenever such a work 
 is published, the author has rarely survived the long 
 season of the public's neglect. While popular works,, 
 after some few years of celebrity, have at length been 
 discovered not worth the repairs nor the renewal of their 
 lease of fame, the neglected work of a nobler design rises 
 in value and rarity. The literary work which requires 
 the greatest skill and difficulty, and the longest labour, 
 is not commercially valued with that hasty, spurious 
 novelty, for which the taste of the public is craving, from 
 the strength of its disease rather than of its, appetite. 
 Rousseau observed, that his musical opera, the work of 
 five or six weeks, brought him as much money as he had 
 received for his "Emile," which had cost him twenty 
 years of meditation, and three years of composition. 
 This single fact represents a hundred. So fallacious .are 
 public opinion and the patronage of booksellers ! 
 
 Such, then, is the inadequate remuneration of a life 
 devoted to literature ; and notwithstanding the more 
 general ititerest excited by its productions within the 
 last century, it has not essentially altered their situaljion 
 in society ; for who is deceived by the trivial exultation 
 of the gay sparkling scribbler who lately assured us that 
 authors now dip their pens in silver ink-standishes, and 
 have a valet for an amanuensis? Fashionable writers 
 must necessarily get out of fashion ; it is the inevitaljlp fate 
 
BOOKSELLERS' PATRONAGE. 259 
 
 of the material and the manufacturer. An eleemosynary- 
 fund can provide no permanent relief for the age and sor- 
 rows of the unhappy men of science and literature ; and 
 an author may even have composed a work which shall he 
 read by the next generation as well as the present, and 
 still he left in a state even of pauperism. These victims 
 perish in silence ! No one has attempted to suggest even 
 a palliative for this great evil; and when I asked the 
 greatest genius of our age to propose some relief for this 
 general suffering, a sad and convulsive nod, a shrug that 
 sympathised with the misery of so many brothers, and 
 an avowal that even he could not invent one, was all tha,t 
 genius had to alleviate the forlorn, state of the literary 
 character.* 
 
 The only man of genius who has thrown out a hint for 
 improving the situation of the literary man is Adam 
 Smith. In that passage in his " Wealth of Nations " to 
 which I have already referred, he says, that " Before the 
 invention of the art of printing, the only employment by 
 which a man of letters could make anything by his tal- 
 ents was that of a public or a private teacher, or by com- 
 municating to other people the various and useful knowl- 
 edge which he had acquired himself; and this surely is a 
 more honourable, a more useful, and in general even a 
 more profitable employment than that other of writing 
 for a bookseller, to which the art of printing has given 
 occasion." We see the political economist, alike insensi- 
 ble to the dignity of the literary character, incapable of 
 ■taking a just view of its glorious avocation. To obviate 
 the personal wants attached to the occupations of an 
 author, he would, more effectually than skilfully, get rid 
 of authorship itself. This is not to restore the limb, but 
 to amputate- it. It is not the preservation of existence, 
 
 . * it was the late Sir Walter Soott — if I could assi^ the date of this 
 bouversation, it would throw some light on what might be then pass- 
 ing in his own mind. 
 
260 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 but its annihilation. His friends Hume and Robertson 
 must have turned from this page humiliated and indig- 
 nant. They could have supplied Adam Smith with a 
 truer conception of the literary character, of its inde- 
 pendence, its influence, and its glory. 
 
 I have projected a plan for the alleviation of the state 
 of these authors who are not blessed with a patrimony. 
 The' trade connected with literature is carried on by men 
 who are usually not literate, and the generality of the 
 publishers of books, unlike all other tradesmen, are often 
 the worst judges of their own wares. Were it practica- 
 ble, as I believe it to be, that authors and men of letters 
 could thettiselVes be booksellers, the public Would derive 
 this immediate benefit from the scheme; a deluge of 
 worthless or indifferent books would be turned away, 
 and the name of the literary publisher would be a pledge 
 for the value of every new book. Every literary man 
 would choose his own favourite department, and we 
 should learn from him as well as from his books. 
 
 "Against this project it may be urged, that literary men 
 are ill adapted to attend to the regular details of tra^de, 
 and that the great capitalists in the book business have 
 not been men of literature. But this plan is not sug- 
 gested for accumulating a great fortune, or for the pur- 
 pose of raising up a new class of tradesmen. It is not 
 designed t6 make authors wealthy, for that would inev- 
 itably extinguish great literary exertion, but only to 
 make them independent, as the best means to preserve 
 exertion. The details of trade are not even to reach 
 him. The poet Gesner, a bookseller, left his librairie to 
 the care of his admirable wife. His own works, the ele- 
 gant editions which issUed from Ms press, and the value 
 of manuscripts, were the objects of his attention. 
 
 On the Continent many of the dealers in books have 
 been literary men. At the memorable expulsion of the 
 French Protestants on the edict of Nantes, their expatria- 
 
LITERARY BOOKSELLERS. 261 
 
 ted literary men flew to t-he shores of England, and the 
 free provinces of Holland ; and it -was in Holland that 
 this colpnj o{ lUtk-ateurs established magnificent printing- 
 houses, and furnished Europe with editions of the native 
 writers of France, often preferable, to the originals, and 
 even wrote the best works of that time. At tliat memo- 
 I'able period in our own history, when two thousand non- 
 conformists were ejected on St. Bartholomew's day from 
 the national establishment, the greater part were men of 
 learning, who, deprived of' their livings, were destitute; 
 of any means of existence. These scholars were com: 
 pelled to look to some profitable occupation, and, for the 
 greater part they fixed on trades connected with litera- 
 ture; some became eminent booksellers, and continued 
 to be voluminous writers, without finding their studies 
 interrupted by their commercial arrangements. The dc; 
 tails of trade must be left to others ; the hand of a child 
 can turn a vast machine, and the object here proposed 
 would be lost, if authors sought to become merely book- 
 sellers. 
 
 Whenever the public of Europe shall witness such a 
 new order of men among their booksellers, they will 
 have less to read, but more to remember. Their opin- 
 ions will be less fluctuating, and their knowledge will' 
 come to them with more maturity. Men of letters will 
 fly to the house of the bookseller who in that elasp of 
 literature in which he deals, will himself be not the least 
 eminent member. 
 
262 LITEBARY CHARAOTEE. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 The matrimonial state of literature. — Matrimony said not to be well 
 suited to the domestic Ufe of genius. — Celibacy a concealed cause Of 
 the early querulousne^s' of men of genius. — Of unhappy unions. — 
 Not absolutely necessary that the wife should be a literary woraan,^- 
 Of the docility and susceptibility of the higher female ohara,cter.5— 
 A picture of a literary wife. 
 
 MATRIMONY has often been considered as a condi- 
 tion not well suited to the domestic life of genius, 
 accompanied as it Inust be by many embarrassments for 
 the head and the heart. It was an axiom with Fuessli, 
 the Swiss artist, that the marriage state is incompatible 
 with a high cultivation of the fine arts ; and such appears 
 to have been the feeling of most artists. When Michael 
 Angelo was asked why he did not marry, he replied, " I 
 have espoused my art ; and it occasions me sufiicieiit 
 domestic cares, for my works shall be my children. 
 What would Bartholomeo Ghiberti have been, had- he 
 not made the gates of St. John ? His children consumed 
 his fortune, but his gates, worthy to be the gates of Para- 
 dise, remain." The three Garaccis refused the conjugal 
 bond on the same principle, dreading the interruptioiis 
 of domestic life. Their crayons and paper were always 
 on their dining-table. Careless of fortune, they deter- 
 mined never to hurry over their works in Order that 
 they might supply the ceaseless demands of a family. 
 We discover the same principle operating in our own 
 times. When a young painter, who had just married, 
 told Sir Joshua that he was preparing to pursue' his 
 studies in Italy, that great painter exclaimed, "Married ! 
 then you are ruined as an artist !" > ■■'■-' 
 
 The same principle has influenced literary men. Sir 
 Thomas Bodley had a smart altercation with his first 
 librarian, insisting that he should not marry, maintaining 
 
CELIBACY. 263 
 
 its absurdity in the man who had the perpetual care of a 
 public library ; and Woodward left as one of the express 
 conditions of his lecturer, that he was not to be a mar- 
 ried man. They imagined that their private affairs would 
 interfere with their public duties. Peiresc, the great 
 French collector, refused marriage, convinced that the 
 cares of a family were too absorbing for the freedom 
 necessary to literary pursuits, and claimed likewise a 
 sacrifice of fortune incompatible with his great designs. 
 Boyle, who would not suffer his studies to be interrupted 
 by " household affairs," lived as a boarder with his sister. 
 Lady Ranelagh. Newton, Locke, Leibnitz, Bayle, and 
 Hobbes, and Hume, and Gibbon, and Adam Smith, 
 decided for celibacy. These great authors placed their 
 happiness in their celebrity. 
 
 This debate, for the present topic has sometimes 
 warmed into one, is in truth ill adapted for controversy. 
 , The heart is more concerned in its issue than any es- 
 poused doctrine terminating in partial views. Look into 
 the domestic annals of genius — observe the variety of 
 positions into which the literary character is thrown in the 
 nuptial state. Cynicism will not always obtain a sullen 
 triumph, nor prudence always be allowed to calculate 
 away some of the richer feelings of our nature. It is not 
 an axiom that literary characters must necessarily institute 
 a new order of celibacy. The sentence of the apostle 
 pronounces that " the forbidding to marry is a doctrine 
 of devils." Wesley, who published, "Thoughts on a 
 Single Life," advised some "to remain smgle for the 
 kingdom of heaven's sake ; but the precept," he adds, " is 
 not for the many." So indecisive have been the opinions 
 of the most curious inquirers concerning the matrimonial 
 state, whenever a great destination has engaged their 
 consideration; 
 
 One position we may assume, that the studies, and 
 even the happiness of the pursuits of men of genius, are 
 
264: LITERARY CHARiCTER. 
 
 powerfully influenced by the domestic associate of their 
 lives. 
 
 They rarely pass through the age of love without its 
 passion. Even their Delias and their Amandas are often 
 the shadows of some real object; for as Shakspeare's ex- 
 pei-ienoe told him, 
 
 Never durst poet touoll a pen to write, 
 Until his ink were temper'd with love's Sighs. 
 
 Their imagination is perpetually colouring those pictures 
 of domestic happiness on which they delight to dwell. 
 He who is no husband sighs for that tenderness which is^ 
 at once bestowed and received; and tears will start in the 
 eyes of him who, in becoming a child among children, yet 
 feels that he is no father ! These deprivations have usu- 
 ally been the concealed cause of the querulous fnelancholy 
 of the literary character. 
 
 Such was the real oecasion of Shenstone's unhappiness. 
 In early life he had been captivated by a young lady 
 adapted to be both the muse and the wife of the poet,, 
 and their mutual sensibility lasted for some yearSi It 
 lasted until she died. It was in parting from her that he, 
 first sketched his " Pastoral Ballad." Shenstone had the 
 fortitude to refuse marriage. His spirit could not endure 
 that she should participate in that life of self-privations 
 to which he was doomed ; but his heart was not locked, 
 up in the ice of celibacy, and his plaintive love song?,, 
 and elegies flowed from no fictitious source. " It is lopg 
 since," said he, " I have considered myself as undone. 
 The world will not perhaps consider me in that light en- 
 tirely till I have married my maid."* 
 
 Thomson met a reciprocal passion in his Amanda, while 
 the full tenderness of his heart was ever wasting itself ' 
 like waters in a desert. As we have been n^ade little ao-„ 
 
 * The raeianchply tale of Shenstone's life is narrated in the third 
 volume ^f '"Curiosities of Literature.'" — Ed. 
 
, CELIBAeT-. 265 
 
 quainted mth this part of tlie history of the poet of the 
 " Seasons," I shall give his own description of those deep 
 feelings from a manuscript letter written to M^Uet, " To 
 turn my eyes a softer way, to you know who-^-afegence 
 sighs it to me. What is my heart made of ? a soft sys- 
 tem of low nerves, too sensible for my quiet — oapahle of 
 being very happy or very unhappy, I am afraid the last 
 will prevail. Lay your hand upon a kindred heart, and 
 despise me not. I know not what it is, huf she dwells 
 upon my thought in a mingled sentiment, which is the 
 sweetest, the most intimately pleasing the soul can re- 
 ceive, and which I would wish never to want towards 
 some dear object or another. To have always some se- 
 cret darling idea to which one Can still have recourse 
 amidst the noise and nonsense of the world, and which 
 never fails to touch us in the most exquisite manner^ is 
 an art of happiness that fortune cannot deprive us o£ 
 This may be called romantic ; but whatever the cause is, 
 the effect is really felt. Pray, when you write, tell me 
 when you saw her, and with the pure eye of a friend, 
 when you see her again, whisper that I am her most 
 humble servant." 
 
 Even Pope was enamoured of a " scornful lady ;" andj 
 as Johnson observed, " polluted hie will with female resent- 
 ment." Johnson himself, we are told by one who knew 
 him, " had always a metaphysical passion for one princess 
 or other, — the rustic Lucy Porter, or the haughty Molly 
 Aston, or the sublimated methodistic Hill Boothby ; and, 
 lastly, the more charming Mrs. Thrale." Ev«n in Ms 
 advanced age, at the height of his celebrity, we hear his 
 cries of lonely wretchedness. " I want every comfort ; 
 my life is very solitary and very cheerless. Let me 
 know that I have yet a friend — let us be kind to one 
 another." But the " kindness " of distant friends is like, 
 tjie polar sun-^oo far removed to warm us. Those who 
 have eluded the individual tienderness of the female, are 
 
266 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 tortured by an aching void in their feelings. The - stoic 
 Akenside, in his "Odes," has preserved the history of a 
 life of genius in a series of his own feelings. One entitled, 
 " At Study," closes with these memorable lines : — 
 
 Me though no peculiar fair 
 Touches wiih a lover's o*ro ; 
 
 Though the pride of my desire 
 Aalis immortal friendship's name, 
 Asks the palm of honest fame 
 
 And the old heroic lyre ; 
 Though the day have smoothly gone, 
 Or to letter'd leisure known, 
 
 Or in social duty spent ; 
 Tet at the eve my lonely breast 
 Seeks in vain- fir perfect rest, 
 ' Languishes for true content. 
 
 If ever a man of letters lived in a state of energy^ and 
 excitement which might raise him above the atmosphere 
 of social love, it was assuredly the enthusiast, Thomas 
 Hollis, who, solely devoted to literature and to republi- 
 canism, was occupied in furnishing Europe and America 
 with editions of his favourite authors. He would not 
 marry, lest marriage should interrupt the labours of his 
 platonic politics. But his extraordinary memoirs, while 
 they show an intrepid mind in a robust frame, bear wit- 
 ness to the self-tormentor who had trodden down the 
 natural bonds of domestic life. Hence the deep "dejec- 
 tion of his spirits ;" those incessant cries, that he has " no 
 one to advise, assist, or cherish those magnanimous pur- 
 suits in him." At length he retreated into the country, 
 in utter hopelessness. "I go not into the country for 
 attentions to agriculture as such; nor attentions of inter- 
 est of any kind, which I have ever despised as such ; but 
 as a used man, to pass the remainder, of a life in tolerable 
 sanity and quiet, after having given up the flower of it, 
 voluntarily, day, week, month, year after year, successive 
 to each other, to public service, and being no longer able 
 
tTNHAPPT UNIONS. 26Y 
 
 to sustain, in hody or mind, the labours that I have 
 chosen to go through ■without falling speedily into the 
 greatest disorders, and it might be imbecility itself. This 
 is not colouring, but the exact plain truth." 
 
 Poor moralist, and what art thou? 
 A solitary fly I 
 
 Thy joys no glittering female meets, 
 No hive hast thou of hbarded sweets. 
 
 Assuredly it would not have been a question whether 
 these literary characters should have married, had not 
 Montaigne, when a widower, declared that "he would 
 not marry a second time, though it were "Wisdom itself;" 
 but the airy Gascon has not disclosed how far Madame 
 was concerned in this anathema. 
 
 If the literary man unite himself to a woman whose 
 taste and whose temper are adverse tO' his pursuits, he 
 must courageously prepare for a martyrdom. Should a 
 female mathematician be united to a poet, it is probable 
 that she would be left amidst her abstractions, to demon- 
 strate to herself how many a specious diagram fails when 
 brought into its mechanical operation ; or discovering 
 the infinite varieties of a curve, she might take occasicAi 
 to deduce her husband's Ve'rsatility. If she become as 
 jealous of his books as other wives might be of his mis- 
 tresses, she may act the virago even over his innocent pa- 
 pers. The wife of Bishop Cooper, while her husband was 
 employed on his Lexicon, one day consigned the volume 
 of many years to the flames, and obliged that scholar to 
 begin a second siege of Troy in a second Lexicon. The 
 wife of Whitelocke often destroyed his MSS., and the 
 marks of her nails have come down to posterity in the 
 numerous lacerations still gaping in his "Memorials." 
 The learned Sir Henry Saville, who devoted more than 
 half his life and nearly ten thousand pounds to his mag- 
 nificent edition of St. Chrysostom, led a very uneasy life 
 
268 LITERARY CHARACTBR. 
 
 between the saint and her ladyship. What mth her 
 tenderness for him, and her own want of amusement, 
 St. Chrysostom, it appears, incurred more than one 
 danger. 
 
 Genius has not preserved itself from the errors and 
 infirmities of matrimonial connexions. The energetic 
 character of Dante could neither soften nor control the 
 asperity of his lady ; and when that great poet lived in . 
 I exile, she never cared to see him more, though he was the^ 
 father of her six children. The internal state of the. house 
 of Domenichino aflBicted that great artis't with many sor- 
 rows. He had married a beauty of high; birth and ex- 
 treme haughtiness, and of the most avaricious disposition. 
 When at Naples he himself dreaded lest the avaricious 
 passion of his wife should not be able to resist the offers 
 she received to poison him, and he was compelled tp pro- 
 vide and dress his own food. It is believed that he died 
 of poison. What a picture has Passpri left of the domes- 
 tic interior of this great artist ! Goslfra m,iUe crepaauo- 
 ri mori uno d^ piii eccellenti artefioi del rmmdo ; che oftre 
 al suo valore pittorico avrebbe pi'A cTogni altri m,aritato. 
 di viver sempre per Vonestd, persqnale. " So perished, 
 amidst a thousand heart-breakings, the most excellent of 
 artists; who besides his worth as a painter, deserved 
 as much as any one to have lived for his excellence as a 
 man." 
 
 Milton carried nothing of the greatness of his mind in 
 the choice of his wives. His first wife was th,e object of, 
 sudden fancy. He left the metropolis and unexpectedly 
 returned a married man, and united to a woman of such 
 uncongenial dispositions, that the romp was frightened 
 at the literary habits of the great poet, found his 
 house solitary, beat his nephews, and ran away after a 
 single month's residence ! To this circumstance we owe 
 his famous treatise on Divorce; and a party (by no 
 means extinct), who having To&Ae as ill ohpices in their 
 
UliTHAPFT FNIONS. 269 
 
 ■wives, were for divorcing as &,st as they had been for 
 marrying, calling themselves Miltonists. 
 
 When we find that Moli^re, so skilful in human life, 
 married a girl from his own troop, who made him ex- 
 perience all those bitter disgusts and ridiculous, embar- 
 rassments which he himself played t)flF at the theatre ; 
 that Addison's fine taste in morals and in life could suffer 
 the ambition of a courtier to prevail with himself to seek 
 a countess, whom he describes under the stormy charac- 
 ter of Oceana, and who drove him contemptuously into 
 solitude, and shortened his days ; and that Steele, warm 
 and thoughtless, -was united to a cold precise "Miss 
 Prue," as he himself calls her, and from whom he never 
 parted without bickerings ; in all these cases we censure 
 the great men, not their wives.* Rousseau has honestly 
 confessed his error. He had united himself to a low, 
 illiterate woman; and when he retreated into solitude, 
 he felt the weight which he carried with him. > He 
 laments that he had not educated his wife: "In a docile 
 age, I could have adorned her mind with talents and 
 knowledge, which w<!)uld have more closely united us in 
 retirement. We should not then have felt the intolerable 
 tedium of a tfete-^-t^te; it is in solitude one feels the 
 advantage of 'living with another who can think." Thus 
 Rousseau confesses the fatal error, and indicates the 
 right principle.* 
 
 " Yet it seems not absolutely necessary for the domestic 
 happiness of the literary character, that his wife should 
 be a literary woman. Tycho Brahe, noble by birth as 
 well as genius, married the daughter of a ipeasant. By 
 which means that great man obtained two points essential 
 for his abstract pursuits ; he acquired an obedient wife, 
 and freed himself of his noble relatives, who would no 
 longer hold an intercourse with the man who was spread- 
 ing their family honours into more ages than perhaps 
 * See " Curiosities of Literature," for an'ecdotea of "Literary "Wives." 
 
270 LITBBAHT CHARAOTEE. 
 
 they could have traced them backwards. The lady of 
 Wieland -was a pleasing domestic person, who, without 
 reading her husband's works, knew he was a great poet. 
 "Wieland was apt to exercise his imagination in declatoft 
 atory invectives and bitter amplifications ; and the. 
 writer of this account, in perfect German taste, assures 
 us, " that many of his felicities of diction were thus 
 struck out at a heat." During this frequent operation 
 of his genius, the placable temper of Mrs. Wieland over-i 
 came the orgasm of the German bard merely by persist- 
 ing in her admiration and her patience. When the burst 
 was over, Wieland himself was so charmed by her docilr 
 ity, that he usually closed with giving up all his' 
 opinions. 
 
 There is another sort of homely happiness, aptly 
 described in the plain words of Bishop Newton. He 
 found " the study of sacred and classic authors ill agreed 
 with butchers' and bakers' bills;" and when the pros- 
 pect of a bishopric opened on him, " more servants, more 
 entertainments, a better table," &c., it became neces- 
 sary to look out for " some clever, sensible woman to be 
 his wife, who would lay out his money to the best advan- 
 tage, and be careful and tender of his health ; a friend 
 and companion at all hours, and who would be happier 
 in staying at home than be perpetually gadding abroad."- 
 Such are the wives not adapted to be the votaries, but 
 who may be the faithful companions through life, even 
 of a man of genius. 
 
 But in the character of the higher female we may dis- 
 cover a constitutional faculty of dt)cility and enthusiasm 
 which has varied with the genius of different ages. It is 
 the opinion of an elegant metaphysician, that the mind of 
 the female adopts and familiarises itself with ideas more 
 easily than that of man, and hence the facility with which 
 the sex contract or lose habits, and accommodate their 
 minds to new situations. Politics, war, and learning, are 
 
UNHAPPY UNIONS. 271 
 
 equally objects of attainment to their delightful suscepti- 
 Mlity. Love has the fancied transparency of the came- 
 leon. When the art of government directed the feel- 
 ings of a womauj we behold Aspasia, eloquent with the 
 genius of Pericles, instructing the Archons ; Portia, the 
 wife of the republican Brutus, devouring burning coals ; 
 and the wife of Lucan, transcribing and correcting the 
 Pharsalia, before the bust of the poet, which she had 
 placed on her bed, that his very figure might never be 
 absent. When the universities were opened to the sex, 
 they acquired academic glory. The wives of military 
 men have shared in the perils of the field ; or like Anna 
 Comnena and our Mrs. Hutchinson, have become even 
 their historians. In the age of love and sympathy, the 
 female often receives an indelible pliancy from her liter- 
 ary associate. His pursuits become the objects of her 
 thoughts, and he observes his own taste reflected in his 
 family ; much less through his own influence, for his 
 solitary labours often preclude him from forming them, 
 than by that image of his own genius — the mother of his 
 children ! The subjects, the very books which enter into 
 his literary occupation, are cherished by her imagina- 
 tion ; a feeling finely opened by the lady of the author 
 of '* Sandford and Merton :" " My ideas of my husband," 
 she said, " are so much associated with his books, that to 
 part with them would be as it were breaking some of the 
 last ties which still connect me with so beloved an 
 object. The being in the midst of books he .has been 
 accustomed to read, and which contain his marks and 
 notes, will still give him a sort of existence with me. 
 Unintelligible as such fond chimeras may appear to 
 many people, I am persuaded they are not so to you." 
 
 With what simplicity Meta MoUers, the wife of Klop- 
 stock, in her German-English, describes to Richardson, 
 the novelist, the manner in which she passes her day 
 with her poet ! she tells him that " she is always present 
 
272 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 at the birth of the young verses, which hegin by frag- 
 ments', here and there, of a subject -with which his. soul is 
 just then filled. Persons who live as we do have no 
 need of two chambers ; we are always in the same : I 
 with my little work, still! still! only regarding some- 
 times my husband's face, which is so venerable at that 
 time with tears of devotion, and all the sublimity of the 
 subject — my husband reading me his young verses, and 
 suffering my criticisms.'-' 
 
 The picture of a literary wife of antiquity has de- 
 scended to us, touched by the domestic pencil of geniuBi, 
 in the susceptible Calphurnia, the lady of the younger 
 Pliny. " Her affection for me," he says, "has given her 
 a turn to books : her passion will increase with our days, 
 for it is not my youth or my person, which time grad- 
 ually impairs, but my reputation and my glory, of which 
 she isenamoured." 
 
 I hav^ been told that Buffon, notwithstanding his 
 favourite seclusion of his old tower in his garden, ac- 
 knowledged to a friend that his lady had a considerable 
 influence over his compositions : "Often," said he, " when 
 I cannot please myself, and am impatient at the dis- 
 appointment, Madame de Buffon reanimates my exertion, 
 or withdraws me to repose for a short interval ; I return 
 to my pen refreshed, and aided by her advice." . 
 
 Gesner declared that whatever were his talents, the 
 person who had most contributed to develope them was 
 his wife. She is unknown to the public; but the.histocy 
 of the mind of such a woman is discovered in the 
 " Letters of Gesner and his Family." - While Gesner 
 gave himself up entirely to his ifavourite arts, draiwiag, 
 painting, etching, and poetry, his Tvife would often reani- 
 mate a genius that was apt to despond in; itS' attempts, 
 and often exciting him to new productions, her sure and 
 delicate taste was attentively consulted by the poet- 
 painter — but she combined the most practical good sense 
 
GESNEE'S "WIFE. 273 
 
 with the most feeling imagination. This forms the rare- 
 ness of the character ; for this same woman, who united 
 with her husband in the education of their children, to 
 relieve him from the interruptions of common business, 
 carried on alone the concerns of his house in lalihrairie.* 
 Her correspondence with her son, a young artist travel- 
 ling for his studies, opens what an old poet compre- 
 hensively terms " a gathered mind." Imagine a woman 
 attending to the domestic economy, and to the commercial 
 details, yet withdrawing out of this business of life into 
 the more elevated pursuits of her husband, and at the 
 same time combining with all this the cares and counsels 
 which she bestowed on her son to form the artist and 
 the man. 
 
 To know this incomparable woman we must hear her. 
 " Consider your father's precepts as oracles of wisdoni ; 
 they are the result of the experience he has collected, 
 not only of life, but of that art which he has acquired 
 simply by his own industry." She would not have her 
 son suffer his strong affection to herself to absorb all 
 other sentiments. "Had you remained at home, and 
 been habituated under your mother's auspices to employ- 
 ments merely domestic, what advantage would you have 
 acquired ? I own we should have passed some delightful 
 winter evenings together; but your love for the arts, 
 and my ambition to see my sons as much distinguished 
 for their talents as their virtues^ would have been a con- 
 stant source of regret at your passing your time in a 
 manner so little worthy of you." 
 
 How profound is her observation on the strong but 
 confined attachments of a youth of genius ! " I have 
 
 * Geaner'a father was a bookseller of Zurich ; descended from a family 
 of men learned in the exact sciences, he was apprenticed to a book- 
 seller at Berlin, and afterwards entered into his father's business. The 
 best edition of his " Idylls " is that 'published by himself, in two vol- 
 umes, 4to, illustrated by his own engravings. — Ed. 
 13 
 
274 LITERARY OHARAOTER 
 
 frequently remarked, with some regret, the excessive at- 
 tachment you indulge towards those who see and feel as 
 you do yourself, and the total neglect with which you 
 seem to treat every one else. I should reproach a man 
 with such a fault who was destined to pass his life in a 
 small and unvarying circle ; hut in an artist, who has a 
 great object in view, and whose country is the whole 
 world, this disposition seems to he likely to produce a 
 great number of inconveniences. Alas ! my son, the, life 
 you have hitherto led in your father's house has been in 
 fact a pastoral life, and not such a one as was necessary 
 for the education of a man whose destiny summons him 
 to the world." 
 
 And when her son, after meditating on some of the 
 most glorious productions of art, felt himself, as he says, 
 " disheartened and cast down at the unattainable superi- 
 ority of the artist, and that it was only by reflecting on 
 the immense labour and continued efforts which such 
 masterpieces must have required, that I regained my 
 courage and my ardour," she observes, "This passage, 
 my dear son, is to me as precious as gold, and I sencl , it 
 to you again, because I wish you to impress it strongly 
 on your mind. The remembrance of this may* also be a 
 useful preservative from too great confidences in your 
 abilities, to which a<warm imagination may sometimes be 
 liable, or from the despondence you might occasionally 
 ' feel from the contemplation of grand originals. Continue, 
 therefore, my dear son, to form a sound judgment and a 
 pure taste from your own observations ; your inind, 
 while yet young and flexible, may receive whatever im- ' 
 pressions 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, 
 
GESIfBE'S WIFE. 275 
 
 touch the heart of genius. This extraordinary woman, 
 whose characteristic is that of strong sense combined 
 with delicacy of feeling, would check her German sen- 
 timentality at the moment she was betraying those emo- 
 tions in which the imagination is so powerfully mixed 
 up with the associated feelings. Arriving at their cot- 
 tage at Sihlwald, she proceeds — "On entering the par- 
 lour 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 
 ' foi-ms ; 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 ad- 
 dicted 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 ap- 
 prehensive 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 yoii are now in a place 
 where your abilities will have opportunities of unfolding, 
 and where you can become great in your art." 
 
 Suclf 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 behold- 
 ing her sons eminent, is she not the real being which the 
 ancients personified in their Muse ? 
 
276 LITEEART CHARACTBE. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 literary ffiendahipa.-^In early life. — Dififerent from those of men of the 
 world. — They suffer an unrestrained communication of their ide^s, 
 and bear reprimands and exhortations. — Unity of feelings. — ^A sym- 
 pathy not of manners but Of feelings.-^Admit of dissimilar charac- 
 ters. — 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 incompatibly 
 with the pursuits of the student ; but to feel friendship 
 like a passion is necessary to the mind of genius alter- 
 nately elated and depressed, ever prodigal of feeling and 
 excursive in knowledge. 
 
 The qualities which constitute litetary friendship, com- 
 pared with those of men of the world, must render it a 
 sentiment as rare as love itself, which it resembles ii^ 
 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 studieSj 
 ehould even one excel the other, he will find in him the 
 protector of his fartie ; as Addison did in Steele, West iii 
 Crray, and Gray in Mason. ThuB Petrarch was the guide 
 of Boccaccio, thus Boccaccio became the defender of hi^ 
 master's genius. Perhaps friendship is never more in- 
 tense than in an intercourse of minds of ready counsels 
 and inspiring ardours. , United ia the same pursuits, but 
 directed by an unequal experience, the imperceptible 
 superiority interests, ;Without mortifying. It is a coun- 
 sel, 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 
 
LITERARY FEIBITDSHIPS. 211 
 
 genius offers itself in the history of Mignard, the groat 
 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 be- 
 came 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 Rome. One roof 
 bheltered 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 friend- 
 ship was not a simple sentiment which limited the views. 
 of " the Inseparables," for with them it was q. 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 unsuccessfiil 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 thie 
 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 -lEneid, or the Jeru- 
 salem 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. Mig- 
 nard supplied Du Fresnoy with all that fortune had 
 
278 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 refused him ; and when he -was no more, perpetuated his 
 fame, which he felt was a portion of his own celebrity, 
 by puhlishing his posthumous poem, De Arte GrapMoa;* 
 a poem, which Mason has made readable by his versifies^ 
 tion, 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 twd 
 young literary friends engaged in their midnight studies : 
 
 Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights I 
 How oft unwearied have we spent the nights, 
 Till the Ledffian 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 and affection, even Malone comnieniorates, with 
 unusual warmth, the literary friendships of Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds; and with a felicity of fancy, not often ia- 
 dulged, has raised an unforced parallel between the 
 bland wisdom of Sir Joshua and the "mitis sapientia 
 LselL" " What the illustrious Scipio was to Leelius was 
 the all-knowing and all-accomplished Burke to Rey- 
 nolds ;" and what the elegant Lselius was to his master 
 Pansetius, whom he gratefully protected, and to his com- 
 panion the poet Lucilius, whom he patronised, was Rey- 
 nolds to Johnson, of whom he was the scholar and frj^end, 
 and to Goldsmith, whom he loved and aided.f 
 
 * La Tie de Pierre Mignard, par L'Ahbd de Monville, the worlt of 
 an amateur. 
 
 •j- Reynolds's hospitality was unbounded to all literary men, and his 
 evenings were devoted to their society. It was at his hpiis^ they com- 
 pared notes; and .the President of the Eoyal Academy obtained that 
 information which gave him a full knowledge of the outward world, 
 which his ceaseless occupation could not else have allowed. — Eu. 
 
LITBBAUT FRIENDSHIPS. 279 
 
 Count Azara mourns with equal tenderness and force 
 over the memory of the artist and the writer Mengs. 
 " The most tender friendship would call forth teaj-s 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 circumstaojce communi- 
 cated to me by one who had visited Gleim, the German 
 poet, who seems to have been a creature made up alto- 
 gether 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 lit- 
 erary 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 affec- 
 tions and the intellectual feelings. Fontenelle describes 
 with characteristic delicacy the conversations of such lit- 
 erary friends : " Our days passed like moments ; thanks 
 to those pleasures, which, however, are not included in 
 those which are commonly called pleasures." The friend- 
 ships of the men of society move on the principle of, per- 
 sonal interest, but interest can easily separate the inter- 
 ested ; or they are cherished to relieve themselves from 
 the listlessness of existence ; but, as weariness is conta- 
 
280 LITEEART CHARACTER. 
 
 gious, the contact of the propagator is watched. Men of 
 the world may look on each other with the same counte- 
 nances, hut 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 an- 
 other, the less is their mutual esteem : the feeble mind 
 quarrels with one still more imbecile than itself; the dis- 
 solute riot with the dissolute, and they despise their 
 companions, while they too have themselves become des- 
 picable. 
 
 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 star- 
 tles ordinary observers. We see literary men, the most 
 opposite in dispositions and opinions, deriving from each 
 other that fulness of knowledge which unfolds the cer- 
 tain, 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 adver- 
 sary, 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 repri- 
 mands nor exhortation, has Joften occurred in the in- 
 tercourse 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 I 
 
 Politics once divided Boccaccio and Petrarch. Thff 
 poet of Valchiusa had never forgiven the Florentines for 
 
PETRARCH XSV BOCCACCIO 281 
 
 their persecution of his father. By the mediation of Boc- 
 caccio they noTV offered to reinstate Petrarch in his patri- 
 mony and his honours. Won over by the tender solici- 
 tude of his fi-iend, Petrarch had consented to return to 
 his country; but with his usual inconstancy of temper, 
 he had again excused himself to the senate of Florence, 
 and again retreated to his solitude. Nor was this all ; 
 for the Visconti of Milan had by their flattery and prom- 
 ises seduced Petrarch to their court ; a court, the avowed 
 enemy of Florence. Boccaccio, for the honour of litera- 
 ture, of his friend, of his country, indignantly heard of 
 Petrarch's fatal decision, and addressed him by a letter — 
 the most interesting perhaps which ever passed between 
 two literary friends, who were torn asunder by the mo- 
 mentary passions of the vulgar, but who were still united 
 by that immortal friendship which literature inspires, and 
 by a reverence for that posterity which they knew would 
 concern itself with their affairs. 
 
 It was on a journey to Ravenna that Boccaccio first 
 heard the news of Petrarch's abandonment of his coun- 
 try, when he thus vehemently addressed his brother- 
 genius : — 
 
 " I would be silent, but I cannot : my reverence com- 
 mands silence, but my indignation speaks. How has it 
 happened that Silvanus (under this name he conceals Pe- 
 trarch) has forgotten his dignity, the many conversations 
 we had together on the state of Italy, his hatred, of the 
 archbishop (Visconti), his love of solitude and freedom, 
 so necessary for study, and has resolved to imprison the 
 Muses at that court? Whom may we trust again, if Sil- 
 vanus, who once branded It Visconti as the Cruel, a 
 Polyphemus, a Cyclop, has avowed himself his friend, 
 and placed his neck under the yoke of him whose audaci- ■ 
 ty, and pride, and tyranny, he so deeply abhorred ? How 
 has Visconti obtained that which King Robert, which 
 the pontiff, the emperor, the King of France, could not? 
 
282 LITERABT CHAEACTER. 
 
 Am I to conclude that you accepted this favour from a 
 disdain of your fellow-citizens, who once indeed scorned 
 you, hut who have reinstated you in the paternal patri- 
 mony of which you have been deprived ? I do not disr 
 approve of a just indignation ; but I take Heaven to wit- 
 ness that I believe that no man, whoever he may be, rightly 
 and honestly can labour against his country, whatever be 
 the injury he has received. You will gain nothing by 
 opposing me in this opinion ; for if stirred up by the 
 most just indignation you become the friend of the enemy 
 of your country, unquestionably you will not spur him on 
 to war, nor assist hjm by your arm, nor by your counsel ; 
 yet how can you avoid rejoicing with him, when you 
 hear of the ruins, the conflagrations, the imprison- 
 ments, death, and rapine, which he shall spread among 
 us?" 
 
 Such was the bold appeal to elevated feelings, and such 
 the keen reproach inspired by that confidential freedom 
 which can only exist in the intercourse of great minds. 
 The literary friendship, or rather adoration of Boccaccio 
 for Petrarch, was not bartered at the cost of his patriot- 
 ism : and it is worthy of our notice that Petrarch, whose 
 personal injuries from an ungenerous republic were rank- 
 ling in bis mind, and whom even the eloquence of Boc- 
 caccio could not disunite from his protector Visconti, yet 
 received the ardent reproaches of his friend without an- 
 ger, tl\pugh not without maintaining the freedom of his 
 own opinions. Petrarch replied,' that the anxiety of Boc- 
 caccio for the liberty of his friend was a thought most 
 grateful to him ; but he assured Boccaccio that he preserv- 
 ed his freedom, even although it appeared that he bowed 
 under a hard yoke. He hoped that he had not to learn 
 to serve in his old age, he who had hitherto studied to 
 preserve his independence ; but, in respect to servitude, 
 he did not know whom it was most displeasing to serve, 
 
LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. £83 
 
 a tyrant like Visconti, or with Boccaccio, a people of 
 tyrants.* 
 
 The unity of feeling is displayed in such memorahle 
 associates as Beaumont and Fletcher ; -whose labours are 
 so combined, that no critic can detect the mingled pro- 
 duction of either ; and whose lives are so closely united, 
 that no biographer can compose the memoirs of the one 
 without running into the history of the other. Their 
 days were interwoven as their verses. Montaigne and 
 Gharron, in the eyes of posterity, are rivals ; but such lit- 
 erary friendship knows no rivalry. Such was Montaigne's 
 affection for Charron, that he requested him by his 
 will to bear the arms of the Montaignes ; and Charron 
 evinced his gratitude to the manes of his departed friend, 
 by leaving his fortune to the sister of Montaigne. 
 
 How pathetically Erasmus mourns over the death of 
 his beloved Sir Thomas More ! — " In Mora rmhi videor 
 extinctus" — " I seem to see myself extinct in More." It 
 was a melancholy presage of his own death, which shortly 
 after followed. The Doric sweetness and simplicity of 
 old Isaac Walton, the angler, were reflected in a mind as 
 clear and geAerous, when Charles Cotton continued the 
 feelings, rather than the little work of Walton. Metas- 
 tasio and Farinelli called each other il QemeUo, the Twin : 
 and both delighted to trace the resemblance of their 
 lives and fates, aid the perpetual alliance of the verse 
 and the voice. The famous John Baptista Porta had a 
 love of the mysterious parts of sciences, such as physiog- 
 nomy, natural magic, the cryptical arts of writing, and 
 projected many curious inventions which astonished his 
 age, and which we have carried to perfection. This ex- 
 traordinary man saw his fame somewhat diminishing by 
 a rumour that his brother John Vincent had a great 
 share in the composition of his works ; but this never 
 
 ♦These interesting letters are .preserved in Count Baldelli's "Life 
 of Boccaccio," p. 115. 
 
284: LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 disturbed Hm ; and Peiresc, in an interesting account oj^ 
 a visit to this celebrated Neapolitan, observed, that 
 though now now aged and grey-haived, he treated his 
 younger brother as a son. These single-hearted brothers, 
 who would not marry that they might never 6e separated^ 
 knew of but one fame, and that was the fame of Porta. , 
 Goguet, the author of " The Origin of the Arts and 
 Sciences," bequeathed his MSS. and his books to his friend 
 Fugere, with whom he had long united his affections and , 
 his studies, that his surviving friend might proceed with, 
 them : but the author had died of a slow and painful dis- 
 order, which Fugere had watched by his side, in silenlj- 
 despair. The eight of those MSS. and books was the 
 friend's death-stroke ; half his soul, which had once given 
 them animation, was parted from him, and a few weeks 
 terminated his own days. When Lloyd heard of the 
 death of Churchill, he neither wished to survive him, nor 
 did.* The Abbe de St. Pierre gave an interesting proof 
 of literary friendship for Varignon, the geometrician, 
 They were of congenial dispositions, and St. Pierre, wheij, 
 he went to Paris, could not endure to part with Varignon, : 
 who was too poor to accompany him ; and St. Pierre was 
 not rich. A certain income, however moderate, waq 
 necessary for the tranquil pursuits of geometry. St, 
 Pierre presented Varignon with a portion of his small 
 income, accompanied by that delicacy of feeling which 
 men of genius who know each other can best conceive : 
 "I do uot give it you," said St. Pierre, "as a salary 
 
 * This event is thus told by Southey : " The news of Churchill's death 
 was somewhat abruptly announced to Lloyd as he sat at dinner j he 
 was seized with a sudden sickness, and saying, ' I shall follow poor 
 Charles,' took to his bed, from which he ueyer rose again ; dying, if. 
 ever man died, of a broken heart. The tragedy did not end here ;, 
 Churchill's favourite sister, who is said to have possessed much of 
 her brother's sense, and spirit, aiid genius, and to have "been betrothed 
 to Lloyd, attended him during hia illness, and sinking under the double 
 loss, sooa followed her brother, and her lover to the grave." — Ed. 
 
LITERAET FRIENDSHIPS. ggj 
 
 but as an annuity, that you may be independent and quit 
 me when you dislike me." The same circumstance occur- 
 red between Akenside and Dyson. Dyson, when the 
 poet was in great danger of adding one more illustrious 
 name to the " Calamities of Authors," interposed between 
 him and ill-fortune, by allowing him an annuity of three 
 hundred a-year ; and, when he found the fame of his lit- 
 erary friend attacked, although not in the habit of com- 
 position, he published a defence of his poetical and phi- 
 losophical character. The name and character of Dyson 
 have been suffered to die away, without a single tribute 
 of even biographical sympathy ; as that of Longueville, 
 the modest patron of Butler, in whom that great political 
 satirist found what the careless ingratitude of a court 
 had denied : but in the record of literary glory, the pa- 
 tron's name should be inscribed by the side of the literary 
 chai'acter : for the public incurs an obligation whenever 
 a man of genius is protected. 
 
 The statesman Fouquet, deserted by all others, wit- 
 nessed La Fontaine hastening every literary man to his 
 prison-gate. Many have inscribed their works to their 
 disgraced patrons, as Pope did so nobly to the Earl of 
 Oxford in the Tower : 
 
 ^ When interest calls off all her snfeaking train, 
 
 And all the obliged desert, and all the vain, 
 They wait, or to the seaflbld, or the cell, 
 When the last lingering friend has bid farewell. 
 
 titerary friendship is a sympathy Hot of manners, but 
 of feelings. The personal character may happen to be 
 very opposite : the vivacious may be loved by the melan- 
 cholic, and the wit by the man of learning. He who is 
 vehement and vigorous will feel himself a double man 
 by the side of the friend who is calm and subtle. When 
 we observe such friendships, we are apt to imagine that 
 they are not real because the characters are dissimilar; 
 but it is their common tastes and pursuits which form a 
 
286 LITEEiET CHAEACTEE. 
 
 bond of union. Pomponius Lsetus, so called from his natu- 
 ral good-humour, was the personal friend of Ilermolaus 
 Barbaras, whose saturnine and melancholy disposition he 
 often exhilarated ; the warm, impetuous Luther was the 
 beloved friend of the mild and amiable Melanothon ; the 
 caustic Boileau was the companion of Racine and Mo- 
 li6re ; and France, perhaps, owes the chefs-d'oeuvre of her 
 tragic and her comic poet to her satirist. The delicate 
 taste and the refining ingenuity of Hurd only attached 
 him the more to the impetuous and dogmatic Warbur- 
 ton.* N"o men could be more opposite in personal char- 
 acter than the careless, gay, and hasty Steele, and the 
 cautious, serious, and the elegant Addison ; yet no liter- 
 ary friendship was more fortunate than their union. 
 
 One glory is reserved for literary friendship. The 
 friendship of a great name indicates the greatness of the 
 character who appeals to it. When Sydenham mentioned, 
 as a proof of the excellence of his method of treating 
 acute diseases, that it had received the approbation of 
 his illustrious friend Locke, the philosopher's opinion 
 contributed to the physician's success. 
 
 Such have been the friendships of great literary char- 
 acters; but too true it is, that they have not always con- 
 tributed thus largely to their mutual happiness. The 
 querulous lament of Gleim to Klopstock is too generally 
 participated. As Gleim lay on his death-bed he addressed 
 the great bard of Germany — "I am dying, dear Klop- 
 stock; and, as a dying man will I say, in this world we 
 have not lived long enough together and for each other ; 
 but in vain would we now recal the past !" What ten- 
 derness in the reproach ! What self-accusation in its 
 modesty ! 
 
 * For a full account of their literary career see the first artieJo in 
 " Quarrels of Authors." 
 
PBESOIfrAL CHARACTER. 287 
 
 CHAPTER XX, 
 
 TEe literary and the personal character. — The personal dispositions of 
 an author may be the reverse of those which appear in his 
 writings. — Erroneous conceptions of the character of distant 
 authors. — Paradoxical eppearances in the history of Genius. — Why 
 the character of the man may be opposite to that of his writings. 
 
 ARE the personal dispositions of an author discover- 
 able in his writings, as those of an artist are 
 imagined to appear in his -works, where Michael Angelo 
 is always great, and Raphael ever graceful ? 
 
 Is .the moralist a moral man? Is he malignant who 
 publishes caustic satires ? Is he a libertine who composes 
 loose poems ? And is he, whose imagination delights in 
 terror and in blood, the very monster he paints ? 
 
 Many licentious writers have led chaste lives. La 
 Mothe le Vayer wrote two works of a free nature ; yet 
 his was the unblemished life of a retired sage. Bayle is 
 the too faithful compiler of impurities, but he resisted the 
 voluptuousness of the senses as much as Newton. La 
 Fontaine wrote tales fertile in intrigue; yet the " bon- 
 hbmme" has not left on record a single ingenious amour 
 of his own. The Queen of Navarre's Tales are gross im- 
 itations of Boccaccio's ; but she herself was a princess of 
 irreproachable habits, and had given proof of the most 
 rigid virtue ; but stories of intrigues, told in a natural 
 style, formed the fashionable literature of the day, and 
 the genius of the female writer was amused in becoming 
 an historian without being an actor. Portiguerra, the 
 author of the Ricciardetto, abounds with loose and licen- 
 tious descriptions, and yet neither his manners nor his 
 personal character were stained by the oflfending freedom 
 of- his inventions. Smollett's character is immaculate; 
 yet he has described two scenes which offend even in the 
 
288 IITERAET CHARAOTEn. 
 
 license of imagination. Cowley, who boasts with such 
 gaiety of the versatility of his passion among so many mis- 
 tresses, wanted even the confidence to address one. Thug, 
 licentious writers may be very chaste persons. The imag- 
 ination may be a volcano while the heart is an Alp of ice. 
 Turn to the moralist — ^there we find Seneca, a usurer 
 of seven millions, writing on moderate desires on a table 
 of gold. Sallust, who so eloquently declaims against the 
 licentiousness of the age, was repeatedly accused in the 
 senate of public and habitual debaucheries ; and when 
 this inveigher against the spoilera of provinces attained 
 to a remote government, he pillaged like Verres. That 
 " Demosthenes was more capable of recommending than 
 of imitating the virtues of our ancestors," is the observa- 
 tion of Plutarch. Luciari, when young, declaimed against 
 the friendship of the great, as another name for servitude ; 
 but when his talents procured him a situation under 
 the emperor, he facetiously compared himself to those 
 quacks who, themselves plagued by a perpetual cough, 
 ofier to sell an infallible remedy for one. Sir Thomas 
 More, in his " Utopia," declares that no man ought to be 
 punished for his religion ; yet he became a fierce perse-; 
 cutor, flogging and racking men for his own " true faith." 
 At the moment the poet Rousseau was giving versions of 
 the Psalms, full of unction, as our Catholic neighbours 
 express it, he was profaning the same pen with infamous 
 epigrams ; and an erotic poet of our times has composed 
 night-hymns in churchyards with the same ardour with 
 which he poured forth Anacreontics. Napoleon said of 
 Bernardin St. Pierre, whose writings breathe the warm 
 principles of humanity and social happiness in every 
 page, that he was one of the worst private characters in 
 France. I have heard this from other quarters ; it startles 
 one ! The pathetic genius of Sterne played about his 
 headj but never reached his heart.* Cardinal Richelieu 
 
 * See what is said on this subject in the article on Sterne in tho 
 " Literary Miscellanies," of the present volume. 
 
PERSOSTAL DISPOSITION. 289 
 
 wrote "The Perfection of a Christian, or the Life of a 
 Christian ;" yet was he an utter stranger to Gospel max- 
 ims ; and Frederick the Great, when young, published his 
 " Anti-Machiavel," and deceived the world by the promise 
 of a pacific reign. This military genius protested against 
 those political arts which he afterwards adroitly practised, 
 uniting the lion's head with the fox's tail — and thus him- 
 self realising the political monster of Machiavel ! 
 
 And thus also is it with the personal dispositions of an 
 author, which may be quite the reverse from those which 
 appear in his writings. Johnson would not believe tbat 
 Horace was a happy man because his verses were cheer- 
 ful, any more than he could think Pope so, because the 
 poet is continually informing us of it. It surprised 
 Spence when Pdpe told him that Howe, the tragic poet, 
 whom he had considered so solemn a personage, " would 
 laugh all day long, and do nothing else but laugh." 
 Lord Kaimes says, that Arbuthnot must have been a 
 great genius, for he exceeded Swift and Addison in 
 humorous painting; although we are informed be bad 
 nothing of that peculiarity in his character. Youngs 
 who is constantly contemning preferment in his writings, 
 was all his life pining after it ; and the conversation of 
 the sombrous author of the " Night Thoughts " was of 
 the most volatile kind, abounding with trivial puns. He 
 was one of the first who subscribed to the assembly at 
 Wellwyn. Mrs. Carter, 'W^ho greatly admired his sublime 
 poetry, expressing her surprise at his social converse, he 
 replied, " Madam, there is much difierence between writ- 
 ing and talking."" 
 
 Molidre, on the contrary, whose humour is so perfectly 
 comic, and even ludicrous, was thoughtful and serious, 
 and even melancholy. His strongly-featured physiog- 
 nomy exhibits the fece of a great tragic, rather than of a 
 great comic, poet. Boileau oalled Moli&re " The Contem- 
 plative Man." Those who make the world laugh often 
 19 
 
290 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 themselves laugh the least. A famous and -witty harle- 
 quin of France was overcome with hypochondriasm, aad 
 consulted a physician, who, after inquiring about his Inal- 
 ady, told his miserable patient, that he knew of no other 
 medicine for him than to take frequent doses of Carlin.— 
 " I am Carlin himself," exclaimed the melancholy man, in 
 despair. Burton, the pleasant and vivacious author jjf 
 " The Anatomy of Melancholy," of whom it is noticed, 
 that he could in an interval of vapours raise laughter in 
 any company, in his chamber was " mute and mopish^" 
 and at last was so overcome by that intellectual disorder, 
 which he appeared to have got rid of by writing his 
 volume, that it is believed he closed his life in a fit of 
 melancholy.* 
 
 Could one have imagined that the brilliant wit, the luxu- 
 riant raillery, and the fine and deep sense of Pascal, 
 could have combined with the most opposite qualijties-r- 
 the hypochondriasm and bigotry of an ascetic ? Roche- 
 foucauld, in private life, was a conspicuous example of 
 all those moral qualities of which he seemed to deny the 
 existence, and exhibited in this respect a striking con- 
 trast to the Cardinal de Retz, who has presumed to cen- 
 sure him for his want of faith in the reality of virtue ; 
 but De Retz himself was the unbeliever in disinterested 
 virtue. This great genius was one of those pretended 
 patriots destitute of a single one of the virtues for which 
 he was the clamorous advocate of faction. 
 
 When Valincour attributed the excessive tenderness in 
 the tragedies of Racine to the poet's own impassioi;ied 
 character, the son amply showed that his father was )3y 
 no means the slave of love. Racine never wrote a single 
 love-poem, nor even had a mistress ; and his wife had 
 never read his tragedies, for poetry was not her delight. 
 
 * It is reported of him that his only mode of alleviating hia melan- 
 choly was by walking from his college at O.tford to the bridge, to listen 
 to the rough jokes of the bargemen. 
 
PERSONAL DISPOSITIOIS-. 291 
 
 Racine's motive for making love the constant source of 
 action in his tragedies, was from the principle which has 
 influenced so many poets, who usually conform to the 
 prevalent taste of the times. In the court of a young 
 monarch it was necessary that heroetf should be lovers ; 
 Oomeille had nohly run in one career, and Racine could 
 not have existed as a great poet had he not rivalled him 
 in an opposite one. The tender Racine was no lover; 
 hut he was a subtle and epigrammatic observer, before 
 whom his convivial fi-iends never cared to open their 
 minds ; and the caustic Boileau truly said of him, " Racine 
 is far more malicious than I am." 
 
 Alfieri speaks of his mistress as if he lived with her in 
 the most unreserved familiarity; the reverse was the 
 case. And the gratitude and affection with which he 
 describes his mother, and which she deserved, entered 
 BO little into his habitual feelings, tha.t, after their early 
 separation, he never saw her but once, though he often 
 passed through the, country where she resided. 
 
 Johnson has composed a beautiful Rambler, describing 
 the pleasures which result from the influence of good- 
 humour ; and somewhat remarkably says, " Without 
 good-humour, learning and bravery can be only formida- 
 ble, and confer that superiority which swells the heart of 
 the lion in the desert, where he roars without reply, and 
 ravages without resistance." He who could so finely 
 discover the happy influence of this pleasing quality was 
 himself a stranger to it, and " the roar and the ravage " 
 were familiar to our lioil. Men of genius frequently sub- 
 stitute their beautiful imagination for spontaneous and 
 natural sentiment. It is not therefore' surprising if we 
 are often erroneous in the conception we form of the per- 
 sonal character of a distant author. Klopstock, the 
 votary of the muse of Zion^ so astonished and warmed 
 the sage Bodmer, that he invited the inspired bard to his 
 house: but his visitor shocked the grave professor, when, 
 
292 LITERABT CHAEACTES. 
 
 instead, of a poet rapt in silent meditation, a volatile 
 youth leaped out of the chaise, who was an enthusiast for 
 retirement only when writing verses. An artist, whose 
 pictures exhibit a series of scenes of domestic tenderness, 
 awakening all the charities of private life, I have heard, 
 participated in them in no other way than on his canvas. 
 Evelyn, who has written in favour of active life, " loved 
 and lived in retirement ;" * while Sir George Mackenzie, 
 who had heen continually in the hustle of business, framed 
 a eulogium on solitude. We see in Machiavel's code of 
 tyranny, of depravity, and of criminal violence, a horrid 
 picture of human nature; hut this retired philosopher 
 was a friend to the freedom of his country ; he partici- 
 pated in none of the crimes he had recorded, hut drew 
 up these systemized crimes " as an observer, not as a 
 criminal." Drummond, whose sonnets still retain the 
 beauty and the sweetness and the delicacy of the most 
 amiable imagination, was a man of a harsh irritable tem- 
 per, and has been thus characterised : — 
 
 Testie Drummoud could not speak for fretting. 
 
 Thus authors and artists may yield no certain indica- 
 tion of their personal characters in their works. Incon- 
 stant men will write on constancy, and licentious minds 
 may elevate themselves into poetry and piety. We 
 'should be unjust to some of the greatest geniuses if the 
 
 * Since this was written the coitespofadefiCe of Evelyn has appeared, 
 by which we find that he apologised to Cowley for having published 
 this veiy treatise, which seemed to condemn that life of study ahd 
 privacy to which they were both equally attached ; and confesses that 
 the whole must be considered as a mere sportive effusion, requesting 
 that Cowley would not suppbse its principles formed his private opin- 
 ions. Thus Leibnitz, we are told, laughed at the fanciful system 
 revealed in his Theodicee, and acknowledged that he never wrote it in 
 earnest; that a philosopher is not always obliged to write seriously, 
 and that to invent an hypothesis is only a j)roof of the force of im- 
 agination. 
 
MONTAIGNE. 293 
 
 extraordinary sentiments -wHch they put into the mouths 
 of their dramatic personages are maliciously to he applied 
 to themselves. Euripides was accused of atheism when 
 he introduced a denier of the gods on the stage. Milton 
 has been censured by Cla,rke for the impiety of Satan ; 
 and an enemy of Shakspeare might have reproached him 
 for his perfect delineation of the acconjplished villain 
 lago, as it was said that Dr. Moore "vyas hurt in the opin- 
 ions of some by his odious Zeluco. Crebillon complains 
 of this: — "They charge me with all the iniquities of 
 Atreus, and they consider me in some places as a wretch 
 with whom it is unfit to associate ; as if all which the 
 mind invents must be derived from the heart." This 
 poet offers a striking instance of the little alliance exist- 
 ing between the literary and personal dispositions of an 
 author. Crebillon, who exulted, on his entrance into the 
 French Academy, that he bad never tinged his pen with 
 the gall of satire^ delighted to strike on the most harrow- 
 ing string of the tragic lyre. In his Atreus the father 
 drinks the blood of his son ; in his Hhadamisfus the son 
 expires under the hand of the father ; in his Electra the 
 son assassinates the mother. A poet is a painter of the 
 soul, but a great artist is not therefore a bad man. 
 
 Montaigne appears to have been sensible of this fact 
 in the literary character. Of authors, he says, he likes 
 to read their little anecdotes and private passions : — " CE|,r 
 j'ai une singuIiSre curiosity de connaitre I'ame et les naifs 
 jugemens de mes auteurs. II faut bien juger leur suffi- 
 sance, mais nqn pas leurs moeurs, ni eux, par cette montre 
 de leurs 6crits qu'ils etalent au theatre- du monde." 
 Which may be thus translated : " For I have a singular 
 curiosity to know the soul and simple opinions of my 
 authors. We must judge of their ability, but no^ of 
 their manners, nor of themselves, by that show of their 
 writings which th^y display pn the ^iheatre of the world." 
 This is very just; are we yet sure, however, that the 
 
294 LITERARY CITARACTBR. 
 
 simplicity of this old favourite of Europe might not have 
 been as much a theatrical gesture as the sentimentality' 
 of Sterne ? The great authors of the Port-Royal Logic 
 have raised severe objections to prove that Montaigne 
 Tras not quite so open in respect to those simple details 
 which he imagined might diminish his personal import- 
 ance with his readers. He pretends that he reveals all' 
 his infirmities and weaknesses, while he is perpetually 
 passing himself off for something more than he is. He 
 carefully informs us that he has " a page," the usual at- 
 tendant of an independent gentleman, and lives in an old 
 family ch&teau ; when the fact was, that his whole reve- 
 nue did not exceed six thousand livres, a state beneiath 
 mediocrity. He is also equally careful not to drop any 
 mention of his having a clerk with a hag • for he was a 
 counsellor of Bordeaux, but affected the gentleman and' 
 the soldier. He trumpets himself forth for having been 
 mayor of Bordeaux, as this offered an opportunity 
 of telling us that he succeeded Marshal Biron, and re- 
 signed it to Marshal Matignon. Could he have discov- 
 ered that any marshal had been a lawyer he would not 
 have sunk that part of his life. Montaigne himself has; 
 said, " that in forming a judgment of a man's life, par- 
 ticular regard should be paid to his behaviour at the end 
 of it ;" and he more than once tells us that the chief 
 study of his life is to die calm and silent ; and that he 
 will plunge himself headlong and stupidly into death,: as 
 into an obscure abyss, which swallows one up in an in- 
 stant ; that to die was the affair of a moment's suffering, 
 and required no precepts. He talked of reposing on the. 
 "pillow of doubt." But how did this great philosopher 
 die ? He called for the more powerful opiates of the in- 
 fallible church ! The mass was performed in his cham- 
 ber, and, in rising to embrace it, his hands dropped and 
 failed him ; thus, as Professor Dugald Stewart observes 
 on this philosopher — " He expired in performing what his 
 
CONTEASTS, PERSONAL AND LITERARY. 295 
 
 old preceptor, Buchanan, would not have scrupled to 
 describe as an act of idolatry." 
 
 We must not then consider that he who paints vice 
 with energy is therefore vicious, lest we injure an hon- 
 ourable man ; nor must we imagine that he who celebrates 
 virtue is therefore virtuous, for we may then repose on 
 a heart which knowing the right pursues the wrong. 
 
 These paradoxical appearances in the history of gen- 
 ius present a curious moral phenomenon. Much must be 
 attributed to the plastic nature of the versatile faculty 
 itself. Unquestionably many men of genius have often 
 resisted the indulgence of one talent to exercise another 
 with equal power ; and some, who have solely composed 
 sermons, could have touched on the foibles of society 
 with the spirit of Horace or Juvenal. Blackstone and 
 Sir William Jones directed that genius to the austere 
 studies of law and philology, which might have excelled 
 in the poetical and historical character. So versatile is 
 this faculty of genius, that its possessors are sometimes 
 uncertain of the manner in which they shall treat their 
 subject, whether gravely or ludicrously. When Breboeuf, 
 the French translator of the Pharsalia of Lucan, had com- 
 pleted the first book as it now appears, he at the same 
 time composed a burlesque version, and sent both to the 
 great arbiter of taste in that day, to decide which the 
 poet should continue. The decision proved to be diffi- 
 cult. Are there not writers who, with all the vehemence 
 of genius, by adopting one principle can make all things 
 shrink into the pigmy form of ridicule, or by adopting 
 another principle startle us by the gigantic monsters of 
 their own exaggerated imagination ? On this principle, 
 of the versatility of the faculty, a production of genius 
 is a piece of art which, wrought up to its full effect with 
 a felicity of manner acquired by taste and habit, is 
 merely the result of certain arbitrary combinations of 
 the mind. 
 
296 LITBRART CHARACTER. 
 
 Are we then to reduce the works of a man of genius 
 to a mere sport of his talents — a game in which he is 
 only the best player ? Can he whose secret power raises 
 so many emotions in our breasts be^ without any in his 
 own? A mere actor performing a part? Is he unfeeling 
 when he is pathetic, indifferent when he is indignant ? 
 Is he an alien to all the wisdom and virtue he inspires? 
 No ! were men of genius themselves to assert this, and 
 it is said some incline so to do, there is a more certain con- 
 viction than their misconceptions, in our own conscious- 
 ness, which for ever assures us, that deep feelings and ele- 
 vated thoughts can alone spring from those who feel 
 deeply and think nobly. 
 
 In proving that the character of the man may be very 
 opposite to that of his writings, we must recollect that 
 the habits of the life may be contrary to the habite of 
 the mind.* The influence of their studies over men of 
 genius is limited. Out of the ideal world, man is re- 
 duced to be the active creature of sensation. An au- 
 thor has, in truth, two distinct characters: the literary, 
 formed by the habits of his study ; the personal, by the 
 habits of his situation. Gray, cold, effeminate, and timid 
 in his personal, was lofty and awful in his literary char- 
 acter. We see men of polished manners and bland affeot 
 tions, who, in grasping a pen, are thrusting a poniard ; 
 whUe others in domestic life with the simplicity of chil- 
 dren and the feebleness of nervous affections, can shake 
 the senate or the bar with the vehemence of their elo- 
 quence and the intrepidity of their spirit. The writings 
 
 * Nothing is more delightful to me in my researches on the literary 
 chaijaoter than when I find in persons of unquestionable and high 
 genius Wie results of my own disooTeries. This circumstance haa fre- 
 quently happened to confirm my principles., Long after tliis was pub- 
 lished, Madame de Stael madp this importaiit confession in her recent 
 work, "Dix Annees d'Bxil," p. 154. ''Je ne pouvais me dissimuler 
 que je n'^tais pas une personne oourageuse ; j'ai de la hardiesse dans 
 Vvmagination, mais de la timidite dans le ca/raciere." 
 
CONTRASTS, PERSONAL AND LITERARY. 29T 
 
 of the famous Baptista Porta are marked by the boldness 
 of his genius, which formed a singular contrast with the 
 pusillanimity of his conduct when menaced or attacked. 
 The heart may be feeble, though the mind is strong. To 
 think boldly may be the habit of the mind, to act weakly 
 may bje the habit of the constitution. 
 
 However the personal character may contrast with 
 that of their genius, still are the works themselves gen- 
 uine, and exist as realities for us — and were so, doubtless, 
 to the composers themselves in the act of composition. 
 In. the calm of study, a beautiful imagination may coii- 
 vert him whose morals are corrupt into an admirable 
 moralist, awakening feelings which yet may be cold in 
 the business of life : as we have shown tljat the phleg- 
 matic can excite himself into wit, and the cheerful man 
 delight in " Night Thoughts." Sallust, the corrupt Sal- 
 lust, might retain the mpgt sublime conceptionis of tjie 
 virtues which were to save the Republic ; and Sterne, 
 whose heart was not so susceptible in ordinary occur- 
 rences, while he was gradually creating incident after 
 incident and touching successive emotions, in the stories 
 of Le Fevre and Maria, might have thrilled — like some of 
 his readers. Many have mourned over the wisdom or the 
 yi^tue they contemplated, mortified at theii- own infirmity. 
 Thus, though there may be no identity between the book 
 and the man, still for us an aiit^ior is ever aij. a,bstract 
 b^ng, and, as one of the Fathers said — "A dead man 
 may sin dead, leaving books that make otfiers sin." An 
 author's wisdom or his foUj does not die with him. The 
 volume, not the author, is our compa,nion, and is for us 
 a real personage, performing before ns whatever it in- 
 spires — " He being dead, yet speaketh." Such is the 
 vits^lity of a book l 
 
298 . LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 The man of letters. — Occupies an intermediate station between authors 
 and readers. — His solitude described. — Often the father of genius. — 
 Attious, a man of letters of antiquity. — The perfect character of a 
 modern man of letters exhibited in Peiresc. — Their utility to authors 
 and artists. 
 
 AMONG the active members of the literary republic, 
 there is a class whom formerly we distinguished by 
 the title of Men op Lbttees — a title which, with us, ha?,. 
 nearly gone out of currency, though I do not think that 
 the general term of " literary men " would be sufficiently, 
 appropriate. 
 
 The man of letters, whose habits and whose whole life 
 so closely resemble those of an author, can only be dis-,. 
 tinguished by this simple circumstance, that the man of 
 letters is not an author; 
 
 Yet he whose sole occupation through life is literature 
 — ^he who is always acquiring and never producing, ap- 
 peal's as ridiculous as the architect who never raised an 
 edifice, or the statuary who refrains from sculpture. His 
 pursuits are reproached with terminating in an epiqurean 
 selfishness, and amidst his incessant avocations he him- 
 self is considered as a particular sort of idler. 
 
 This race of literary characters, as we now find them,, 
 could not have appeared till the press had poured forth 
 its affluence. In the degree that the nations of Europe 
 became literary, was that philosophical curiosity kindled 
 which induced some to devote their fortunes and their 
 days, and to experience some of the purest of human 
 enjoyments in preserving and familiarising themselves 
 with " the monuments of vanished minds," as books are 
 called by D'Avenant with so much sublimity. Their 
 expansive library presents an indestructible history of 
 
MEN OF LETTERS. 299 
 
 the genius of every people, through all their eras — and 
 ■whatever men have thought and whatever men have 
 done, were at length discovered in books. 
 
 Men of letters occupy an intermediate station between 
 authors and readers. They are gifted with more curi- 
 osity of knowledge, and more multiplied tastes, and by 
 those precious collections which they are forming during 
 their lives, are more completely furnished with the means 
 than are possessed by the multitude who read, and the 
 few who write. 
 
 The studies of an author are usually restyicted to par- 
 ticular subjects. His tastes are tinctured by their colour- 
 ing, hife mind is always shaping itself by their form. An 
 author's works form his solitary pride, and his secret 
 power ; while half his life wears away in the slow matu- 
 rity of composition, and still the ambition of authorship 
 torments its victim alike in disappointment or in posses- 
 sion. 
 
 But soothing is the solitude of the Man of Lettbes ! 
 View the busied inhabitant of the library surrounded by 
 the objects of his love ! He possesses them — and they 
 possess him! Thesfe volumes — images of bur milid and 
 passions ! — as he traces them from Herodotus to Gibbon, 
 from Homer to Shakspeare — those portfolios which gather 
 up the inventions of genius, and that selected cabinet of 
 medals which holds so many unwritten histories ; — some 
 favourite sculptures and pictures, and some antiquities 
 of all nations, here and there about his house — these are 
 his furniture ! 
 
 In his unceasing occupations the only repose he re- 
 quires, consists not in quitting, but in changing them. 
 Every day produces its discovery ; every day in the life 
 of a man of letters may furnish a multitude of emotions 
 and of ideas. For him there is a silence amidst the 
 world ; and in the scene ever opening before him, all that 
 has passed is acted over again, and all that is to come 
 
300 LITBEARY CHARACTER. 
 
 seems revealed as in a vision. Often his library is con- 
 tiguous to his chamher,* and this domain '■'■ parva sed 
 apta," this contracted space, has often marked the boun- 
 dary of the existence of the opulent owner, who lives 
 where he will die, contracting his days into hours ; and a 
 whole life thijs passed is found too short to close its de- 
 signs. Such are the men who have not been unhappily 
 described by the Plollanders as lief-hebhers, lovers or fan- 
 ciers, and their collection as lief-hebbery, things of their 
 love. The Dutch call everything for which they are im- 
 passioned lief-hehbery ; but their feeling being much 
 stronger than their delicacy, they apply the term to every 
 thing, from poesy and picture to tulips and tobacco. The 
 term wants the melody of the languages of genius; but 
 something parallel is required to correct that indiscrimi- 
 nate, notion which most persons associate with t^at of 
 collectors. 
 
 It was fancifully said of one of these lovers, in the style 
 of the age, that, " His book was his bride, and his study 
 his bride-chamber." Many have voluntarily relinquished 
 a public station and their rank in society, neglecting even 
 their fortune and their health, for the life of self-oblivion 
 
 * The eontipniity of the chamber to the ltbrakt is not the solitary 
 fancy of an individual, but marks the class. Early in life, when in 
 France and Holland, I met with several of these amatewa, who had 
 bounded their lives by the circle of their collections, and were rarely 
 seen out of them. The late Duke of Rorburgli once expres.^ed his de; 
 light to a literary friend of mine, tbat he had only to step fi'om his 
 Bleeping apartment into his fine library; so that he could command, a/t 
 all moments, the gratiilcation of pursuing his researches while he in- 
 dulged his reveries. The Chevalier Terhulst, of Bruxellps, of whoin we 
 have a curious portrait prefixed, to the catalogue of his pictures and 
 curiosities, was one of those men of letters who experienced this strong 
 affection for his collections, and to such a degree, that he never went 
 out of his house for twenty jeavi ; where, however, he kept up a 
 courteous Intercourse with the lovers of art and literature. Tie was an 
 entlmsiaatic votary of Rubens, of whom he taa written a copious life 
 in Dutch, the only work he appears to have composed. 
 
BOOK OOLLECTOKS. gOl 
 
 of the man of letters. Count De Caylus expended a 
 princely income in the study and the encouragement of 
 Art. He passed his mornings among the studios of art- 
 ists, watching their progress, increasing his collections, 
 and closing his day in the retirement of his own cabinet. 
 His rank and his opulence were no obstructions to his 
 settled habits. Cicero himself, in his happier moments, 
 addressing Atticus, exclaimed — " 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 who in his secession from public affairs retreated 
 to a literary life, where he appears suddenly to have dis- 
 covered a new-found world. Fox's favourite line, which 
 lie often repeated, was — 
 
 How various his employments whom the world 
 OaUs idle I 
 
 De Sacy, one of the Port-Royalists, was fond of repeat- 
 ing this lively remark of a man of wit — " That all the 
 mischief in the world comes from not being able to keep 
 ourselves quiet in our room." 
 
 But tranquillity is essential to the existence of the 
 man of letters — an unbroken and devotional tranquillity. 
 For though, unlike the author, his occupations are inter- 
 rupted without inconvenience, and resumed without effort ; 
 yet if the painful realities of life break into this vision- 
 ary world of literature and art, there is an atmosphere 
 of taste about him which will be dissolved, and har- 
 monious ideas which will be chased away, as it happens 
 when something is violently flung among the trees where 
 the birds are singing — all instantly disperse ! 
 
 Even to quit their ' collections for a short time is a real 
 suffering to these lovers ; everytbing which surrounds 
 them becomes endeared by habit, and by some higher as- 
 sociations. Men of letters have died with grief from hav- 
 
302 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 ing been forcibly deprived of the use of their libiraries. 
 De Thou, with all a brother's sympathy, in his great his- 
 tory, has recorded the sad fates of several who had wit- 
 nessed their collections dispersed in the civil wars of 
 France, or had otherwise been deprived of their precious 
 volumes. Sir Robert Cotton fell ill, and betrayed, in 
 the ashy paleness of his countenance, the misery which 
 killed him on the sequestration of his collections. " They 
 have broken my heart who have looked up my library 
 from me," was his lament. ' 
 
 If this jJassion for acquisition and enjoyment be so 
 strong and exquisite, what wonder that these "lovers" 
 should regard all things as valueless in comparison with 
 the objects of their love ? There seem to be spells 
 in their collections, and in their fascination they have 
 often submitted to the ruin of their personal, but not of 
 their internal enjoyments. They have scorned to bal- 
 ance in the scales the treasures of literature and art, 
 though imperial magnificence once was ambitious to out- 
 weigh them. 
 
 Van Praun, a friend of Albert Durer's, of whom we 
 possess a catalogue of pictures and prints, was one of 
 these enthusiasts of taste. The Emperor of Germany, 
 probably desirous of finding a royal road to a rare col- 
 lection, sent an agent to procure the present one entire ; 
 and that some delicacy might be observed with- such a 
 man, the purchase was to be proposed in the form of a 
 mutual exchange ; the emperor had gold, pearls, and dia- 
 monds. Our lief-hebher having silently listened to the 
 imperial agent, seemed astonished that such things should 
 be considered as equivalents for a collection of works of 
 art, which had required a long life of experience and 
 many previous studies and practised tastes to have form- 
 ed, and compared with which gold, pearls, and diamonds, 
 afibrded but a mean, an unequal, and a barbarous barter. 
 
 If the man of letters be less dependent on others for 
 
BOOK COLLECTORS. 303 
 
 the very perception of his own existence than men of 
 the world are, his solitude, however, is not that of a des- 
 ert ; for all there tends to keep alive those concentrated 
 1 feelings which cannot he indulged with security, or even 
 ■ without ridicule in general society. Like the LucuUus 
 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 Gre- 
 cians. Such rden are the fathers of genius ; they seem to 
 possess an aptitude in discovering those minds which are 
 clouded over by the obscurity of their situations ; and it 
 is, they who so frequently project those benevolent insti- 
 tutions, where they have poured out the philanthropy of 
 their hearts in that world which they appear to have for- 
 saken. If Europe be literary, to whom does she owe this 
 more than to these men of letters ? Is it not to their 
 noble passion of amassing through life those magnificent 
 collections, which often bear the names of their founders 
 from the gratitude of a following age ? Venice, Flor- 
 ence, and Copenhagen, Oxford, and London, attest the 
 existence of their labours. Our Bodleys and our Har- 
 leys, our Cottons and our Sloanes, our Craoherodes, our 
 Townleys, and our Banks, 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. The private 
 
 . , * Sir Thomas Bodley, in 1602, first brought the old libraries at Ox- 
 ford into order for the benefit of students, and added thereto his own 
 noble collection. That of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford (died 1724), 
 was purchased! by the country, and is now in the British Museum ; and 
 also are the other collections named above. Sir Robert Cotton died 
 1631 ; his collection is remarkable for its historic documents and state- 
 papers. Sir Hans Sloaue's collections may be said to be the foundation, 
 of the British Museum, and were purchased by Government fcr 20,0002. 
 after his death, in 1749. Of Cracherode and Townley some notice will 
 be found on p. 2 of the present volume. Sir Joseph Banljs and his sister 
 made large bequests to the same national establishment. — Ed. 
 
304 LITERABT CHAEACTBE. 
 
 acquisitions of a solitary man of letters during half a 
 century have become public endo'winents. A generous 
 enthusiasm inspired these intrepid labours, and their vol- 
 tary privations of what the world calls its pleasures 
 and its honours, would form an interesting history not 
 yet written ; their due, y«t undischarged. 
 
 But " riien of the world," as they are emphatically dis- 
 tinguished, imagine that a man so lifeless in "the world" 
 must be one of the dead in it, and, with mistaken wit) 
 would inscribe over the sepulchre of his library, " Here 
 lies the body of our friend." If the man of letters have 
 voluntarily quitted their " world," at least he has passed 
 into another^ where he enjoys a sense of existence 
 through a long succession of ages, and where Time, who 
 destroys all things for others, for him only preserves and 
 discovers. This world is best described by one who has 
 lingered among its inspirations. " We are wafted into 
 other times and strange lands, connecting us by a sad 
 but exalting relationship with the great events and 
 great minds which have paSsed away. Our studies at 
 once cherish and control the imagination, by leading 
 it over an unbounded range of the noblest scenes 
 in the overawing Company of departed wisdom and 
 gfenius." * 
 
 Living more with books than with men, which is often 
 becoming better acquainted with man himself, though 
 not always with men, the man of letters is more tolerant 
 of opinions than opinionists are among themselves. Nor 
 are his views of human affairs contracted to the day, like 
 those who, in the heat and hurry of a too active life, pre- 
 fer expedients to principles ; men who deem themselves 
 politicians because they are not moralists; to whom the 
 centuries behind have conveyed no results, and who 
 cannot see how the present time is always full of the 
 
 * " Quarterly Review," No. xxxiii., p. 146. 
 
LIVING ■WITH BOOKS. 305 
 
 fntnre. "Everything," says the lively Burnet, "must 
 be Ibrought to the nature of tinder or gunpowder, ready 
 for a spark to set it on fire," before they discover it. 
 The man of letters indeed is accused of a cold indiffer- 
 ence to the interests which divide society ; he is rarely 
 observed as the head or the " rump of a party ;" he 
 views at a distance their temporary passions — those 
 mighty beginnings, of which he knows the miserable 
 terminations. 
 
 Antiquity presents the character of a perfect 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 his class. But the sage Atticus rejected a popular ce- 
 lebrity for a pateion not less powerful, yielding up his 
 whole soul to study. Cicero, with all his devotion to 
 literature, was at the same time 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, 
 for which he 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 blame- 
 able induced you to adopt an honourable leisure; 
 honestum otium."* These motives appear in the in- 
 teresting memoirs of- this man of letters ; a contempt of 
 political intrigues combined vnth a d,esire to escape from 
 the splendid bustle of Rome to the learned leisure of 
 Athens. He wished to dismiss a pompous train of slaves 
 
 * "Ad Attioum," Lib. i., Ep. IT 
 
306 LITBRAUT OHAIlAaTEK. 
 
 for the delight of assemWing under his roof a literary- 
 society of readers and transcribers. And having col- 
 lected under that roof the portraits, or busts of the illus- 
 trious men of his country, inspired by their spirit and 
 influenced by their virtues or their genius, he inscribed 
 under them, in concise verses, the characters of their 
 mind. Valuing wealth only for its use, a dignified econ~ 
 omy enabled him to be profuse, and a moderate expendi- 
 ture 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 hira, 
 conferring on our Pomponius the fond surname of Atti- 
 cus. 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 froiUpthe 
 senate, was there distinguished by the affeotionati? titl^ 
 of " the Venetian." 
 
 Yet such a character as Atticus could not escape cen- 
 sure from "men of the world." They want the heart 
 and the imagination to conceive something better than 
 themselves. The hajppy indifference, perhaps the con- 
 tempt of our Attieus for rival factions, they have stigmar 
 tised as a cold neutrality, a timid pusillianimous hypoc- 
 risy. Yet Atticus could not have be^n a mutual friend, 
 had not both parties alike held the man of letters as a 
 sacred being amidst their disguised ambition; and the 
 urbanity of Atticus, while it balanced the fiercenessr of 
 two heroes, Pompey and Caesar^ couM 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 Atticusi Sir Matthew Hale lived, in dis- 
 tracted' times, and tool? the character of our man, of let- 
 ters for his model, adopting two principles in the conduct 
 of the Roman. He engaged himself with no party busi- 
 
MEN Off LETTERS. 307 
 
 ness, and afforded a constant relief to the unfortunate, of 
 ■whatever party. He was thras preserved amidst the con- 
 tests of the times. 
 
 If the personal interest of the man of letters be not 
 deeply involved in society, his individual prosperity, 
 however, is never contrary to public happiness. Other 
 professions necessarily exist by the conflict and the ear 
 lamities of tike community : the politiciarm becomes great 
 by hatching an intrigue; the lawyer, in counting his 
 briefs ; the physician, his sick-list. The soldier is elani- 
 orous for war; the merchant riots on 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 at those intervals, 
 when, after a long interchange of destruction, men, re- 
 covering their senses,, discover that " knowledge is power." 
 Burke, whose ample mind took in every conception of the 
 literary eharaotet,, has finely touched on tiie distinctioa 
 between thk order of contemplative men^ and the other 
 active classes of society. In addressing Mr. Malone, 
 whose real character was that of a man of letters who 
 first showed us the neglected state of our literary history, 
 Burke observed — for I shall give his own words,, always 
 too beautifu.1 to altera" If you are not called to exert 
 your great talents, and employ yotir gseat acquisitions in 
 the transitory service of your country,, which- is done in 
 active life, you will continue to do it that permanent serv- 
 ice which it receives from the labouirs of those who know 
 how to make the silence of elosets more beneficial to Xhe 
 world than all the noise tod bustle of oourtSj senates, and 
 Camps." 
 
 A moving picture of the literary life of a man of let- 
 ters who was HO author, would have been lost to us, had 
 not Peiresc found in Gassendr a twin spirit. So intimate 
 was the biographer with the very thoughts, so closely 
 united in the same pursuits, and so perpetual an observer 
 
308 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 of the remarkaMe man whom he has immortalised, that 
 when employed on this elaborate resemblance of his 
 friend, he was only painting himself with all the identi- 
 fying strokes of self-love.* 
 
 It was in the vast library of Pinelli, the founder of the 
 most magnilicent one in Europe, that Peiresc, then a 
 youth, felt the remote hope of emulating the man of let- 
 ters before his eyes. His life was not without prepara- 
 tion, nor 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 pre^ 
 cocity, as usually are strong passions in strong minds ; 
 this intense curiosity was the germ of all those studies 
 which seemed mature in his youth. He early 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 settling points of eru- 
 dition ; or by the opened cabinet of the antiquary, de- 
 ciphering obscure inscriptions, and explaining medals. 
 In the galler'ies of the curious in art, among their marbles, 
 their pictures, and their prints, Peiresc has oftan revealed 
 to the artist some secret in his own art. In the museum 
 of the naturalist, or the garden of the botanist, there was 
 no rarity of nature on which he had not something to 
 communicate. His mind toiled with that impatience of 
 knowledge, that 'becomes a pain only when the mind is 
 not on the advance. In England Peiresc was the associate 
 
 * " I suppose," -writes Erelyn, that most agreeable enthusiast of 
 Eterature, to a trayelUng friend, " that you carry the life of that in- 
 comparable virtuoso always about you in your motions, not only be- 
 cause it is portable, but for that it is written by the pen of the great 
 Gassendas." 
 
PEIRBSO. 309 
 
 of Camden and Selden, and had more than one interview; 
 with that friend to literary men, our calumniated James 
 the First, One may judge by these who were the men 
 whom Peiresc sought, and by whom he himself was ever 
 after 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 the combined studies of such friends. 
 
 Another peculiar greatness in this literary character 
 was Peiresc's enlarged devotion to literature out of its 
 purest love for itself alone. He made his own universal 
 curiosity the source of knowledge to other men. Con- 
 sidering the studious as forming but one great family 
 wherever they were, for Peiresc the national repositories 
 of knowledge in Europe formed but one collection for the 
 world. This man of letters had possessed himself of 
 their contents, that he might have manuscripts collated, 
 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 often 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, his uni- 
 versal mind busied' itself in every part of the habitable 
 globe. He kept up a noble traffic with all travellers, sup- 
 plying 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 im- 
 portations 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 
 
810 IITERABT CHAEACTER. 
 
 and fruits.* Whenever 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, a plant, when money could not be offered, fed 
 thar mutual passion, and sustained the general cause of 
 science. The correspondence of Peiresc branched out to 
 the farthest bounds of Ethiopia, connected both Ameri- 
 cas, 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 charac- 
 ter, that men of letters may be reminded of the capacity 
 they possess. In the character of Peiresc, however, there 
 still remains another peculiar feature. His fortune was 
 not great ; and when he sometimes endured the reproach 
 of those whose sordidness was startled at his prodigality 
 pf mind, and the great objects which were the result, 
 Peiresc replied, that " a small matter suffices for the nat' 
 ural wants of a literary man, whose true wealth consists 
 in the monuments of arts, the treasures of his library, 
 and the brotherly affections of the ingenious." Peiveso 
 was a French judge, but he supported hi? rank 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 por- 
 traits of his literary friends ; and in the unadorned sim- 
 plicity 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 
 fbr his guest." 
 
 Peiresc, like Pinelli, never published any work. These 
 
 * On this subject see "Ouriositiesof Literature," vol. ii., p. 151; and 
 for some further account of feiresc and his labours, vol. iii., p. 409, of 
 ihe same work. — Bd. 
 
CULTITATORS OF KNOWLEDGB. 311 
 
 men of letters derived their pleasurCj and perhaps their 
 pride, from those vast sti'ata of knowledge which their 
 curiosity had heaped together in their mighty collections. 
 They either were not endowed with that faculty of genius 
 ■which strikes out aggregate views, or were destitute of 
 the talent of composition which embellishes minute ones^ 
 This deficiency in the minds of such men may be attribu-- 
 ted 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 compose is to hesitate ; and to revise is 
 to be mortified by fresh doubts and unsupplied omissions* 
 Peiresc was employed all his life on a histoi'y of Prov- 
 ence ; but, observes Gassendi, " He could not mature the 
 birth of his literary offspring, or lick it into any shape of 
 elegant form ; he was therefore content to take the mid- 
 wife's part, by helping the happier labours of others." 
 
 Such are the cultivators of knowledge, who are rarely 
 authors, but who are often, however, contributing to the 
 works of others; and without whose secret labours the 
 public would not have possessed many valued ones. 
 The delightful instruction which these men ate con- 
 stantly offering to authors and to artists, flows froin 
 their silebt but uninterrupted cultivation of literature 
 and the arts. 
 
 When Robertson, after his successful "History of 
 Scotland," was long irresolute in his designs, and still 
 unpractised in that curious research Which habitually 
 occupies these men of letters, his adtnirers bad nearlf 
 lost his popular productions) had not a fortunate intro- 
 duction to Dr. Birch enabled him to open the clasped 
 boots, and to drink of the isealed fountains. Rabertson 
 has confessed his inadequate knowledge, and his over- 
 flowing gratitude, in letters which I have elsewhere 
 printed/ A suggestion by a man of letters has opened 
 
312 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 the career of 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 
 respect 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 ever 
 supplying with his invaluable researches Burnet, Kennet, 
 Heame, and Middleton. The concealed aid which men 
 of letters afford authors, may be compared to those sub- 
 terraneous streams, which, flowing into spacious lakes, 
 are, though unobserved, enlarging the waters which 
 attract the public eye. 
 
 Count De Caylus, celebrated for his collection, and for 
 his generous patronage of artists, ha? given the last 
 touches to this picture of the man of letters, with all the 
 delicacy and warmth of a self-painter. 
 
 " 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 sensi- 
 ble 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." 
 
 Such a man of letters appears to have been the late 
 Lord Woodhouselee. Mr. Mackenzie, returning from 
 his lordship'^ literary retirement, meeting Mr. Alison, 
 finely said, that " he hoped he was going to Woodhouse- 
 lee ; for no man could go there without being happier, 
 or return from it without being better." 
 
 Shall we then hesitate to assert, that this class of lit- 
 erary men forms a useful, as well as a select order in 
 
OLD AGE. 313 
 
 society ? We see that their leisure is not idleness, that 
 their studies are not unfruitful for the public, and that 
 their opinions, purified from passions and prejudices, are 
 always the soundest in the nation. They are counsellors 
 whom statesmen may consult ; fathers of genius to whom 
 authors and artists may look for aid, and friends of all 
 nations ; for we ourselves have witnessed, during a war 
 of thirty years, that the men of lettees in England were 
 still united with their brothers in France. The abode of 
 Sir Joseph Banks was ever open to every literary and 
 scientific foreigner; while a wish expressed or a com- 
 munication written by this man op lettees, was even 
 respected by a political power which, acknowledging no 
 other rights, paid a voluntary tribute to the claims of 
 science and the privileges of literature. 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 Literary old nge still learning. — Influence of late studies m life. — Occu- 
 pations in advanced age of the literary character. — Of literary men 
 who have died at their studies. 
 
 THE. old age of the literary character retains its enjoy- 
 ments, and usually its powers — a happiness which 
 accompanies no other. The old age of coquetry wit- 
 nesses its own extinct beauty; thsft of the "used" idler 
 is left without a sensation ; that of the grasping Croesus 
 exists only to envy his heir; and that of the . Machiavel 
 who has no longer a voice in the cabinet, is but an unhappy 
 'spirit lingering to find its grave : but for the aged man 
 of letters memory returns to her stores, and imagination 
 is still on the wing amidst fresh discoveries and new 
 designs. The others fall like dry' leaves, but he drops 
 like rijDC fruit, and is valued when no longer on the tree. 
 
Sli LITERARY CHAIiACTER. 
 
 The constitutional melancholy of Johnson often tinged 
 his views of human life. When he asserted that " no 
 man adds much to his stock of knowledge, or improves 
 much after forty," his theory was overturned by his own 
 experience ; for his most interesting works were the 
 productions of a very late period of life, formed out of 
 the fresh knowledge with which he had then furnished 
 himself. 
 
 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. Ajtcoea impaeo !^-" Even yet I 
 am learning !" was the concise inscription on an ingenious 
 device of an old man placed in a child's gO-cart, 'vVith an 
 hour-glass upon it, which, it is said, Michael Angelo ap- 
 plied to his own vast genius in his ninetieth year. Paint- 
 ers have improved even to extreme "old age : West's last ' 
 works were his best, and Titian was greatest on the verge 
 of his century. Poussin was delighted with the dis- 
 covery of this circumstance in the lives of painters. " As 
 I grow older, I feel the desire of surpassing myself." 
 And it was in the last year of his life, that with the finest 
 poetical invention, he painted the allegorical pictures of 
 the Seasons. A man cif 'letters in his sixtieth year once 
 told me, " It is but of late years that I have learnt the 
 right use of books and the art of reading." 
 
 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 proportioil,' 
 the general mass of my knowledge will greatly accumu- 
 late. If we are not deprived by nature or misfortune of 
 the means to pursue this perpetual augmentatioil of 
 
OLD AGE. 315 
 
 ft 
 
 knowledge, I do not see but we may be still fiilly occu- 
 pied and deeply interested even to the last day of our 
 earthly term." Such is the delightful thought of Owen 
 Feltham : " If I die to-morrow, my life will be somewhat 
 the sweeter to-day for knowledge." The pei-fectibility 
 of the human mind, the animating theory of the eloquent 
 De StaSl, consists in the mass of our ideas, to which every 
 age will now add, by means unknown to preceding gen- 
 erations. Imagination was born at once perfect, and her 
 arts find a term to their progress ; but there is no boun- 
 dary to knowledge nor the discovery of thought. 
 
 How beautiful in the old age of the literary character 
 was the plan which a friend of mine pursued ! His mind, 
 like a mirror whose quicksilver had not decayed, reflected 
 all objects to the last. Full of learned studies and ver- 
 satile curiosity, he annually projected a summer-tour on 
 the Continent to some remarkable spot. The local asso- 
 ciations were an unfailing source of agreeable impressions 
 to a mind so well prepared, and he presented his fiiends 
 with a " Voyage LittSraire," as a new-year's gift. In 
 such pursuits, where life is " rather wearing out than 
 rusting out," as Bishop Cumberland expressed it, scarcely 
 shall we feel those continued menaces of death which 
 shake the old age of men of no intellectual pursuits, who 
 ai-e, dying so many years. 
 
 Active enjoyments in the decline of life, then, consti- 
 tute the happiness of literary men. The study of the 
 arts and literature spreads a sunshine over the winter of 
 their days. In the solitude and the night of human life, 
 they discover that unregarded kindness of nature, which 
 has given flowers that only open in the evening, and only 
 bloom through- the night-season. Necker perceived the 
 influence of late studies in life ; for he tells us, that " the 
 era of threescore and ten is an agreeable age for writing; 
 your mind has not lost its vigour, and envy leaves you 
 in peace." 
 
316 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 The opening of one of La Mothe le'Vayer's Treatise^ 
 is striking : " I should but ill return the favours God has 
 granted me in the eightieth year of my age, should ] 
 allow myself to give way to that shameless want of oc- 
 cupation which all my life I have condemned ;" and the 
 old man proceeds with his " Observations on the Compo- 
 sition and Reading of Books." " If man be a bubble 
 of air, it is then time that I should hasten my task ; for 
 my eightieth year admonishes me to get my baggage to- 
 gether ere I leave the world," wrote Yarro, in opening 
 his curious treatise de lie Hustica, which the sage lived 
 to finish, and which, after nearly two thousand years, the 
 world possesses. " My works are many, and I am oldi; 
 yet I still can fatigue and tire myself with writing more," 
 says Petrarch in his " Epistle to Posterity." The literary 
 character has been fully occupied in the eightieth and the 
 ninetieth year of life. Isaac Walton still glowed while 
 writing some of the most interesting biographies in his 
 eighty-fifth year, and in the ninetieth enriched the poet-, 
 ical world with the first publication of a romantic tale by 
 Chalkhill, "the friend of Spenser." Bodmer, beyond 
 eighty, was occupied on Homer, and Wieland 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 Idndled the curiosity of Dr. Reid to his latest 
 days, and he studied by various means to prevent the 
 decay of his faculties, and to remedy the deficiencie,s of 
 one failing sense by the increased activity of another, A 
 late popular author, when advanced in life, discovered, in 
 a class of reading to which he had never been accustomed, 
 a profuse supply of fresh furniture for his mind. This 
 felicity was the delightfulness of the old age of Goethe— 
 
 ■ * See " Curiosities of Literature," on " Tlie progress of old age in 
 new studies." 
 
STUDIES IN ADYANOBD LIFE. 317 
 
 literature, art, and science, formed his daily inquiries ; and 
 this venerable genius, prompt to receive each novel im- 
 pression, was a companion for the youthful, and a com- 
 municator pf knowledge even for the most curious. 
 
 Even the steps of time are retraced, and we resume 
 the possessions we seemed to have lost ; 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 acquired by our own experience. Adam 
 Smith confessed his' satisfaction at this pleasure to Pro- 
 fessor Dugald Stewart, while " he was reperusing, with 
 the enthusiasm of a student, the tragic poets of ancient 
 Greece, and Sophocles and Euripides lay open on his table." 
 
 Dan3 ses veines toujours un jeune sans; bouillone, 
 Et Sophode k cent ans peiut encore Antigone. 
 
 The calm philosophic Hume fovind that death could 
 only interrupt the keen pleasure he was again receiving 
 from Lucian, inspiring at the moment a humorous self- 
 dialogue with Charon. " Happily," said this philosopher, 
 " on retiring from the world I found my taste for reading 
 return, even with greater avidity." We find Gibbon, 
 after the close of his History, returning with an appetite 
 as keen to " a full repast on Homer and Aristophanes, 
 and involving himself in the philosophic maze of the writ- 
 infc;s of PlatoJ" Lord Woodhouselee found the recom- 
 position of his " Lectures on History" so fascinating in 
 the last pei'iod of his life, that Mr. Alison informs us, "it 
 rewarded him with that peculiar delight, which has been 
 often observed in the later years of literary men ; the de- 
 light of returning again to the studies of their youth, and 
 of feeling under the snows of age the cheerful memories 
 of their spri&g."* 
 
 * There is an interesting chapter on Favourite Authors in " Curi- 
 osities of Literature," vol. ii., to which the reader may be referred for 
 other examples. — Ed. 
 
318 LITER AEY CHARACTER. 
 
 Not without a sense of exultation has the literary char- 
 acter felt this peculiar happiness, in the unbroken chain 
 of his hahits, and his ifeelingSv 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 vei-sion of the 
 Odyssey, and the following year his Iliad. Of the happy 
 results of literary habits in advanced life, the Count Dc 
 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 hajil, how'- 
 ever, contrived to reserve an hour or two every day foi 
 literary pursuits. The men of science, with whom he 
 had chiefly associated, appear to have turned his pas- 
 sion to observation and knowledge rather than towards 
 imagination and feeling ; the combination formed a wreati 
 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 vivacitj 
 of a young author inspired by the illusion of fame. Al 
 the age of seventy-five, with the imagination of a poet,,h( 
 abridged, he translated, he recomposed his old Chivalric 
 Romances, and his reanimated fancy struck fire in th< 
 veins of the old man. Among the first designs of his re 
 tirement was a singular philosophical legacy for his chil 
 dren. It was a view of the history and progress of tlji 
 human mind — of its principles, its errors, and its advan 
 tages, as these were reflected in himself; in the dawning 
 of his taste, and the secret inclinations of his mind, wMcl 
 the men of genius of the age with whom he assocjate( 
 had developed. Expatiating on their memory, he call 
 on his children to witness the happiness of study, so evi 
 dent in those pleasures which were soothing and adorr 
 ing his old age. " Without knowledge,, without liters 
 
DEATHS OF LITERARY J£EN. 319 
 
 ture," exclaims the venerable entliusiast, "in wliatever 
 rank we are born, we can only resemble the vulgar." To 
 the centenary Fontenelle the Count De Tressan was 
 clj.iefly indebted for the happy life he 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 Uo-ge to his 
 ancient master. It was the voice of the dying to the 
 dead, a last moment of the love and sensibility of genius, 
 which feeble life could not extinguish. 
 
 The genius of Cicero, inspired by the love of literature, 
 has thrown soniething delightful over this latest season 
 of life, in his de Senectute. To have written on old age, 
 in old age, is to have obtained a triumph over Time.* 
 
 When the literary character shall discover himself to 
 be like a stranger in a new world, when all that he loved 
 lias not life, and all that lives has no love for old age : 
 when his ear has ceased to listen,, and nature has looked 
 up the man witliin himself, he may still expire amidst his 
 busied thoughts. Such aged votaries, like the old bees, 
 have been found dying in their honeycombs. Let them 
 preserve but the flame alive on the altar, and at th« last 
 moments they may be found-in the act of sacrifice ! The 
 venerable Bede, the instructor of his generation, and the 
 historian for so many successive ones, expired in the act 
 of dictating. Such was the fate of Petrarch, who, not 
 long before his death, had written to a friend, " I read, 
 I write, I think; such is my life, and my plea,sures as 
 they were in my youth." Petrarch was found lying on 
 a fblio in his library, from which volume he had been 
 busied making extracts for the biography of his country- 
 men. His domestics having often observed him studying 
 in that reclining posture for days together, it was long 
 
 * "Spurinna, or the Comforts of Old Age," by the late Sir Thomas 
 Bernard, was written a year or two before he died. 
 
320 LITERARY CHARACTKR. 
 
 befoi'e they discovered that the poet was no more. The 
 fate of Leibnitz was similar : he was found dead with the 
 " Argenis " of Barclay in his hand ; he had been study- 
 ing the style of that political romance as a model for his 
 intended history of the House of Brunswick. The liter- 
 ary death of Barthelemy affords a remarkable proof' of 
 the force of uninterrupted habits of study. He had 
 been slightly looking over the newspaper, when suddealy 
 he called for a Horace, opened the volume, and found 
 the passage, on which he paused for a moment; and 
 then, too feeble to speak, made a sign to bring him 
 Dacier's; but his hands were already cold, the Horace 
 fell — and the classical and dying man of letters sunk 
 into a fainting fit, from which he never recovered. 
 Such, too, was the fate — perhaps now told for the first 
 time — of the great Lord Clarendon. It was in the midst 
 of composition that his pen suddenly dropped from his 
 hand on the paper, he took it up again, and again it 
 dropped : deprived of the sense of touch — his hand with- 
 out motion — the earl perceived himself struck by palsy 
 ■ — and the life of the noble exile closed amidst the 
 warmth of a literary work unfinished ! 
 
 CHAPTER' XXIII. 
 
 Universality of genius. — Limited notion of genius entertained by the 
 ancients. — Opposite faculties act with diminished force. — Men of 
 genius excel ouly in a single art. 
 
 niHE ancients addicted themselves to one species of 
 JL composition ; the tragic poet appears not to have 
 entered into the province of comedy, nor, as far as we 
 know, were their historians writers of verse. The^r 
 artists worked on the same principle ; and from Pliny's 
 
TJNITEESALITY OF GEjSTItrS. 321 
 
 account of the ancient sculptors, we may infer that with 
 them the true glory of genius consisted in carrying to 
 perfection a single species of their art. They did not 
 exercise themselves indifferently on all subjects, but cul- 
 tivated the favourite ones which they had chosen from 
 the impulse of their own imagination. The hand which 
 could copy nature in a human form, with the characteris- 
 tics of the age and the sex, and the occupations of life, 
 refrained from attempting the colossal and ideal majesty 
 of a divinity ; and when one of these sculptors, whose 
 skill was pre-eminent in casting animals, had exquisitely 
 wrought the glowing coursers for a triumphal car, 
 he requested the aid of Praxiteles to place the 
 driver in the chariot, that his work might not be dis- 
 graced by a human form of inferior beauty to his 
 animals. Alluding to the devotion of an ancient sculp- 
 tor to his labours, Madame de Stael has finely said, 
 " The history of his life was the history of his statue." 
 
 Such was the limited conception which the ancients 
 formed of genius. They confined it to particular objects 
 or departments in art. But there is a tendency among 
 men of genius to ascribe a universality of power to a 
 master-intellect. Dry den imagined tliat Virgil could have 
 written satire equally with Juvenal, and some have hard- 
 ily defined genius as " a power to accomplish all that we 
 undertake." But literary history will detect this fallacy, 
 and the failures of so many eminent men are instructions 
 from Nature which must not be lost on us. 
 
 No man of genius put forth more expansive promises 
 of universal power than Leibnitz. Science, imagination, 
 history, criticism, fertilized the richest of human soils ; 
 yet Leibnitz, with immense powers and perpetual knowl- 
 edge, dissipated them in the multiplicity of his pursuits. 
 "The first of philosophers," the late Professor Playfair 
 observed, " has left nothing in the immense tract of his 
 intellect which can be distinguished as a monument of 
 21 
 
322 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 his genius." As a universalist, Voltaire remains un- 
 paralleled in ancient or in modern times. This volumin- 
 ous idol of our neighbours stands without a rival in liter- 
 ature; but an exception, even if this were one, cannot 
 overturn a fundamental principle, for we draw our con- 
 clusions not from the fortune of one man of genius, but 
 from the fate of many. The real claims of this great 
 writer to invention and originality are as moderate as 
 his size and his variety are astonishing. The wonder of 
 hiy ninety volumes is, that he singly consists of a number 
 of men of the second order, making up one great man ; 
 for unquestionably some could rival Voltaire in any 
 single province, but no one but himself has possessed 
 them all. Voltaire discovered a new art, that of creat- 
 ing a supplement to the genius which had preceded him ; 
 and without Corneille, Racine, and Ariosto, it would be 
 diificult to conjecture what sort of a poet Voltaire could 
 have been. He was master, too, of a secret in composi- 
 tion, which consisted in a new style and manner. His 
 style promotes, but never interrupts thinking, while it 
 renders all subjects familiar to our comprehension : his 
 manner consists in placing objects well known in new 
 combinations ; he ploughed up the fallow lands, and 
 renovated the worn-out exhausted soils. Swift defined a 
 good style, as " proper words in proper places." Vol- 
 taire's impulse was of a higher flight, " proper thoughts 
 on proper subjects." Swift's idea was that of a gramma- 
 rian. Voltaire's feeling was that of a philosopher. We 
 are only considering this universal writer in his literary 
 character, which has fewer claims to the character of an 
 inventor than several who never attained to his celebrity. 
 Are the original powers of genius, then, limited to a 
 single art, and even to .departments in that art ? May 
 not men of genius plume themselves with the vainglory 
 of universality? Let us dare to call this a vainglory; 
 for he who stands the first in his class, does not really add 
 
SINGLE^TESS OF GEMTTS. 323 
 
 to the distitiotive character of his genius, hy a versatility 
 which, however apparently successful is always subordin- 
 ate to the great character on which his fame rests. It 
 is only that character which bears the raciness of th® 
 soil ; it is only that impulse whose solitary force stamps 
 the authentic work of genius. To execute equally well 
 on a variety of subjects may raise a suspicion of the 
 nature of the executive power. Should it be mimetic, 
 the ingenious writer may remain absolutely destitute of 
 every claim to genius. Du Clos has been i-efused the 
 honours of genius by the French critics, because he 
 wrote equally well on a variety of subjects. 
 
 I know that this principle is contested by some of 
 great name, who have themselves evinced a wonderful' 
 variety of powers. This penurious principle flatters not 
 that egotism which great writers share in common with 
 the heroes who have aimed at universal empire. Besides, 
 this universality may answer many temporary purposes. 
 These writers may, however, observe that their oonteai' 
 poraiies are continually disputing on the merits of their 
 versatile productilbns, and the most contrary opinioiaB are 
 even formed by their admirers ; but their great individ- 
 ual character standing by itself, and resembling no other, 
 is a positive excellence. It is time only, who is influenced 
 by no name, and will never, like contemporaries, inis- 
 , take the true work of genius. 
 
 And if it be true that the primary qualities of the 
 mind are rio different in men of genius as to render them 
 more apt for one class than for another, it would seem 
 that whenever a pre-«minent faculty had shaped the 
 mind, a faculty of the most contrary nature must act 
 ■with a diminished force, and the other often with an 
 exclusive one. An impassioned and pathetic genius has 
 never become equally eminent as a comic genius. Rich- 
 ardson and Fielding could not have written each other's 
 works. Could Butler, who excelled in wit and satire. 
 
324' LITERARY OHAEAOTEB. 
 
 like Milton have excelled in sentiment and imagination ? 
 Some eminent men have shown remarkable failures in 
 their attempts to cultivate opposite departments in their 
 . own pursuits. The tragedies and the comedies of Dry- 
 den equally prove that he was not blest with a dramatic 
 genius. Gibber, a spirited comic writer, was noted for 
 the most degrading failures in tragedy; while Rowe, 
 successful in the- softer tones of the tragic muse, proved 
 as luckless a candidate for the smiles of the comic as the 
 pathetic Otway. La Fontaine, unrivalled humorist as 
 a fabulist, found his opera hissed, and his romance 
 utterly tedious. The true genius of Sterne was of a de- 
 scriptive and pathetic cast, and his humour and ribaldry 
 were a perpetual violation of his natural bent. Alfieri's 
 great tragic powers could not strike out into comedy or 
 wit. Scarron declared he intended to write a tragedy. 
 The experiment was not made ; but with his strong cast 
 of mind and habitual associations, we probably have lost 
 a new sort of " Roman comique." Cicero failed in poetry, 
 Addison in oratory, Voltaire in comedy, and Johnson in 
 tragedy. The Anacreontic poet remains only Anacreon- 
 tic in his epic. With the fine arts the same oc currence 
 has happened. It has been observed in painting, that 
 the school eminent for design was deficient in colouring ; 
 while those who with Titian's warmth could make the 
 blood circulate in the flesh, could never rival the expres- 
 sion and anatomy of even the middling artists of the 
 Roman school. 
 
 Even among those rare and gifted minds which have 
 startled us by the versatility of their powers, whence do 
 they derive the high character of their genius ? Their 
 durable claims are substantiated by what is inherent in 
 themselves— what is individual — and not by that flexi- 
 bility which may include so much which others can equal. 
 We rate them by their positive originality, not by their 
 variety of powers. When we think of Young, it is only 
 
SIN'GLENESS OF GENIUS. 325 
 
 of his " Night Thoughts," not of his tragedies, nor his 
 poems, nor even of his satires, which others have rivalled 
 or excelled. Of Akenside, the solitary work of genius is 
 his great poem ; his num.erous odes are not of a higher 
 order than those of other ode--writers. Had Pope only- 
 composed odes and tragedies, the great philosophical poet, 
 master of human. life and of perfect verse, had not left an 
 undying name. Teniers, unrivalled in the walk of his 
 genius, degraded history by the meanness of his concep- 
 tions. Such instances abound, and demonstrate an im- 
 portant truth in the history of genius that we cannot, 
 however we may incline, enlarge the natural extent of 
 our genius, any more than we can "add a cubit to our 
 stature." We may force it into variations, but in multi- 
 plying mediocrity, or in doing what others can do, we 
 add nothing to genius. 
 
 So true is it that men of genius appear only to excel in 
 a single art, or even in a single department of art, that 
 it is usual with men of taste to resort to a particular 
 artist for a particular object. Would you ornament your 
 house by interior decorations, to whom would you apply 
 if you sought the perfection of art, but to different artists, 
 of very distinct characters in their invention and their 
 execution ? For your arabesques you would call in the 
 artist whose delicacy of touch and playfulness of ideas 
 are not to be expected from the grandeur of the histori- 
 cal painter, or the sweetness of the Paysagiste. Is it not 
 evident that men of genius excel only in one depart- 
 ment of their art, and that whatever they do with' the 
 utmost original perfection, cannot be equally done by an- 
 otap man of genius? He whose undeviating genius 
 guards itself in its own true sphere, has the greatest 
 chance of encountering no rival. He is a Dante, a Milton, 
 a Michael Angelo, a Raphael : his hand will not labour 
 on what the Italians call pasticcios ; and he remains not 
 unimitated but inimitable. 
 
326 LITERABT CHARACTER. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 laterature an avenue to flory. — An intellectual nobility not chimerioalj 
 but ereated by public opinion. — Literary honours of various na- 
 tions. — ^LocaJ associations with the memory of the man of genius. 
 
 LITERATURE is an avenue to: glory, ever open for 
 those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or 
 of wealth. Like that illustrious Roman whO' owed noth- 
 ing to his ancestors, videtur ex se natus, these seem self- 
 ]i)orn ; and in the baptism of fame, they have given them- 
 selves their name. Rruyere has finely said of men of 
 genius, " These men have neither ancestors nor posterity ; 
 they alone compose their whole race." 
 
 But Akenside, we have seen, blushed when his lame- 
 ness reminded him. of the fall of one of his father's cleav- 
 ers ; Prior, the son of a vintner, could ^ot endure to be 
 reminded, though by his favourite Horace, that " the 
 cask retains its flavour ;" like Vdlture, another descend- 
 ant of a marohand de vin, whose heart sickened over that 
 which exhilarates all other hearts, whenever his opinion 
 of its quality, was maliciously consulted. All these in- 
 stances too evidently prove that genias is subject; to the 
 iQost vulgar infirmities. 
 
 But some have thought more courageously. The 
 amiable RoUin was the son of a cutler, but the historian 
 of nations never felt his dignity compromised by hia 
 birth. Even late in life, he ingeniously alluded to his 
 first occupation, for we find an epigram of his in sending 
 a knife for a. new-years's gift, " informing bis friend,^jthat 
 should this present appear to come rather from Vulcan 
 than from Minerva, it should not surprise, for," adds the 
 epigrammatist, "it was from the cavern of the Cyclops I 
 feegam to direct my footsteps towards Parnassus." The 
 great political negotiator, Cardinal D'Ossat, was elevated 
 
GENIUS ELEVATES OBSCURE MEN. 327 
 
 by his genius from an orphan state of indigence, and 
 was alike destitute of ancestry, of titles, even of parents. 
 Oa the day of his creation, when others of noble extrac- 
 tion assumed new titles from the seignorial names of their 
 ancient houses, he was at a loss to fix on one. Having 
 asked the Pope whether he should choose that of his 
 bishopric, his holiness, requested him to preserve his plain 
 family name, which he had rendered famous by his own 
 ■genius. The sons of a sword-maker, a potter, and a tax- 
 gatherer, were the greatest of the orators, the most ma- 
 jestic of the poets, and the most graceful of the satirists 
 of antiqifity; Demosthenes, Virgil, and Horace. The 
 eloquent Massillon, the brilliant Flechier, Rousseau, and 
 Piderot ; ^Tohnson, Goldsmith, and Franklin, arose amidst 
 the most humble avocations. 
 
 Vespasian raised a statue to the historian Josephus, 
 though a Jew ; and the Athenians one to jEsop, though 
 a slave. Even among great military republics the road 
 to public honour was open, not alone to heroes and 
 patricians, but to that solitary genius which deri^res from 
 itself all which it gives to the public, and nothing from 
 its birth or the public situation it occupies. 
 
 It is the prerogative of genius to elevate obscure men 
 to the higher class of society. If the affluence of wealth 
 in the present day has created a new aristocracy of its 
 own, where they already begin to be jealous of their 
 ranks, we may assert that genius creates a sort of intel- 
 lectual nobility, which is now conferred by public feeling ; 
 as heretofore the surnames of "the African," and of 
 " Coriolanus," won by valour, associated with the names 
 of the conqueror of Africa and the vanquisher of CojioU. 
 Were men of genius, as such, to have armorial bearings, 
 they might consist, not of imaginary things, of griiSns 
 and chimeras, but of deeds performed and of public 
 ■works, in existence. When Dondi raised the great astro- 
 nomical clock at the University of Padua, which was 
 
328 LITERAUT CHARACTER. 
 
 long the admiration of Europe, it gave a name and, 
 nobility to its maker and all his descendants. There 
 still lives a Marquis Dondi dal' Horologio. Sir Hugh 
 Middleton, in memory of his vast enterprise, changed 
 his former arms to bear three piles, to perpetuate the 
 interesting circumstance, that by these instruments he 
 had strengthened the works he had invented, when his 
 genius poured forth the waters through our metropolis, 
 thereby distinguishing it from all others in the world.' 
 Should not Evelyn have inserted an oak-tree in his bear- 
 ings? for his "Sylva" occasioned the plantation of 
 " many millions of timber-trees," and the present navy 
 of Great Britain has been constructed with the oaks 
 which the genius of Evelyn planted. There was an 
 eminent Italian musician, who had a piece of music in- 
 scribed on his tomb ; and I have heard of a Dutch mathe- 
 matician, who had a calculation for his epitaph. 
 
 We who were reproached for a coldness in our national 
 character, have caught the inspiratiofl and enthusiasm 
 for the works and the celebrity of genius ; the symptoms 
 indeed were long dubious. Reynolds wished to have 
 one of his own pictures, " Contemplation in the figure 
 of an Angel," carried at his funeral ; a custom not un- 
 usual with foreign painters ; but it was not deemed pru- 
 dent to comply with this last wish of the great artist, 
 from the fears entertained as to the manner in which a 
 London populace might have received such a novdty. 
 This shows that the profound feeling of art is still con- 
 fined within a circle among us, of which hereafter the 
 circumference perpetually enlarging, may embrace even 
 the whole people. If the public have borrowed the 
 names of some lords to dignify a "Sandwich" and a 
 " Spencer," we may be allowed to raise into titles of lit- 
 erary nobility those distinctions which the public voice 
 has attached to some authors ; ^scJiylus Potter, Athenian 
 Stuart, and Anacreon Moore. Butler, in his own day, 
 
LITERARY HONOURS. 329 
 
 ■was more generally known by the single and singular 
 name of Iludibras, than by his own. 
 
 This intellectual nobility is not chimerical. Such titles 
 must be found indeed, in the years which are to come ; 
 yet the prelude of their fame distinguishes these men 
 from the crowd. Whenever the rightful possessor ap- 
 pears, will not the eyes of all spectators be fixed- on him ? 
 I allude to scenes which I have witnessed. Will not 
 even literary honours superadd a nobility to nobility; 
 and make a name instantly recognised which might 
 otherwise be hidden under its rank, and remain unknown 
 by its title ? Our illustrious-list of literary noblemen is 
 far more glorious than the satirical " Catalogue of Noble 
 Authors," drawn up by a polished and heartless cynic, 
 who has pointed his brilliant shafts at all who were chival- 
 rous in spirit, or related to the family of genius. One may 
 presume on the existence of this intellectual nobility, 
 from the extraordinary circumstance that the great have 
 actually felt a jealousy of the literary rank. But no 
 rivalry can exist in the solitary honour confen-ed on an 
 author. It is not an honour derived from birth nor crea- 
 tion, but from public opinion, and inseparable from his 
 name, as an essential quality; for the diamond will 
 sparkle and the rose will be fragrant, otherwise it is no 
 diamond or rose. The great may well condescend to be 
 humble to genius, since genius pays its homage in be- 
 coming proud of that humility. Cardinal Richelieu was 
 mortified at the celebrity of the unbending Corneille ; so 
 were several noblemen at Pope's indifference to their 
 rank ; and Magliabechi, the book prodigy of his age, 
 whom every literary stranger visited at Florence, assured 
 Lord Haley that the Duke of Tuscany had become jeal- 
 ous of the attention he was receiving from foreigners, as 
 they usually went to visit Magliabechi before the Grand 
 Duke. 
 
 A confession by Montesquieu states, with open can- 
 
330 LITEEART CHARACTER. 
 
 dour, a fact in his life ■which, confirms this jealonsy of the 
 great ■with the literary character. " On my entering into 
 life I ■was spoken of as a man of talents, and people of 
 condition gave me a favourable reception; but ■when the 
 success of my Persian Letters proved perhaps that I -was 
 not un-worthy of my reputation, and the public began to 
 esteem me, my reception with the great was disoouraging, 
 and I experienced innwnerahle mortifications.'" Montes- 
 quieu subjoins a reflection sufiiciently humiliating for the 
 mere nobleman : " The great, in-wardly ■wounded ■with 
 the glory of a celebrated name, seek to humble it. In 
 general he only can patiently endure the fame of others, 
 ■who deserves fame himself." This sort of jealousy un- 
 questionably prevailed in the late Lord Orford, a wit, a 
 man of the world, and a man of rank ; but ■while he con- 
 sidered literature as a mere amusement, he ■was mortified, 
 at not obtaining literary celebrity ; he felt his authorial 
 always beneath his personal character. It fell to my lot 
 to develope his real feelings respecting himself and the 
 literary men of his age.* 
 
 Who was the dignified character. Lord Chesterfield or 
 Samuel Johnson, when the great author, proud of his 
 protracted and vast labour, rejected- his lordship's tardy 
 and trivial patronage ? f "I value m.yself," says Swift, 
 
 * " Calamities of Authors;" I printed, in 1812, extracts from 'Wal- 
 pole's correspondence with Cole. Some have considered that there 
 was a severity of delineation in my character of Horace ■Walpole. I 
 was the first, in my impartial view of his literary character, to pro- 
 claim to tho world whit it has now fully sanctioned, that ." His most 
 pleasing, if not his great talent, lay in letter-writing ; here he was 
 without a rival. His correspondence abounded with literature, criti- 
 cism, and wit of the most original and brilliant composition." This 
 was pubhshed several years before the recent oolleelion of liia letters. 
 
 f Johnson had originally siibmitted the plan of liis "Dictionary" 
 to Lord Chesterfield, but received no mark of interest or sympathy 
 during its weary progress ; when tlie moment of publication, approached, 
 his lordsliip, perhaps in the hope of earning a dedication, published in 
 The World two tettefs commending Johnson and his labours. It was 
 
INTELLECTUAL NOBILITT. 33I 
 
 " isipon making the miiiistiy desire to be acquainted with 
 Parnell, and not Parnell with the ministry." Piron 
 would not SHiffer the literary character to be lowered in 
 his presence. Entering the apartment of a nobleman, 
 who was eonductiiig another peer to the stairs-head, the 
 latter stopped to make way for Piron : " Pass on, my 
 lord," said the noble master ; " pass, he is only a poet." 
 Piron replied, " Since our qualities are declared, I shall 
 take my rank," and placed himself before the lord. Nor 
 is this pride, the true source of elevated character, re- 
 fused to the great artist as well as the great author. 
 Michael Angelo, invited by Julius II. to the court of 
 Rome, found that intrigue had indisposed his holiness 
 towards him, and more than once the great artist was 
 suffered to linger in attendance in the antechamber. 
 One day the indignant man of genius exclaimed, " Tell 
 his holiness, if he -wants me, he must look for me else- 
 where." He flew back to his beloved Florence, to pro- 
 ceed with that celebra,ted cartoon which afterwards be- 
 came a favourite study with all artists. Thrice the Pope 
 wrote for his return, and at length menaced the little 
 State of Tuscany with war, if Michael Angelo prolonged 
 his absence. He returned. The sublime artist knelt at 
 the foot of the Father of the Church, turning aside his 
 troubled countenance in silence. An intermeddling 
 bishop offered himself as a mediator, apologisijng for our 
 artist by observing, " Of this proud humour are these 
 painters made !" Julius turned to this pitiable mediator, 
 and, as Vasari tells, used a switch on this occasion, ob- 
 
 this notice that produced Johnson's celebrated, letter, in wMBh ha 
 asks, — " Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a 
 man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground 
 encumbers him with help? The notice you have been pleased to take 
 of my labours, had it been early had been kind, but it has been de- 
 layed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; tUl I am solitary, and 
 cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it." — Ed. 
 
332 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 serving, "You speak injuriously of him, while I am 
 silent. It is you who are ignorant." Raising Michael 
 Angelo, Julius II. embraced the man of genius. 
 
 " I can make lords of you every day, but I cannot 
 create a Titian," said the Emperor Charles V. to his court- 
 iers, who had become jealous of the hours and the half- 
 hours which the monarch stole from them that he might 
 converse with the man of genius at his work. There is 
 an elevated intercourse between power and genius ; and 
 if they are deficient in reciprocal esteem, neither are 
 great. The intellectual nobility seems to have been as- 
 serted by De Harlay, a great French statesman ; for ' 
 when the Academy was once not received with royal 
 honours, he complained to the French monarch, observ- 
 ing, that when " a man of letters was presented to 
 Francis I. for the first time, the king always advanced 
 three steps from the throne to receive him." It i^some- 
 thing more than an ingenious thought, when Fontenelle, 
 in his eloge on Leibnitz, alluding to the death of Queen 
 Anne, adds of her succeLjor, that " The Elector of Han- 
 over united under his dominion an electorate, the three ' 
 kingdoms of Great Britain, and Leibnitz and Newton." * ' 
 
 K ever the voice of individuals can recompense a life 
 of literary labour, it is in speaking a foreign accent. 
 This sounds like the distant plaudit of posterity. The 
 distance of space between the literary character and the 
 inquirer, in some respects represents the distance of time 
 which separates the author from the next age. Fon- 
 tenelle was never more gratified than when a- Swede, ar- 
 riving at the gates of Paris, inquired of the custom-house 
 
 * This groatuesa of intellect that glorifies a court, however small, is 
 well instanced in that at Weimar, wliere the Duke Frederic surrounded 
 himself with the first men in Germany. It was the chosen residence and 
 burial-place of Herder ; the birth-place of Kotzebue. Here also Wieland 
 resided for mAuy years ; and in the vaults of the ducal chapel the ashes 
 of Schiller repose by those of Goethe, who for more than half a century 
 astisted in the councils, and adomed'the court of Weimar. — iio. 
 
HONOUR TO G-ENITJS. 333 
 
 officers where Fontenelle resided, and expressed his in- 
 dignation that not one of them had e^^er heard of hjs 
 name. Hobhes expresses his proud delight that his por- 
 trait was sought after by foreigners, and that the Great 
 Duke of Tuscany made the philosopher the object of his 
 first inquiries. Camden was not insensible to the visits 
 of German noblemen, who were desirous of seeing the 
 British Pliny; and Pocock, while he received no aid 
 from patronage at home for his Oriental studies, never 
 relaxed in those unrequited labours, animated by the 
 learned foreigners, who hastened to see and converse with 
 this prodigy of Eastern learning. 
 
 Yes ! to the very presence of the man of genius will 
 the world spontaneously pay their tribute of respect, of 
 admiration, or of love. Many a pilgrimage has he lived 
 to receive, and many a crowd has followed his footsteps ! 
 There are days in the life of genius which repay its suffer- 
 ings, Demosthenes confessed he was pleased when even 
 a fishwoman of Athens pointed him out. Corneille had 
 his particular seat in the theatre, and the audience would 
 rise to salute him when he entered. At the presence of 
 liaynal in the House of Commons, the Speaker was re- 
 quested to suspend the debate till that illustrious for- 
 eigner, who had written on the English parliament, was 
 accommodated with a seat. Spinosa, when he gained an 
 humble livelihood by grindhig optical glasses, at an ob- 
 scure village in Holland, was visited by the first general 
 in Europe, who, for the sake of this philosophical con- 
 ference, suspended the march of the army. 
 
 In all ages and in all countries has this feeling been 
 created. It is neither a temporary ebullition nor an in- 
 dividual honour. It comes out of the heart of man. It 
 is the passion of great souls. In Spain, whatever was 
 most beautiful in its kind was described by the name of 
 the great Spanish bard :* everything excellent was called 
 
 * Lope de Tega. 
 
334 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 a Lope. Italy would fiimisli a volume of the pubMo 
 honours decreed to literary men ; nor is that spirit ex- 
 tinct, though the national character has fallen by the 
 chance of fortune. Metastasio and Tiraboschi received 
 what had been accorded to Petrarch and to Poggio. 
 Germany, patriotic to its literary characters, is the land 
 of the enthusiasm of genius. On the borders of the Lin- 
 net, in the public walk of Zurich, the monument of Gres- 
 ner, erected by the votes of his fellow-citizens, attests 
 their sensibility ; and a solemn funeral honoured the re- 
 mains of Kl'opstock, led by the senate of Hamburgh, 
 with fifty thousand votaries, so penetrated by one uni- 
 versal sentiment, that this multitude preserved a mourn- 
 ful silence, and the interference of the police ceased to be 
 necessary through the city at the solemn burial of the 
 man of genius. Has even Holland proved insensible? 
 The statue of Erasmus, in Rotterdam, still animates her 
 young students, and offers a noble example to her neigh- 
 bours of the influence even of the sight of the statue of 
 a man of genius. Travellers never fail to mention Eras- 
 mus when Basle occupies their recollections ; so that, as 
 Bayle observes, ""He has rendered the place of his 
 death as celebrated as that of his birth." In France, 
 since Francis I. created genius, and Louis XIV. protected 
 it, the impulse has been communicated to the French peo- 
 ple. There the statues of their illustrious men spread 
 inspiration on the spots which living they would have 
 haunted : — in their theatres, the great dramatists ; in their 
 Institute their illustrious authors ; in their public edifices, 
 congenial men of genius.* This is worthy of the coun- 
 
 *'We cannot bury the fame of our English worthies — ^that exists be- 
 fore us, independent of ourselves ; but we bury the influeHce of their in- 
 spiriag presence in those immortal memorials of genius easy to be read 
 by all men — their statues and their busts, consigning them to spots 
 seldom visited, and often too obscure to be viewed. [We ha.ve recent 
 evidence of a more noble acknowledgment of our great men. The 
 
HONOURS TO GENIUS. 335 
 
 try which privileged the family of La Fontaine to he for 
 ever exempt from taxes, and decreed that ',' the produc- 
 tions of the mind were not seizable," when the creditors 
 of CreMllon would have attached the produce of his 
 tragedies. 
 
 These distinctive honours accorded to genius were in 
 unison with their decree respecting the will of Bayle. It 
 was the subject of a lawsuit between the heir of the will 
 and the inheritor by blood. The latter contested that 
 this great literary character, being a fugitive for religion, 
 and dying in a proscribed country, was divested by law 
 of the power to dispose of his property, and that our au- 
 ■ thor, when residep.t in Holland, in a civil sense was dead. 
 In the Parliament of Toulouse the judge decided that 
 learned men are free in all countries : th^t he who had 
 sought in a foreign land an asylum from his love of let- 
 ters, was no fugitive ; that it was unworthy of France to 
 treat as a stranger a son in whom she gloried, and he 
 protested against the notion of a civil death to such a 
 man as Bayle, whose name was living throughout Europe. 
 This judicial decision in France was in unison with that 
 of the senate of Rotterdam, who declared of the emigrant 
 Bayle, that *' such a man should not be considered as a 
 foreigper." 
 
 Even the most common objects are consecrated when 
 associated with the memory of the man of genius. We 
 still seek for his tomb on the spot where it lias vanished. 
 The enthusiasts of genius still wander on the hills of Pau- 
 silippo, and muse on Virgil to retrace his landscape. There 
 is a grove at Magdalen College which retains the name of 
 Addison's walk, where still the student will linger ; and 
 there is a cave at Macao, which is still visited by the 
 Portuguese from a national feeling, for ^amoens there 
 
 statue of Dr. Jenner is placed in Trafalgar Square ; and Granthaai 
 has nowr a noble work to commemorate its great townsman, Sir Isaac 
 
336 XITERAET CHARACTER. 
 
 passed many days in composing his Lusiad. When Pe- 
 trarch was passing by his native town, he was received 
 with the honours of his fame ; but when the heads of the 
 town conducted Petrarch to the house where the poet 
 was born, and informed him that the proprietor had often 
 wished to make alterations, but that the townspeople had 
 risen to insist that the house which was consecrated by 
 the birth of Petrarch should be preserved unchanged ; 
 this was a triumph more affecting to Petrarch than his 
 coronation at Rome.* 
 
 In the village of Certaldo is still shown the house of 
 Boccaccio ; and on a turret are seen the arms of the Me- 
 dici, which they had sculptured there, wjth an inscription 
 alluding to a small house and a name which filled the 
 world ; and in Ferrara, the small house which Ariosto 
 built was purchased, to be preserved, by the municipality, 
 and there they still show the poet's study ; and under his 
 bust a simple but affecting tribute to genius records that 
 " Ludovieo Ariosto in this apartment wrote." Two hun- 
 dred and eighty years after the death of the divine poet 
 it was purchased by the podesta, with the money of the 
 commune, that " the public veneration may be main- 
 tained." f " Foreigners," says Anthony Wood of Milton, 
 " have, out of pure devotion, gone to Bread-street to see 
 the house and chamber where he was born ;" and at Paris 
 
 * On this passage I find a remarkable manuscript note by Lord 
 Byron : — " It woul-i have pained me more that ' the proprietor ' should 
 have 'often wislied t'o make alteratrons, than it could give pleasure 
 that the rest of Arezzo rose against his r'jftJ (for right he had) ; the 
 depreciation of the lowest of mankind is more painful than the applause 
 of the highest is pleasin?; the sting of a scorpion is more in torture 
 than the possession of anything could be in rapture." 
 
 f A public subscription secured the house in which Shakspeare was 
 born at Stratford-on-Avon. Durer's house, at Nuremberg, is still re- 
 ligiously preserve'^, and its features are unaltered. The house in 
 which Michael Augelo resided at Florence is also carefully guarded, 
 and the rooms are still in the condition in which they were left by the 
 great master. — Ed. 
 
EELICS 0? GENIUS. 337 
 
 the house which Voltaire inhabited, and at Ferney his 
 study, are both preserved inviolate. In the study of 
 Montesquieu at La Brede, n^ar Bordeaux, the proprietor 
 has preserved all the furniture, without altering anytljing, 
 that the apartment where this great man jnedita/ted on 
 his immortal work should want for nothing to g,ssist the 
 reveries of the spectator ; and on the side of the chimney 
 is still seen a place which while writing he was accus- 
 tomed to rub his feet against, as they rested on it. In g, 
 keep or dungeon of this feudal chdteau, the local associa- 
 tion suggested to the philosopher his chapter on " Thie 
 Liberty of the Citizen." It is the second chapte;r of the 
 twelfth book, of which the close is remarkable. 
 
 Let us regret that the little villa of Pope, and the 
 poetic Leasowes of Shenstone, have fallen the victims of 
 property as much as if destroyed by the barbarous hand 
 which cut down the consecrated tree of Shakspcare. Xhe 
 very apartment of a man of genius, the chair he studied 
 in, the table he wrote.on, are .contemplated with curiosity.; 
 the ispot is full of local impressions. And all .this hap- 
 pens from a/n unsatisfied desire to. see and hear him whom 
 we never can see nor hear ; yet, in a moment of illusion, 
 if we listen to a traditional conversation, if we can revive 
 one of his feelings, if we can catch but a dim image, we 
 reproduce this man of genius before us, on whose featiirfis 
 we so often dwell. Even the rage of the military spirit 
 has taught itself to respect the abode of geniijis; and 
 Caesar and Sylla, who never spared the blood of their own 
 Rome, alike felt itheir spirit rebuked, and alike isaved the 
 literary city of Athens. Antiquity has preserved a beau- 
 tiful incident of this nature, in the noble reply of the art- 
 ist Protogcnes. When the city of Hihodes was taken Vy 
 Demetrius, the man of genius was discovered in his gar- 
 den, tranquilly finishing a picture. "How is it that you 
 do not participate in the general alarm ?" asked the con- 
 queror. " Demetrius, you war against tlie Rhodians, h\^i 
 22 
 
338 LITBRAET CHARACTEE. 
 
 not against the fine arts," replied tlie man of genius. De- 
 metrius had already shown this by his conduct, for he 
 forbade firing that part of the city where the artist re- 
 sided. 
 
 The house of the man of genius has been spared amidst 
 contending empires, from the days of Pindar to those of 
 Buffon ; " the Historian of Nature's " ch&teau was pre- - 
 served from this elevated feeling by Prince Schwartzen- 
 berg, as our Marlborough had performed the same glori- 
 ous office in guarding the hallowed asylum of Fenelon. * 
 In the grandeur of Milton's verse we perceive the feeling 
 he associated with this literary honour : 
 
 The great Emathian conqueror bid spare 
 
 The house of Pindarus when temple and tower 
 
 Went to the ground . 
 
 And the meanest things, the very household stufflf asso- 
 ciated with the memory of the man of genius, become the 
 objects of our affections. At a festival, in honour of 
 Thomson, the poet, the chair in which he composed part 
 of his " Seasons " was produced, and appears to have com- 
 municated some of the raptures to which he was liable 
 who had sat in that chair. Rabelais, amongst his drollest 
 inventions, could not have imagined that his old cloak 
 would have been preserved in the university of Montpe- 
 lier for future doctors to wear on the day they took their 
 degree ; nor could Shakspeare have supposed, with all his 
 fancy, that the mulberry-tree which he planted would 
 have been multiplied into relics. But in such instances 
 the feeling is right, with a wrong direction ; and while / 
 the populace are exhausting their emotions on an old tree, 
 an old chair, and an old cloak, they are paying that in- 
 
 * The printing office of Plantyn, at Antwerp, was guarded in a 
 similar manner, during the great revolution that separated Holland and 
 Belgium, when a troop of soldiers vfere' stationed in its courtyard., See 
 "Curiosities of; Literature," vol. i., p. 77, noie~ Ed. 
 
ENGLAND HONOURED BY ITS AUTHORS. 339 
 
 voluntary tribute to genius which fornis its pride, and 
 will generate the race. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 Influence of Authors on society, and of society on Authors. — National 
 tastes a source of literary prejudices. — True Genius always the organ 
 of its nation. — Master-writers preserve the distinct national oharaC- 
 ter.^Genius the organ of the state of the ago. — Causes of its sup- 
 press'on in a people. — Often invented, but neglected. — The natural 
 gradations of genius. — Men of Genius produce their usefulness in 
 privacy. — The public mind is now the creation of the public writer. — 
 Politicians affect to deny this principle. — Authors stand between the 
 governors and the governed. — A view of the solitary Author in his 
 study. — They create an epoch in history. — Influence of popular Au- 
 tliors.— The immortality of thought. — The Family of Genius illus- 
 trated by their genealogy. 
 
 LITERARY fame, which is the sole preserver of all 
 other fame, participates little, and remotely, in the 
 remuneration and the honours of professional characters. 
 All other professions press more immediately on tte 
 wants and attentions of men, than the occupations of Lir- 
 EEAET Chaeactbks, who from their habits are secluded ; 
 producing their usefulness often at a late period of life, 
 and not always valued by their own generation. • 
 
 It is not the commercial character of a nation which 
 inspires veneration in mankind, nor will its military 
 power engage the affections of its neighbours. So late 
 as in 1700 the Italian Gemelli told all Europe that he 
 could find nothing among us but our writings to distin- 
 guish us from a people of barbarians. It was long 
 considered that our genius partook of the density and 
 variableness of our climate, and that we were incapaci- 
 tated even by situation from the enjoyments of those 
 beautiful arts which have not yet travelled to us — as if 
 
310 LITEEA.RT CHABAOTEB. 
 
 Ifature liergelf had designed to disjoin us from more 
 polished nations and brighter skies. 
 
 At length we have triumphed ! Our philosophers, our 
 poets, and our historians, are printed at foreign presses. 
 This is a perpetual victory, and establishes the ascendancy 
 of our genius, as much at least as the commerce and the 
 prowess of England. This singular revolution in the 
 history of the human mind, and by its reaction this 
 singular revolution in human affairs, was effected by a 
 glorious succession of authors, who have enabled our 
 nation to arbitrate among the nations of Europe, and to 
 possess ourselves of their involuntary esteem by dis- 
 coveries in science, by principles in philosophy, by truths 
 in history, and even by the graces of fiction ; and there 
 is not a man of genius among foreigners who stands 
 unconnected Vith our intellectual sovereignty. Even 
 had our country displayed more limited resources than 
 its awful powers have opened, and had the sphere of its 
 dominion been enclosed by its island boundaries, if thse 
 same ncebional •literary cfiarkoter had predominated, we 
 should have stood on the same emiinenoe among our 
 Continental rivals. The small cities of Athens and of 
 Florence will perpetually attest the influence of the 
 literary character over other nations. The one received 
 the tribute of the "mistress of the universe, when the 
 Romans sent their youth to be educated at the Grecdan 
 city, "while the other, at the revival of lettea-s, beheld 
 every polished European crowding to its little court. 
 
 In 'Closing this imperfect woi-k toy attempting to 
 ascertain the real influence of authors on society, it will 
 be necessary to notice some curious facts in the history 
 of genius. 
 
 The distinct literary tastes of different nations, and the 
 repugnance tliey mutually betray for the anastCT-writers 
 of each other, is an inipouitant 'cii-cmnstrinc^ to tk'j 
 philosophical observei'. These national tastes originate 
 
NATIONAL AUTHORS. 34t 
 
 in modes of feeling, in customs, in idioms, aad all th@ 
 numerous associations prevalent among every people. 
 The reciprocal influence of manners on taste, and of 
 taste on manners — of government and religion on the 
 literature of a people, and of their literature on the 
 national character, with other congenial objects of 
 inquiry, still require a more ample investigation. 
 Whoever attempts to reduce this diversity, and these 
 strong contrasts of national tastes to one common stand- 
 ard, by forcing such dissimilar objects into comparative 
 parallels, or by trying them by conventional principles 
 and arbitrary regulations, -will often condemn what in 
 truth his mind is inadequate to comprehend, and the 
 experience of his associations to combine. 
 
 These attempts have been the fertile source in 
 literatur* of what may be called national prejudices. 
 The French nation insists that the northerns are defective 
 in taste — the taste, they tell us, which is established at 
 Paris, and which existed at Athens : the Gothic iniagina-. 
 tion of the north spurns at the timid copiers of the 
 Latin classics, and interminable disputes prevail in their 
 literature, as in their architecture and their painting. 
 Philosophy discovers a fact of which taste seems little 
 conscious; it is, that genius varies with the soil, and 
 produces a nationality of taste. The feelings of mankind 
 indeed have the same common source, but they must 
 come to us through the medium and by the modifica- 
 tions of society. Love is a universal passion, but the 
 poetry of love in different nations is peculiar to each ; 
 for every great poet belongs to his country. Petrarch, 
 Lope de Vega, Racine, Shakspeare, and Sadi, would each 
 express this universal passion by the most specific 
 differences ; and the style that would be condemned as 
 unnatural by one people, might be habitual with anothei'. 
 The concetti of the Italian, the figurative style of the 
 Persian, the swelling grandeur of the Spaiiiard, the 
 
34-2 LITEBART CHARACTER. 
 
 classical correctness of the French, are all modifications 
 of genius, relatively true to each particular writer. On 
 national tastes critics are but wrestlers : the Spaniard 
 will still prefer his Lope de Vega to the French Racine, 
 or the English his Shakspeare, as the Italian his Tasso 
 and his Petrarch. Hence all national writers are 
 studied with enthusiasm by their own people, and their 
 very peculiarities, offensive to others, with the natives 
 constitute their excellences. Nor does this perpetual 
 contest about the great writers of other nations solely 
 arise from an association of patriotic glory, but really 
 because these great native writers have most strongly 
 excited the sympathies and conformed to the habitual 
 tastes of their own people. 
 
 Hence, then, we deduce that true genius is the organ 
 of its nation. The creative faculty is itself created ; for 
 it is the nation which first imparts an impulse to the 
 character of genius. Such is the real source of those 
 distinct tastes which we perceive in all great national 
 authors. Every literary work, to ensure its success, 
 must adapt itself to the sympathies and the understand- 
 ings of the people it addresses. Hence those opposite 
 characteristics, which are usually ascribed to the master- 
 writers themselves, originate with the country, and not 
 with the writer. Lope de Vega, and C.ilderon, in their 
 dramas, and Cervantes, who has left his name as the 
 epithet of a peculiar grave humour, were Spaniards 
 before they were men of genius. Corneille, Racine, and 
 Rabelais, are entirely of an opposite character to the 
 Spaniards, having adapted their genius to their own 
 declamatory and vivacious countrymen. Petrarch and 
 Tasso display a fancifulness in depicting the passions, as 
 Boccaccio narrates his facetious stories, quite distinct 
 from the inventions and style of northern writers. 
 Shakspeare is placed at a wider interval from all of them 
 than they are from each other, and is as perfectly insular 
 
NATIONAL AUTHORS. 34.g 
 
 in his genius as his own countrymen were in their cus- 
 toms, and their modes of thinking and feeling. 
 
 Thus the master-writers of every people preserve the 
 distinct national character in their works ; and hence 
 that extraordinary enthusiasm with which every people 
 read their own fa/rourite authors ; but in which others 
 cannot participate, and for which, with all their national 
 prejudices, they often recriminate on each other with 
 false and even ludicrous criticism. 
 
 But genius is not only the organ of its nation, it is 
 also that of the state of the times; and a great work 
 usually originates in the age. Certain events must prcr 
 cede the man of genius, who often becomes only the 
 vehicle of public feeling. Machiavel has been reproached 
 for propagating a political system- subversive of all 
 human honour and happiness ; but was it Machiavel who 
 formed his age, or the age which created Machiavel ? 
 Living among the petty principalities of Italy, where 
 stratagem and assassination were the practices of those 
 wretched courts, what did that calumniated genius more 
 than lift the veil from a cabinet of banditti ? Machiavel 
 alarmed the world by exposing a system subversive of all 
 human virtue and happiness, and, whether he meant it or 
 not. certainly led the way to political freedom. On the 
 same principle we may learn that Boccaccio would not 
 have written so many indecent tales had not the scandal- 
 ous lives of the«monks engaged public attention. This 
 we may now regret ; but the court of Rome felt the con- 
 cealed satire, and that luxurious and numerous class in 
 society never recovered from the chastisement. 
 
 Montaigne has been censured for his universal scepti- 
 cism, and for the unsettled notions he drew out on his 
 motley page, which has been attributed to his incapacity 
 of forming decisive opinions. "Que sgais-je?" was hia 
 motto. The same accusation may reach the gentle Eras- 
 mus, who alike offended the old catholics and the new 
 
344 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 reformers. The real source of their vacillations we may- 
 discover in the age itself. It was one of controversy and 
 of civil wars, when the minds of men were thrown into 
 perpetual agitation, and opinions, like the victories of the 
 parties, were every day changing sides. 
 
 Even in its advancement beyond th'fe intelligence of its 
 own age genius is but progressive. In nature all is oon- 
 tinnous ; she fliakes no starts and leaps. Genius i^ said 
 to soar, but we should rather say that genius climbs.- 
 Did the great VerulaHi, or Rawleigh, or Dr. More, eman- 
 cipate themselves from all the dreams of their age, fronS 
 the occult agency of Witchcraft, the astral influence, and 
 the ghost and demon creed ? 
 
 Before a particular man of genius can appear, certain 
 events must arise to prepare the age for him. A great 
 Cortiniercial nation, in the maturity of time, opened all 
 the sources of wealth to the contemplation of Adartt 
 Smith. That extensive system of what is called political 
 fecdhomy could not have been produced at any other 
 time ; for before this period the materials of this work 
 had but an imperfect existence, and the advances which 
 this soft of science had made were only partial arid pre-" 
 paratory. If the principle of Adani Smith's great work 
 seems to confound the happiness of a nation with itS 
 ■Stealth, we 6an scarcely reproach the man of genius, whd 
 we shall find is always reflecting back the feelings of his 
 6wn nation, even in his most original speculations. 
 
 In works of pure iriiagination we trace the same inai'ch 
 of the human intellect ; and we discover in those inven- 
 tions, which appear sealed by their originality, how much 
 has been derived from the age a,nd the people in Which 
 they Were produced. Every work of genius is tinctured 
 by the feelings, and often originates in the events, of the 
 times, "fhe Inferno of Dante was caught fi'onl the 
 popular superstitions of the age, and had been preceded 
 by the gross visions which the monks had forged, usually 
 
NATIONAL AUTHORS. 345 
 
 for their own purposes. " La CittS. dolente," and < " la 
 perduta gente," were familar to the imaginations of the 
 people, by the monkish visions, and it seems even by- 
 ocular illusions of Hell, exhibited in Mysteries, with its 
 gulfs of flame, and its mountains of ice, and the shrieks 
 of the condemned.* To produce the " Inferno " only 
 required the giant step of genius, in the sombre, the 
 awful, and the fierce, Dante. When the age of chivalry 
 flourished, all breathed of love and courtesy ; the. great 
 man was the great lover, and the great author the ro- 
 mancer. It was from his own age that Milton derived 
 his greatest blemish — the introduction of school-divinity 
 into poetry. In a polemical age the poet, as well as the 
 sovereign, reflected the reigning tastes. 
 
 There are accidents to which genius is liable, and by 
 which it is frequently suppressed in a people. The 
 establishment of the Inquisition in Spain at one stroke 
 annihilated all the genius of the country. Cervantes 
 said that the Inquisition had spoilt many of his most 
 delightful inventions ; and unquestionably it silenced the 
 wit and invention of a nation whose proverbs attest they 
 possessed them even to luxuriance. All the continental 
 nations have boasted great native painters and architects, 
 while these arts were long truly foreign to us. Theoret- 
 ical, critics, at a loss to account for this singularity, 
 accused not only our climate, but even our diet, as the 
 occult causes of our unfitness to cultivate them. Yet 
 Montesquieu and Winkelmann might have observed that 
 the air of fens and marshes had not deprived the gross 
 feeders of Hollatid and Flanders of admirable artists. 
 "We have beeJi outrageously calumniated. Bo far from 
 
 * Sismondi relates that the bed of the river Arno, at Florence, was 
 transformed into a representation of the Gulf of Hell, in the year 
 1304; and that all the variety of suffering that monlcish imagination 
 had invented was apparently inflicted on real persons, whose shrieks 
 and groans gave fearful reality to the appalling scene.— Ed. 
 
3-16 LITEBART CHARACTER. 
 
 any national incapacity, or obtuse feelings, attaching to 
 ourselves in respect to these arts, the noblest efforts had 
 long been made, not only by individuals, but by the 
 magnificence of Henry VIII., who invited to his court 
 Raphael and Titian; but unfortunately only obtained, 
 Holbein. A later sovereign, Charles the First, not only 
 possessed galleries of pictures, and was the greatest pur- 
 chaser in Europe, for he raised their value, but he like- 
 wise possessed the taste and the science of the connois- 
 seur. Something, indeed, had occurred to our national 
 genius, which had thrown it into a stupifying state, from 
 which it is yet hardly ai-oused. Could those foreign 
 philosophers have ascended to moral causes, instead of 
 vapouring forth fanciful notions, they might have struck 
 at the true cause of the deficiency in our national genius. 
 The jealousy of puritanic fanaticism had persecuted these 
 arts from the first rise of the Reformation in this country. 
 It had not only banished them from our churches and 
 altar-pieces, but the fury of the people, and the "wisdom" 
 of parliament, had alike combined to mutilate and even 
 efface what little remained of painting and sculpture 
 among us. Even within our own times this deadly 
 hostility to art was not extinct ; for when a proposal was 
 made gratuitously to decorate our places of worship by 
 a series of religious pictures, and English artists, in pure 
 devotion to Art, zealous to confute the Continental 
 calumniators, asked only for walls to cover, George the. 
 Third highly approved of the plan. The design was put, 
 aside, as some had a notion that the cultivation of the 
 fine arts in our naked churches was a return to Catholi- 
 cism. Had this glorious plan been realized, the golden 
 age of English ai-t might have arisen. Every artist 
 would have invented a- subject most congenial to his 
 powers. Reynolds would have emulated Raphael in th^ 
 Virgin and Child in the manger, West had fixed on 
 Christ raising the young man from the dead, Barry had 
 
ENGLISH AJRCHITEOTS. 347 
 
 profoundly meditated on the Jews rejecting Jesus. Thus 
 did an age of genius perish before its birth ! It was on 
 the occasion of this frastrated project that Barry, in 
 the rage of disappointment, immortalised himself by a 
 gratuitous labour of seven years on the walls of the 
 Society of Arts, for which, it is aaid, the French govern- 
 ment under Buonaparte offered ten thousand pounds. 
 
 Thus also it has happened, thkt we have possessed 
 among ourselves great architects, although opportunities 
 for displaying their genius have been rare. This the 
 fate and fortune of two Englishmen attest. Without 
 the fire of London we might not have shown the world 
 one of the greatest architects, in Sir Christopher Wren; 
 had not a St. Paul's been required by the nation he 
 would have found no opportunity of displaying the 
 magnificence of his genius, which even then was muti- 
 lated, as the original model bears witness to the world. 
 That great occasion served this noble architect to mul- 
 tiply his powers in other public edifices : and it is here 
 worth remarking that, had not Charles II. been seized 
 by apoplexy, the royal residence, which was begun at 
 Winchester on a plan of Sir Christopher Wren's, by its 
 magnificence would have raised a Versailles for Eng- 
 land. 
 
 The fate of Inigo Jones is as remarkable as that of 
 Wren. Whitehall afibrded a proof to foreigners that 
 among a people which, before that edifice appeared, was 
 reproached for their total deficiency of feeling for the 
 pure classical style of architecture, the true taste could 
 nevertheless exist. This celebrated piece of architecture, 
 however, is but a fragment of a grander composition, by 
 which, had not the civil wars intervened, the fame of 
 Britain would have balanced the glory of Greece, or 
 Italy, or France, and would have shown that our 
 country is more deficient in marble than in genius. Thus 
 the fire of London produces a St. Paul's, and the civil 
 
348 LITERARY OHARACTBB. 
 
 ■wars suppress a Whitehall. Such circumstances in the 
 history of art among nations have not always been de-' 
 veloped by those theorists who have calumniated the 
 artists of England. 
 
 In the history of genius it is remarkable that its work 
 is often invented, and IJJES neglected. A close observer 
 of this age pointed ou#to me that the military genius of 
 that great French capM,in, who so long appeared to have 
 conquered Europe, was derived from his applying the 
 new principles of war discovei-ed by Folard and Guibert. 
 The genius of Folard observed that, among the changes 
 of military discipline in the practice of war among Euro- ' 
 pean nations since the introduction of gunpowder, one 
 of the ancient methods of the Romans had been im- 
 properly neglected, and, in his Commentaries on Poly- 
 bius, Folard revived this forgotten mode of warfare, 
 Guibert, in his great work, " Histoire de la Milice Fran- 
 gaise," or rather the History of the Art of War, adopted 
 Folard's system of charging by columns, and breaking 
 the centre of the enemy, which seems to be the famous 
 plan of our Rodney and Nelson in their maritime battles. 
 But this favourite plan became the ridicule of the mili- 
 tary ; and the boldness of his pen, with the high confi- ' 
 dence of the author, only excited adversaries to mortify 
 his pretensions, and to treat him as a dreamer. From 
 this perpetual opposition to his plans, and the neglect he 
 incurred, Guibert died of " vexation of spirit ;" and the 
 last words on the death-bed of this man of genius were, 
 " One day they will know me !'? Folard and Guibert 
 created a Buonaparte, who studied them on the field of 
 battle; and he who would trace the military genius who 
 so long held in suspense the fate of the world, may dis- 
 cover all that he pei-formed in the neglected inventions of 
 preceding genius. 
 
 Hence also may we deduce the natural gradations of 
 genius. Many men of genius must arise before a particu- 
 
mPLTTE2SrCB OP AUTHORS. 349 
 
 lar man of genius can appear. Before Homer there 
 ■were other epic poets ; a catalogue of their names and 
 their works has come down to us. Corneille could not 
 have been the chief dramatist of France had not the 
 founders of the French drama preceded him, and Pope 
 could not have preceded Dryden. It was in the nature 
 of things that a Giotto and a Cimabue should have pre- 
 ceded a Raphael and a Michael Angelo. 
 
 Even the writings of such extravagant geniuses as 
 Bruno and Cardan gave indications of the progress of 
 the human mind ; and had Ramus not shaken the au- 
 thority of the Organon of Aristotle we might not have 
 had the Novum Organon oi Sa.aon. Men slide into their 
 degree in the scale of genius often by the exercise of a 
 single quality which their predecessors did not possess, 
 or by completing what at first was left imperfect. Truth 
 is a single ;point in knowledge, as beauty is in art : ages 
 revolve till a Newton and a Locke accomplish what an 
 Aristotle and a Descartes began. The old theory of 
 animal spirits, observes Professor Dugald Stewart, was 
 applied by Descartes to explain the mental phenomena 
 which led Newton into that train of thinking, which 
 served as the groundwork of Hartley's theory of vibra- 
 tions. The learning of one man makes others learned, 
 and the influence of genius is in nothing more remark- 
 able than in its effects on its brothers. Selden's treatise 
 on the Syrian and Arabian Deities enabled Miltcm to 
 comprise, -in one hundred and thirty beautiful lines, the 
 two large and learned syntagma which Selden had com- 
 posed on that abstract subject. Leland, the father of 
 British antiquities,, im,pelled Stowe to work on his " Survey 
 of London ;" and Stowe's " London " inspired Camden's 
 stupendous " Britannia." Herodotus produced Thucydi- 
 des, and Thvicydides Xenophon. With us Hume, Robert- 
 son, and Gibbon rose almo&t simultaneously by mutu-al in- 
 spiration. There exists a perpetual action and reaction in 
 
350 LTTBBART CHAEICTER. 
 
 the history of the human mind. It has frequently been 
 inquired why certain periods seem to have heen more 
 favourable to a particular class of genius than another ; 
 or, in other words, why men of genius appear in clus- 
 ters. We have theories respecting barren periods, which 
 are only satisfactorily accounted for by moral causes. 
 Genius generates enthusiasm and rivalry; but, having 
 reached the meridian of its class, we find that there can 
 be no progress in the limited perfection of human nature. 
 All excellence in art, if it cannot advance, must decline. 
 
 Important discoveries are often obtained by accident ; 
 but the single work of a man of genius, which has at 
 length changed the character of a people, and even of an 
 age, is slowly matured in meditation. Even the me- 
 chanical inventions of genius must first become perfect in 
 its own solitary abode ere the world can possess them. 
 Men of genius then produce their usefulness in privacy ; 
 but it may not be of immediate application, and is ofteli 
 undervalued by their own generation. ' 
 
 The influence of authors is so great^ while the author 
 himself is so inconsiderable, tha.t to some the cause may 
 not appear commensurate to its effect. When Epicurus 
 published his doctrines, men immediately began to ex- 
 press themselves with freedom on the established religion, 
 and the dark and fearful superstitions of paganism, falling 
 into neglect, mouldered away. If, then, before the art of 
 multiplying the productions of the human mind existed, 
 'the doctrines of a philosopher in manuscript or by lecture 
 could diffuse themselves throughout a literary nation, it 
 will baffle the algebraist of metaphysics to calculate the 
 unknown quantities of the propagation of human thought. 
 There are problems in metaphysics, as well as in mathe- 
 matics, which can never be resolved. 
 
 A small portion of mankind appears marked out by 
 nature and by study for the purpose of cultivating their 
 thoughts in peace, and of giving activity to their discov- 
 
IBrFLTJENOE OF AUTHOES. 351 
 
 eries, by disclosing them to the people. " Could I," ex- 
 claims Montesquieu, whose heart was beating with the 
 feelings of a great author, " could I but afford new rea- 
 sons to men to love their duties, their king, their country, 
 their laws, that they might become more sensible of their 
 happiness under every government they live, and in every 
 station they occupy, I should deem myself the happiest of 
 men !" Such was the pure aspiration of the great author 
 who studied to preserve, by ameliorating, the humane 
 fabric of society. The same largeness of mind character- 
 ises all the eloquent friends of the human race. In an age 
 of religious intolerance it inspired the President De Thou 
 to inculcate, from sad experience and a juster view of hu- 
 man nature, the impolicy as well as the inhumanity of re- 
 ligious persecutions, in that dedication to Henry IV. , which 
 Lord Mansfield declared he could never read without 
 rapture. " I was not born for myself alone, but for my 
 country and my friends !" exclaimed the genius which 
 hallowed the virtuous pages of his immortal history. 
 
 Even bur liberal yet dispassionate Locke restrained the 
 freedom of his inquiries, and corrected the errors which 
 the highest intellect may fall into, by marking out that 
 impassable boundary which must probably for ever 
 limit all human intelligence ; for the maxim which Locke 
 constantly inculcates is that " Reason must be the last 
 judge and guide in everything." A final answer to those 
 who propagate their opinions, whatever they may be, 
 with a sectarian spirit, to force the understandings of 
 other men to their own modes of belief, and their own 
 variable opinions. This alike includes those who yield 
 up nothing to the genius of their age to correct the im- 
 perfections of society, and those who, opposing all human 
 experience, would annihilate what is most admirable in 
 its institutions. 
 
 The public mind is the creation of the Master-Writers — 
 an axiom as demonstrable as any in Euclid, and a princi- 
 
352 LITERARY OHAEA.CTEK. 
 
 j)le as sure in its operation as any in mechanics. Bacon's 
 influence over philosophy, and Grotius's over the politi- 
 cal state of society, are still felt, and their principles 
 practised far more than in their own age. These men of 
 genius, in their solitude, and with their views not always 
 comprehended by their contemporaries, became themselves 
 the foujiders of our science and our legislation. When 
 Locke and Montesquieu appeared, the old systems of 
 government were reviewed, the principle of toleration 
 was developed, and the revolutions of opinion were dis- 
 covered. 
 
 A noble thought of Vitruvius, who, of all the authors 
 of antiquity, seems to have been most deeply imbued, 
 with the feelings of the literary character, has often struck 
 me by the grandeur and the truth of its conception. 
 " The sentiments of excellent writers," he says, -" although 
 their persons be for ever absent, exist in future agesj 
 and in councils and debates are of greater authority than 
 those of the persons who ai'e present." 
 
 But politicians affect to disbelieve that abstract princi- 
 ples possess any considerable influence on the conduct of 
 the subject. They tell us that "in times of tranquillity 
 ■they are not wanted', and in times of confusion they are 
 never heard ;" this is the philosophy of men who do not 
 choose that jphilosophy should distui'b their fireside ! But 
 it is in leisure, when they are not wanted,'that the specu- 
 lative part of mankind create them, and when they are 
 wanted they are already prepared fox the active multitude, 
 who come, like a phalanx, pressing each other with a uni- 
 ty of feeling and an integrity of force. Paley would not 
 close his eye-s on what was passing before him ; foi;, he 
 has abser.ved, that during the convulsions at Geneva, the 
 political theory of Rousseau wa« preyajlent in their con- 
 tests ; while, in the political disputes of our country, the 
 ideas of civil ..authority displayed in the works of Looke 
 recurred in every form. The character of a great author 
 
INFLUBNOK OF AUTHORS. 353 
 
 can never be considered as subordinate in society ; nor 
 do politicians secretly think so at the moment they are 
 proclaiming it to the world, for, on the contrary, they 
 consider' the worst actions of men as of far less conse- 
 quence ■ than the propagation of their opinions. Politi- 
 cians have exposed their disguised terrors. Books, as 
 well as their authors, have been tried and condemned. 
 Cromwell" was alarmed when he saw the " Oceana " of 
 Harrington, and dreaded the' effects' of that volume more 
 than the plots of the Royalists ; while Charles 11. trem- 
 bled at an author only in his manuscript state, and in 
 the height of terror, and to the honour of genius, it was 
 decreed, that "Scribere est agere." — "The book of Tele- 
 maohus," says Madame de Sta6l, " was a courageous ac- 
 tion." To insist with such ardour on the duties of a sover- 
 eign, and to paint with such truth a voluptuous reign, 
 disgraced Fenelon at the court of Louis XIV., but 
 the virtuous author raised a statue for himself in all 
 hearts. Massillon's Petit Gwr^me was another of these 
 animated recals of man to the sympathies of his nature, 
 which proves the influence of an author ; for, during the 
 contests of Louis XV. with the Parliaments, large edi- 
 tions of this book were repeatedly printed and circulated 
 through the kingdom. In such moments it is that a peo- 
 ple find and know the value of a great author, whose 
 work is the mighty organ which- conveys their voice to 
 their governors. 
 
 But, if the influence- of benevolent authors over society 
 is great, it must not be forgotten that the abuse of this 
 influence is terrific. Authors preside at a tribunal in 
 Europe which is independent of all the powers of the 
 earth — the tribunal of Opinion ! But since, as Sophocles 
 has long declared, "Opinion is stronger than truth," 
 it is unquestionable that the falsest and the most de- 
 praved notions are, as long as these opinions main- 
 tain their force, accepted as immutable truths j and 
 23 
 
354 LITEKAUT CHABACTER. 
 
 the mistakes of one man become the crimes of a whole 
 people. 
 
 Authors stand between the governors and the gov- 
 erned, and form the single organ of both. Those who 
 govern a nation cannot at the same time enlighten the 
 people, for the executive power is not empirical ; and 
 the governed cannot think, for they have no continuity 
 of leisure. The great systems of thought, and the great 
 discoveries in moral and political philosophy, have come 
 from the solitude of contemplative men, seldom occupied 
 in public affairs or in private employments. The com- 
 mercial world owes to two retired philosophers, Locke 
 and Smith, those principles which dignify trade into a 
 liberal pursuit, and connect it with the happiness and the 
 glory of a people. A work in France, under the title of 
 "L'Ami des Hommes," by the Marquis of Mirabeau, 
 first spread there a general passion for agricultura* pur- 
 suits; and although the national ardour carried all to 
 excess in the reveries of the " Economistes," yet marshes 
 were drained and waste lands inclosed. The " Emilius " 
 of Rousseau, whatever may be its errors and extrava- 
 gances, operated a complete revolution in modern Europe, 
 by communicating a bolder spirit to education, and im. 
 proving the physical force and character of man. An 
 Italian marquis, whose birth and habits seemed little 
 favourable to study, operated a moral revolution in the 
 administration of the laws. Beccaria dared to plead in 
 favour of hunjanity against the prejudices of many cen- 
 turies in his small volume on " Crimes and Punishments," 
 and at length abolished torture ; while the French advo- i- 
 cates drew their principles from that book, rather than 
 from their national code, and our Blackstone quoted it 
 with admiration! Locke and Voltaire, having written 
 on "Toleration," have long made us tolerant. Li all 
 such cases the authors were themselves entirely uncon- 
 nected with their subjects, except as speculative writers. 
 
INPLITENCB OF AtTTHOES. 355 
 
 Such are the authors who become universal in. public 
 opinion ; and it then happens that the work itself meets 
 with the singular fate which that great genius Smeaton 
 said happened to his stupendous " Pharos :" " The nov- 
 , elty having yearly worn off, and the greatest real praise 
 of the edifice being that nothing has happened to it — 
 nothing has occurred to keep the talk of it alive." The 
 fundamental principles of such works, after having long 
 entered into our earliest instructions, become unquestion- 
 able as self-evident propositions ; yet no one, perhaps, at 
 this day can rightly conceive the great merits of Locke's 
 Treatises on " Education," and on " Toleration ;" or the 
 philosophical spirit of Montesquieu, and works of this 
 high order, which first diffused a tone of thinking over 
 Europe. The principles have become so incorporated 
 with our judgrnent, and so interwoven with our feelings, 
 that we can hardly now imagine the fervour they excited 
 at the time, or the magnanimity of their authors in the 
 decision of their opinions. Every first grea,t monument 
 of genius raises a new standard to our knowledge, from 
 which the human mind takes its impulse and measures 
 its advancement. The march of human* thought through 
 ages might be indicated by every great work as it is 
 progressively succeeded by others. It stands like the 
 golden milliary column in the midst of Rome, from which 
 all others reckoned their distances. 
 
 But a scene of less grandeur, yet more beautiful, is the 
 view of the solitary author himself in his own study— so 
 deeply occupied, that whatever passes before him never 
 reaches his observation, while, working more than twelve 
 hours every day, he still murmurs as the hour strikes ; 
 the volume still lies open, the page still importunes — ■ 
 " And whence all this business ?" He has made a dis- 
 covery for us ! that never has there been anything im- 
 j)ortant in the active world but what is reflected in the 
 literary — books contain everything, even the falsehoods 
 
356 LITERABT CHARACTER. 
 
 and the crimes which have heen only projected by man ! 
 This soEtary man of genius ia arranging the. materials of 
 instruction and curiosity from every country and every 
 age; he is striking out, in the concussion of new light, a 
 new order of ideas for his own times ; he possesses secrets 
 which men hide from their contemporaries, truths ithey 
 dared not Titter, facts they dared not discover. View 
 him in the stillness of meditation,, his eager spirit husied 
 over a copious page, and his eye sparkling with gladness ! 
 He has concluded what his countrymen will hereafter 
 cherish as the legacy of genius — you see him now 
 changed ;, and the restlessness of his soul is thrown into 
 his very gestures^-could you listen to the vaticinator ! 
 But the next age only will quote his predictions. If he 
 be the truly great author, he will be best comprehended 
 by posterity, for the result of ten years of solitary medi- 
 tation has often required a whole century to be under- 
 stood and to be adopted. The ideas of Bishop Berkeleyj 
 in his " Theory of Vision," were condemned as a philo- 
 sophical romance,^ and now form an essential part of 
 every treatise of optics; and HThe History of Oracles," 
 by Eontenelle, says La Hai-pCj which, in his youth, was 
 censured for its impiety, the centenarian lived to. see 
 regard,ed as a proof o£ his respect for religion. 
 
 " But whatinfluenoc' can this solitary man,' this author 
 of genius, have on his nation, when he has none in the 
 very street in which he lives ? and it may be suspected 
 as little in his own house, whose inmateS' are hourly prac- 
 tising on ithe infantine simplicity which marks his char- 
 acter,. and that frequent abstraction from what is passing 
 under his own eyes ?" 
 
 This solitary man of genius is stamping hiM own chai> 
 acter on the minds of his own people. Take one in.' 
 stance, from others far more splendid, in the contrast 
 presented by Franklin and Sir William Jones. The par- 
 simonious habits, the money-getting precepts, the, wary 
 
INFLUENCE 01 AUTHORS. 357 
 
 cunning, the little scruple about means, the fixed- intent 
 upon the end, of Dr. Franklin, imprinted themselves on 
 his Americans. Loftier feelings could not elevate a- man 
 of genius who became the founder of a trading people, 
 and who retained the early habits of a journeyman; 
 while the elegant tastes of Sir William Jones could in- 
 spire the servants of a commercial corporation to opennefw 
 and vast sources of knowledge. A mere company of 
 merchants, influenced by the literary character, enlarges 
 the stores of the imagination and provides fresh materials 
 for the history of human natui-e. 
 
 Franklin, with that calm good sense which is freed 
 from the passion of imagination, has hirdself declared this 
 important truth relating to the literary character :'^^" I 
 have always thought that one man of toterable' abilities 
 may work great changes and accomplish great afiatrs 
 among mankind, if he first forms a good plan; and cut- 
 ting off' all amusements, or other employments that 
 would divert his attention, makes the execution of that 
 same plan his sole study and business." Fontenelle 
 was of the same opinion, for he remarks that " a single 
 great man is sufiicient to accomplish -a change in the 
 taste of his age." The life of Granville Sharp is a 
 striking illustration of the solitary force of individual 
 character. 
 
 It cannot be doubted that the great author, in the 
 solitude of his study, has often created an epoch in the 
 annals of mankind. A single man of genius arose- in a 
 barbarous period in Italy, who gave birth not only to 
 Italian, but to European literature. Poet, orator, phi- 
 losopher, geographer, historian, and antiquary, Petrarch 
 kindled a line of light through his native land, while a 
 crowd of followers hailed their father-genius, who" had 
 stamped his- character on the agfe. Descartes, it has been 
 observed, accomplished a change in the taste of his age 
 by the perspicacity and method for which he was in- 
 
358 LITERAET CHAEACTER. 
 
 debted to his mathematical researches ; and " models of 
 metaphysical analysis and logical discussions" in the 
 ■works of Hume and Smith have had the same influence 
 in the writings of our own time. 
 
 Even genius not of the same colossal size may aspire 
 to add to the progressive mass of human improvement 
 hy its own single eflTort. When an author writes on a 
 national suhject, he awakens all the knowledge which 
 slumbers in a nation, and calls around him, as it were, 
 every man of talent ; and though his own fame may be 
 eclipsed by his successors, yet the emanation, the morn- 
 ing light, broke from his solitary study. Our naturalist, 
 Ray, though no man was more modest in his claims;; 
 delighted to tell a friend that " Since the publication of 
 his catalogue of Cambridge plants, many were prompted 
 to botanical studies, and to herbalise in their walks in 
 the fields." Johnson has observed that " An emulation 
 of study was raised by Cheke and Smith, to which even 
 the present age perhaps owes many advantaiges, without ; 
 remembering or knowing its benefactors. RoUin is 
 only a compiler of history, and to the antiquary he is 
 nothing ! But races yet unborn .will be enchanted by 
 that excellent man, in whose works " the heart speaks to 
 the heart," and whom Montesquieu called " The Bee of ; 
 France." The Bacons, the Newtons, and the Leibnitzes 
 were insulated by their own creative powers, and stood 
 apart from the world, till the dispersers of knowledge 
 became their interpreters to the people, opening a com- 
 munication between two spots, which, though close to 
 each other, were long separated — the closet and the 
 world I The Addisons, the Fontenelles, and the Fey- 
 joos, the first popular authors in their nations who 
 taught England, France, and Spain to become a reading 
 people, while their fugitive page imbues with intellectual 
 sweetness every uncultivated mind, like the perfumed 
 mould taken up by the Persian swimmer. " It was but a 
 
INFLUENCE OP AUTHORS. 359 
 
 piece of common earth, but so delicate was its fragrance, 
 that he who found it, in astonishment asked whether it 
 were musk or amber. 'I am nothing but earth; but 
 roses were planted in my soil, and their odorous virtues 
 have deliciously penetrated through all my pores : I have 
 retained the infusion of sweetness, otherwise I had been 
 but a lump of earth !' " 
 
 I have said that authors produce their usefulness in 
 privacy, and that their good is not of immediate applicar 
 tion, and often unvalued by their own generation. On 
 this occasion the name of Evelyn always occurs to me. 
 This author supplied the public with nearly thirty works, 
 at a time when taste and curiosity were not yet domicili- 
 ated in our country ; his patriotism warmed beyond the 
 eightieth year of his age, and in his dying hand he held 
 another legacy for his nation. Evelyn conveys a pleas- 
 ing idea of his own works and their design. He first 
 taught his countrymen how to plant, then to build : and 
 liaving taught them to be useful without doors, he then 
 attempted to divert and occupy them within doors, by 
 his treatises on chalcography, painting, medals, libraries. 
 It was during the days of destruction and devastation 
 both of woods and buildings, the civil wars of Charles 
 the First, that a solitary author was projecting to make 
 the nation delight in repairing their evil, by inspiring 
 them with the love of agriculture and architecture. 
 Whether his enthusiasm was introducing to us a taste 
 for medals and prints, or intent on purifying the city 
 from smoke and nuisances, and sweetening it by planta- 
 tions of native plants, after having enriched our orchards 
 and our gardens, placed summer-ices on our tables, and 
 varied even the salads of our country ; furnishing " a 
 Gardener's Kalendar," which, as Cowley said, was to last 
 as long " as months and years ;" whether the philosopher 
 of the Royal Society, or the lighter satirist of the toilet, 
 or the fine moralist for active as well as contemplative 
 
360 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 life — in all these changes of a studious life, the better part 
 of his history has not yet been told. ' While Britain re- 
 tains her awiul situation among the nations of Europe, 
 the "Sylva" of Evelyn will endure with her triumphant 
 oaks. In the third edition of that work the heart of 'the 
 patriot expands at its result; he tells Charles II. "how 
 many millions of timber trees, besides infinite others, have 
 been propagated and planted at the instigation and hy 
 the sole direction . of this work." It was an author in 
 his studious retreat who, casting a prophetic eye on the 
 age we live in, secured the late victories of our naval 
 sovereignty. Inquire at the Admiralty how the fleets of 
 Nelson have been constructed, and they can tell you that 
 it was with the oaks which the genius of Evelyn planted.* 
 
 The same character existed in France, where De 
 Serres, in 1599, composed a work on the cultivation of 
 mulberry-trees, in reference to the art of raising silk- 
 worms. He taught his fellow-citizens to convert a leaf 
 into silk, and silk to become the representative of gold. 
 Our author encountered the hostility. of the prejudices of 
 his times, even from Sully, in giving his country one of 
 her staple commodities; but I lately received a medal 
 recently struck in honour of De Serres by the Agri- 
 cultural Society of the Department of the Seine: We 
 slowly commemorate the intellectual characters of our 
 own country ; and our men of genius are still defrauded 
 of the debt we are daily incurring of their posthumous 
 fame. Let monuments be raised and let medals be 
 struck ! They are sparks of glory which might be 
 scattered through the next age ! 
 
 There is a singleness and unity in the pursuits of 
 
 * Since this was first printed, the "Diary ''of Evelyn has appeared'; 
 and although it could not add to his genergl character, yet I was not 
 too sanguine in my anticipations of the diary of so perfect a literary 
 character, who has shown how his studies were intermingled with the 
 husiness of life. 
 
CONaiNGUINITT OE AUTHORS. 361 
 
 genius -which ie carried on through all ages, and will for 
 ever connect the nations of the earth. The iMMOSTAin^r 
 OF Thought exists foe Man ! The veracity of 
 Herodotus, after more than two thousand years, is now 
 receiving a fresh confirmation. The single and precious 
 idea of genius, however obscure, is eventually disclosed ; 
 for original discoveries have often been the developments 
 of former knowledge. The system of the circulation 
 of the blood appears to have been obscurely conjectured 
 by Servetus, who wanted experimental facts to support 
 his hypothesis : Vesalius had an imperfect perception of 
 the light motion of the blood: Ceesalpinus admits a 
 circulation without, comprehending its consequences ; at 
 length our Harvey, by patient meditation and penetra- 
 ting sagdcity, removed the errors of his predecessors, and 
 demonstrated the true system. Thus, too. Hartley 
 expanded the hint of " the association of ideas*" from 
 Locke; and raised a system on what Locke had only 
 used for an accidental illustration. The beautiful theory 
 of vision by Berkeley, was taken up by him just where 
 Locke had dropped it : and as Professor Dugald Stewart 
 describes, by following out his principles to- their remoter 
 consequences, Berkeley, brought out a doctrine which- was 
 as true as it seemed novel. Lydgate's " Fall of Princes," 
 says Mr. -Campbell, "probably suggested to Lord 
 Sackville the idea of his " Mirror for Magistrates." The 
 " Mirror for Magistrates " again gave hints to Spenser in 
 allegory, and may also " have possibly suggested to 
 Shakspeare the idea of his historical plays." When 
 indeed we find that that great original, Hogarth, adopted 
 %he idea of his,'* Idle and Industrious Apprenticej'' from 
 the old comedy of Eastward Sbe, we easily conceive 
 that some of the most original inventions of genius, 
 whether the more profound or the mor^ agreeable, may 
 thus be tracked in the snow of time. 
 
 In the . history of genius therefore there is no 
 
362 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 chronology, for to its votaries everything it has done is 
 I'KBSENT— the earliest attempt stands connected with the 
 most recent. This continuity of ideas characterises the 
 human mind, and seems to yield an anticipation of its 
 immortal nature. 
 
 There is a consanguinity in the characters of men of 
 genius, and a genealogy may he traced among their 
 races. Men of genius in their different classes, living at 
 distinct periods, or in remote countries, seem to reappear 
 under another name ; and in this manner there exists in 
 the literary character an eternal transmigration. In the 
 great march of the human intellect the same individual 
 spirit seems still occupying the same place, and is still- 
 carrying on, with the same powers, his great work ' 
 through a line of centuries. It was on this principle that 
 one great poet has recently hailed his brother as " the 
 Ariosto of the North," and Ai-iosto as " the Scott of the 
 South." And can we deny the real existence of the 
 genealogy of genius? Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and. 
 Newton ! this is a single line of descent ! 
 
 Aristotle, Hobbes, and Locke, Descartes, and Newton, 
 approximate more than we imagine. The same chain of 
 intellect which Aristotle holds, through the intervals of 
 time, is held by them ; and links will only be added by 
 their successors. The naturalists Pliny, Gesner, Aldrovan- 
 dus, and Buffon, derive differences in their characters 
 from the spirit of the times; but each only made an 
 accession to the family estate, while he was the legitimate 
 representative of the family of the naturalists. Aristo- 
 phanes, Moli^re, and Foote, are brothers of the family of 
 national wits ; the wit of Aristophanes was a part of the 
 common property, and Moli^re and Foote were Aristo- 
 phanic. Plutarch^ La Mothe le Vayer, and Bayle, alike 
 busied in amassing the materials of human thought and 
 human action, with the same vigorous and vagrant 
 curiosity, must have had the same habits of life. If 
 
OONSANGtJINITT OF GENIUS. 363 
 
 Plutarch were credulous, La Mothe Le Vayer sceptical, 
 and Bayle philosophical, all that can he said is, that 
 though the heirs of the family may differ in their 
 dispositions, no one will arraign the integrity of the lineal 
 descent. Varre did for the Romans ^hat Pausanias had 
 done for the Greeks, and Montfaucon for the French, and 
 Camden for ourselves. 
 
 My learned and reflecting friend, whose original re- 
 searches have enriched our national history, has this 
 observation on the character of Wickliffe : — " To com- 
 plete our idea of the importance of Wickliffe, it is only 
 necessary to add, that as his writings made John Huss 
 the refonner of Bohemia, so the writings of John Huss 
 led Martin Luther to he the reformer of Germany ; so 
 extensive and so incalculable are the consequences which 
 sometimes follow from human actions."* Our historian 
 has accompanied this by giving the very feelings of 
 Luther in early life on his first perusal of the works of 
 John Huss ; we see the spark of creation caught at the 
 moment : a striking influence of the generation of char- 
 acter ! Thus a father-spirit has many sons ; and several 
 of the great revolutions in the history of man have been 
 carried on by that secret creation of minds visibly oper- 
 ating on human affairs. In the' history of the human 
 mind, he takes an imperfect view, who is confined to 
 contemporary knowledge, as well as he who stops short 
 with the Ancients. Those who do not carry researches 
 through the genealogical lines of genius, mutilate their 
 minds. 
 
 Such, then, is the influence of AirrHCES ! — ^those " great 
 lights of the world," by whom the torch of genius has 
 been successively seized and perpetually transferred from 
 hand to hand, in the fleeting scene. Descartes delivers 
 it to Newton, Bacon to Locke ; and the continuity of 
 human affairs, through the rapid generations of man, is 
 maintained from age to age ! 
 
 * Turner's " History of England," vol. il., p. 432. 
 
LITERARY MISCELLANIES. 
 
LITERARY MISCELLANIES. 
 
 MISCELLANISTS. 
 
 MISCELLANISTS are the most popular writers 
 among every people; for it is they who form a 
 communication between the learned and the unlearned, 
 and, as it were, throw a bridge between those two great 
 divisions of the public. Literary Miscellanies are classed 
 among philological studies. The studies of philology 
 formerly consisted rather of the labours of arid gram- 
 marians and conjectural critics, than of that more elegant 
 philosophy which has, within our own time, been intro- 
 duced into literature, and which, by its graces and inves- 
 tigation, augment the beauties of original genius. This 
 delightful province has been termed in Germany the 
 Esthetic, from a Greek term signifying sentiment or 
 feeling. Esthetic critics fathom the depths, or run with 
 the current of an author's thoughts, and the sympathies 
 of such a critic offer a supplement to the genius of the 
 original writer. Longinus and Addison are ^Esthetic 
 critics. The critics of the adverse school always look 
 for a precedent, and if none is found, woe to the origin- 
 ality of a great writer ! 
 
 Very elaborate criticisms have been formed by eminent 
 writers, in which great learning and acute logic have only 
 betrayed the absence of the Esthetic faculty. Warbur- 
 ton called Addison an empty superficial writer, destitute 
 himself of an atom of Addison's taste for the beautiful ; 
 and Johnson is a flagrant instance that great powers of 
 
368 LITBRART CHABACTEB. 
 
 reasoning are more fatal to the worts of imagination 
 than had ever been suspected. 
 
 By one of these learned critics was Montaigne, the 
 venerable father of modern Miscellariies, called " a bold 
 ignorant fellow." To thinking rieaders, this critical 
 summary will appear mysterious; for Montaigne had 
 imbibed the spirit of all the moral writers of antiquity ; 
 and although he has made a capricious complaint of a 
 defective memory, we cannot but wish the complaint had 
 been more real ; for we discover in his works such a 
 gathering of knowledge that it seems at times to stifle 
 his own energies. ' Montaigne was censured by Scaliger, 
 as Addison was censured by Warburton ; because both, 
 like Socrates, smiled at that mere erudition which con- 
 sists of knowing the thoughts of others and having no 
 thoughts of Our own.' To weigh syllables, and to arrange 
 dates, tO' adjust texts, and to heap annotations, has gener- 
 ally proved the absence of the higher faculties. When 
 a more adventurous spirit of this herd atteriipts some 
 novel discovery, often men of taste behold, with indig- 
 nation, the perversions of their understanding; and a 
 Bentley in his Milton, or a Warburton on a Virgil, had 
 either a singular imbecility concealed under the arro- 
 gance of the scholar, or they did not believe what they 
 told the public ; the one in his extraordinary invention 
 of an interpolating editoi*, and the other in his more 
 extraordinary explanation of the Eleusinian mysteries. 
 But what was still worse, the froth of the head became 
 venom; when it reached the heart. ' 
 
 Montaigne has also been censured for an' d,pparent 
 vanity, in making himself the idol of his lucubrations. 
 If he had ilot done this, he had not perfomiedtfli'e prom- 
 ise he makes at the commencement of his preface.'' An 
 engaging tenderness prevails in these na'ive expressions 
 which shall not be injured by a version. " Je Pay vou6 
 a la commodity particuliere de mes parens et amis; ^ ce 
 
MISCELLANISTS. 369 
 
 que m'ayans perdu (ce qu'ils ont h, faire bientost) ils f 
 pnissent reti'ouver quelques traicts de mes humeurs, et 
 que par ce moyen ils nourrisseat plus entifere et plus vifue 
 la conoissance qu'ils ont eu de moi" 
 
 Those authors who appear sometimes to forget they 
 are writers, and rememhei' they are men, will be our 
 favourites. He who writes from the heart, will write to 
 the heart ; every one is enabled to decide on his merits, 
 and they will not be referred to learned heads, or a dis- 
 tant day. "Why," says Boileau," are my verses read 
 read by all ? it is only because they Speak truths, a.nd 
 that I am convinced of the truths I write." 
 
 Why have some of our fine writers interested more 
 than others, who have not displayed inferior talents ? 
 Why is Addison still the first of our essayists ? he has 
 sometimes been excelled in criticisms more philosophical, 
 in topics more interesting, and in diction more coloured. 
 But there is a personal charm in the character he has 
 assumed in his periodical Miscellanies, which is felt with 
 such a gentle force, that we scarce advert to it. He has 
 painted forth his little humdurs, his individual feelings, 
 and eternised himself to his readers, Johnson and 
 Hawkesworth we receive with respect, and we dismiss 
 with awe ; we come from their writings as from public 
 lectures, and from Addison's as from private conversa- 
 tions. Mont.iigne preferl-ed those of the ancients, who 
 appear to write under a conviction of what they said ; 
 the eloquent Cicero declaims but coldly on liberty, while 
 in the impetuous Brutus may be perceived a man who is 
 resolved to purchase it -n-ith his life. We know little of 
 Plutarch ; yet a spirit of honesty and persuasion in his 
 works expresses a philosophical character capable of 
 imitating, as well as admiring, the virtues he records. 
 
 Sterfte perhaps derives a portion of his celebrity from 
 the same influence ; he interests us in his minutest mo- 
 tions, for he tells us all he feels. Richardson was sensi- 
 24 
 
370 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 He of the power with which these minute strolses of 
 description enter the heart, and which are so many fast-, 
 enings to which the imagination clings. He says, " If I 
 give speeches and conversations, I ought to give thenj 
 justly ; for the humours and characters of persons cannot 
 be known, unless I repeat whai they say, -and their marir 
 ner of saying." I confess I am infinitely pleased when 
 Sir William Temple acquaints us with the size of his 
 orange-trees, and with the flavour of his peaches, and 
 grapes, confessed by Frenchmen to equal those of France ; 
 with his having had the honour to naturalise in this 
 country four kinds of grapes, with his liberal distribution 
 of them, because " he ever thought all things of this kind 
 the commoner they are the better." In a word, with his 
 passionate attachment to his garden, where he desired his 
 heart to be buried, of his desire to escape from great em- 
 ployments, and having passed five years withoulf going 
 to town, where, by the way, " he had a large house al- 
 ways ready to receive him." Dryden has interspersed 
 many of these little particulars in his prosaic compositions, 
 and I think that his character and dispositions may be 
 more correctly acquired by uniting these scattered , no- 
 tices, than by any biographical account which can now 
 be given of this man of genius. 
 
 From this agreeable mode of writing, a species of com- 
 positions may be discriminated, which seems above all 
 others to identify the reader with the writer ; composi- 
 tions which are often discovered in a fugitive state, but, to 
 which their authors were prompted by the fine impulses 
 of genius, derived from the peculiarity of their situation. 
 Dictated by the heart, or polished with the fondness of 
 delight, these productions are impressed by the seductive 
 eloquence of genius, or attach us by the sensibility of 
 taste. The object thus selected is no task imposed on 
 the mind of the writer for the mere ambition of litera- 
 ture, but is a voluntary effusion, warm with all the sensa- 
 
MISCELLANIST3. 371 
 
 tions of a pathetic ■writer. In a ■word, they are the com- 
 positions of genius, on a subject in -which it is most deeply 
 interested; ■which it revolves on all its sides, -which it 
 paints in all its tints, and -which it finishes -with the same 
 ardour it hegan. Among such -works may be placed the 
 exiled Bolingbf oke's " Reflections upon Exile ;" the re- 
 tired Petrarch and Zimmerman's Essays on " Solitude ;" 
 the imprisoned Boethius's " Consolations of Philosophy ;" 
 the oppressed Pierius Valerianus's Catalogue of^' Literary 
 Calamities ;" the deformed Hay's Essay on "Deformity ;" 
 the projecting De Foe's " Essays .on Projects ;" the lib- 
 eral Shenstone's Poem on " Economy." 
 
 We may respect the profound genius of voluminous 
 •writers ; they are a kind of painters -who occupy great 
 room, and fill up, as a satirist expresses it, " an acre of 
 canvas." But we love to dwell on those more delicate 
 pieces, — a group of Cupids ; a Venus emerging from the 
 ■waves ; a Psyche or an Aglaia, ■which embellish the cabi- 
 net of the man of taste. 
 
 It should, indeed, be the characteristic of good Miscel- 
 lanies, to be multifarious and concise. Usbek, the Per- 
 sian of Montesquieu, is one of the profoundest philoso- 
 phers, his letters are, ho-wever, but concise pages. Roche- 
 foucault and La Bruy^re are not superficial observers of 
 human nature, although they have only ■written sentences. 
 Gf Tacitus it has been finely remarked by Montesquieu, 
 ' that "he abridged everything because he saw everything." 
 Montaigne approves of Plutarch and Seneca, because their 
 loose papers were suited to his dispositions, and where 
 knowledge is acquired ■without a tedious study. " It is," 
 said he, " no great attempt to take one in hand, and I 
 give over at pleasure, for they have no sequel or con- 
 nexion." La Fontaine agreeably applauds short com- 
 positions : 
 
 Les longs ouvrages me font peur ; 
 
 Loin d'epuiaer une matiere, 
 
 On n'en doit prendre que la fleur ; 
 
a72 LITEEAET CHARACTER. 
 
 and Old Francis Osborne has a coarse and ludicmns 
 iniage in favour of such, opuscula ; he says, " Huge vol- 
 umes, like the ox roasted whole at Bartholomew fair, may 
 proclaim plenty of labour and invention, but afford lesa 
 of what is delicate, savoury, and well concocted, than 
 smaller pieces." To quote so light a genius as the en- 
 chanting La Fontaine, and so solid a mind as the sensible 
 Osborne, is taking in all the climates of the human mind ; 
 it is touching at the equator^, and pushing on to the pole. 
 
 Montaigne's works have been caJled by a cardinal 
 "The Breviary of Idlers." It is therefore the book of 
 man ; for all men are idlers ; we have hours which we 
 pass with lamentation, and which we know are always 
 retuirning. At those moments miscellanists are conform- 
 able to all our humours. We dart along their airy and 
 concise page ; and their lively anecdote or their profound 
 observation are so many interstitial pleasures ia our list- 
 less hours. 
 
 The ancients were great admirers of miscellanies ; Au- 
 lus Gellius has preserved a copious list of titles of such 
 works; These titles are so numerous, and include such 
 gay and pleasing descriptions, that we may infer by their 
 number that they were greatly admired by the public, 
 and by their titles that they prove the great delight their 
 authors experienced in their composition. Among the 
 titles are " a basket of flowers ;" " an embroidered man- 
 tle ;" and " a variegated meadow." Such a misoellanist; 
 as was the admirable Erasmus deserves tha happy de- 
 scription which Plutarch with an elegant enthusiasm 
 bestows on Menander : he calls him the delight of phi- 
 Ijosophei:* fatigued with study ; that they have recourse 
 to hisi works as to a meadow enamelled with flowerSj 
 where the sense is deUghted by a purer air; and very 
 elegantly adds, that Menander has a salt peculiar to, him- 
 self, drawn from' the same waters that gave bu'th to 
 Venus, 
 
PEEPAOES. 373 
 
 The Troubadours, Conteurs, and Jongleurs, practised 
 what is yet called in the southern parts of France, Ij6 
 guay Saber, or the gay science. I consider these as the 
 Miscellanists of their day ; they had their grave mwrali- 
 ties, their tragical histories, and their sportive tales; 
 their verse and their prose. The village was in motion 
 at their approach ; the castle was opened to the ambu- 
 latory poets, and the feudal hypochondriac listened to 
 their solemn instruction and their airy fancy. I would 
 call miscellaneous composition Le Gpay Sabee, and I 
 would have every miscellaneous writer as solemn and as 
 gay, as various and as pleasing, as these lively artists of 
 versatility. 
 
 Nature herself is most delightful in her miscellaneous 
 scenes. When I hold a volume of miscellanies, and run 
 over with avidity the titles of its contents, toy mind is 
 enchanted, as if it were placed among the landscapes of 
 Valais, which Rousseau has described with such pictur- 
 esque beauty. I fancy myself seated in a cottage amid 
 those mountains, those valleys, those rocks, encircled by 
 the enchantments of optical illusion. I look, and behold 
 at once the united seasons — " All climates in one place, 
 all seasons in one instant." I^aze at once on a hundred 
 rainbows, and trace the romantic figures of the shifting 
 clouds. I seem to be in a temple dedicated to the ser- 
 vice of the Goddess Vaeiety. 
 
 PREFACES. 
 
 I DECLARE liiyself infinitely delighted by a preface. Is 
 it exquisitely written ? no literary mot-sel is more deli- 
 cious. Is the author inveterately dull ? it is a kind of 
 preparatory information, which may be very useful. It 
 argues a deficiency in taste to turn over an elaborate 
 
374 LITBRART CHAEACTEB. 
 
 preface tinread ; for it is the attar of the author's roses ; 
 every drop distilled at an immense cost. It is the reason 
 of the reasoning, and the folly of the foolish. 
 
 I do not wish, however, to conceal that several writers, 
 as well as readers, have spoken very disrespectfully of 
 this species of literature. That fine writer Montesquieu, 
 in closing the preface to his " Persian Letters," says, " I 
 do not praise my ' Persians ;' because it would be a very 
 tedious thing, put in a place already very tedious of it- 
 self; I meaa a preface." Spence, in the preface to his 
 " Polymetis," inform us, that " there is not any sort of 
 writing which he sits down to with so much unwilling- 
 ness as that of prefaces ; and as he believes most people 
 are not much fonder of reading them than he is of writing 
 them, he shall get over this as fast as he can." Pelissou 
 warmly protested against prefatory composition; but 
 when he published the works of Sarrasin, was wise enough 
 to compose a very pleasing one. He, indeed, endeavoured 
 to justify himself for acting against his own opinions, 
 by this ingenious excuse, that, like funeral honours, it is 
 proper to show the utmost regard for them when given 
 to others, but to be inattentive to them for ourselves. ; 
 
 Notwithstanding all this evidence, I have some good 
 reasons for admiring prefaces ; and barren as the investi- 
 gation may appear, some literary amusement can be 
 gathered. 
 
 In the first place, I observe that a prefacer is generally 
 a most accomplished liar. Is an author to be introduced 
 to the public ? the preface is as genuine a panegyric, 
 and nearly as long a one, as that of Pliny's on the Em- 
 peror Trajan. Such a preface is ringing an alarum bell 
 ■for an author. If we look closer into the characters of 
 these masters of ceremony, who thus sport with and defy 
 the judgment of their reader, and who, by their extrava- 
 gant panegyric, do considerable injury to the cause of 
 taste, we discover that some accidental occurrence has 
 
PEBPAOES. 375 
 
 occasioned this vehement affection for the author, and 
 which, like that of another kind of love, makes one com- 
 mit so many extravagances. 
 
 Prefaces are indeed rarely sincere. It is justly ob- 
 served by Shenstone, in his prefatory Essay to the 
 " Elegies," that " discourses prefixed to poetry inculcate 
 such tenets as may exhibit the performance to the great- 
 est advantage. The fabric is first raised, and the meas- 
 ures by which we are to judge of it are afterwards ad- 
 justed." This observation might be exemplified by more 
 instances than some readers might choose to read. It 
 will be sufficient to observe with what art both Pope and 
 Fontenelle have drawn up their Essays on the nature of 
 Pastoral Poetry, that the rules they wished to establish 
 might be adapted to their own pastorals. Has accident 
 made some ingenious student apply himself to a subor- 
 dinate branch of literature, or to some science which is 
 not highly esteemed — ^look in the preface for its sublime 
 panegyric. Collectors of coins, dresses, and butterflies, 
 have astonished the world with eulogiums which would 
 raise their particular studies into the first ranks of 
 philosophy. 
 
 It would appear that there is no lie to which a prefacer 
 is not tempted. I pass over the commodious prefaces of 
 Dry den, which were ever adapted to the poem and not 
 to poetry, to the author and not to literature. 
 
 The boldest preface-liar was Aldus Manutius, who, 
 having printed an edition of Aristophanes, first published 
 in the preface that Saint Chrysostom was accustomed to 
 place this comic poet under his pillow, that he might 
 always have his works at hand. As, in that age, a saint 
 was supposed to possess every human talent, good taste 
 not excepted, Aristophanes thus recommended became 
 a general favourite. The anecdote lasted for nearly two 
 centuries ; and what was of greater consequence to Al- 
 dus, quickened the sale of his Aristophanes. This inge- 
 
376 LITERA.RT CHARACTER. 
 
 nious invention of the prefacer of Aristophanes at length 
 •was detected by Menage, 
 
 The insincerity of prefaces arises whenever an author 
 wouid disguise his solicitude for his work, by appearing 
 negligent, and even undesirous of its success. A writer 
 will rarely conclude such a preface without betrjiying 
 himseK I think that even Dr. Johnson forgot his sound 
 dialectic in the admirable Preface to his Dictionary, In 
 one part he says, " having laboured this work with so 
 much application, I cannot but have some degree of pa- 
 rental fondness." But in his conclusion he tells us, " I 
 dismiss it with frigid tTEinquillity, having little to fear or 
 hope from censure or from praise." I deny the doctor's 
 " fiigidity." This polished period exhibits an affected 
 stoicism, which no writer ever felt for the anxious labour 
 of a great portion of life, addressed not merely to a class 
 of readers, but to literary Europe. 
 
 But if prefaces are rarely sincere or just, they are, not- 
 withstanding, literary opuscula in which the author is 
 materially concerned. A work with a poor preface, like 
 a person who copses with an indifferent recommendation, 
 must display uncommon merit to master our prejudices, 
 and to please us, as it were, in spite of ourselves, Works 
 ornamented by a finished preface, such as Johnson not 
 infrequently presented to his friends or his booksellei"s, 
 inspire us with awe ; we observe a veteran guard placed 
 in the porch, and we are induced to conclude from this 
 appearance that some person of eminence resides in the 
 place itself. 
 
 The public ^re treated with contempt when an author 
 professes to publish his puerilities. This Warburton did, 
 in his pompoxjs edition of Shakspeare. In the preface he 
 informed the public, that his notes " were among his 
 youngep anvusements, when he turned over these sort of 
 writers." This ungracious compliment to Shaksppare and 
 the public, merited that perfect scourging which our 
 
PREFACES. 377 
 
 haughty commentator received from the sarcastic 
 " Canons of Criticism."* Scudery was a writer of some 
 genius, and great variety. His prefaces are remarkable 
 for their gasconades. In his epic poem of Alaric, he 
 says, " I have such a facility in writing verses, and also 
 in my invention, that a poem of double its length would 
 have cost me little trouble. Although it contains only 
 eleven thousand lines, I believe that longer epics do not 
 exhibit more embellishments than mine." And to con- 
 clude with one more student of this class, Amelot de la 
 Houssaie, in the preface to his translation of " The Prince" 
 of Machiavel, instructs us, that " he considers his copy 
 as superior to the original, because it is everywhere in- 
 telligible, and Machiavel is frequently obscure." I have 
 seen in the playbills of strollers, a very pompous descrip- 
 tion of the triumphant entry of Alexander into Babylon ; 
 had they said nothing about the triumph, it might have 
 passed without exciting ridicule ; and one might not so 
 maliciously have perceived how ill the four candle-snuffers 
 crawled as elephants, and the triumphal car discovered 
 its want of a lid. But having pre-excited attention, we 
 had full leisure to sharpen our eye. To these imprudent 
 authors and actors we may apply a Spanish proverb, 
 which has the peculiar quaintness of that people, Aviendo 
 prego7iado vino, venden vinagre : " Having cried up their 
 wine, they sell us vinegar." 
 
 A ridiculous humility in a preface is not less despica- 
 ble. Many idle apologies were formerly in vogue for 
 publication, and formed a literary cant, of which now 
 the meanest writers perceive the futility. A literary 
 anecdote of the Romans has been preserved, which is 
 sufficiently curious. One Albinus, in the preface to his 
 Koman History, intercedes for pardon for his iiumei-ous 
 blunders of phraseology ; observing that they were the 
 
 * See the essay on Warburton and his disputes in " Quarrela of 
 Authors."— Ed. 
 
378 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 more excusaljle, as he had composed his history in the 
 Greek language, with which he was not so familiar as his 
 maternal tongue. Cato severely rallies him on this ; and 
 justly observes, that our Albinus had merited the pardon 
 he solicits, if a decree of the senate had compelled him 
 thus to have composed it, and he could not have obtained 
 a dispensation. The avowal of our ignorance of the 
 language we employ is like that excuse which some 
 writers make for composing on topics in which they are 
 little conversant. A reader's heart is not so easily molli- 
 fied ; and it is a melancholy truth for literary men that 
 the pleasure of abusing an author is generally superior 
 to that of admiring him. One appears to display more 
 critical acumen than the other, by showing 'that though 
 we do not choose to take the trouble of writing, we have 
 infinitely more genius than the author. These suppliant 
 prefacers are described by Boileau. 
 
 Un auteur h genoux dans une humble preface 
 Au leoteur qu'il ennuie a beau deraander grace ; ■ 
 II ne gagnera rien sur ce juge irrite, 
 Qui lui fait sou proems de pleiue autoritd 
 
 Low in a, humble preface authors kneel ; 
 In vain, the wearied reader's heart is steel. 
 Callous, that irritated judge with awe, 
 ' Inflicts the penalties and arms the law. 
 
 The most entertaining prefaces in our language are 
 those of Dryden ; and though it is ill-naturedly said, by 
 Swift, that they were merely formed 
 
 To raise the volume's price a shilling, 
 
 yet these were the earliest commencements of English 
 ' criticism, and the first attempt to restrain the capricious- 
 ness of readers, and to form a national taste. Dryden 
 has had the candour to acquaint us with his secret of 
 prefatory composition ; for in that one to his Tales he 
 says, " the nature of preface-writing is rambling ; never 
 
PREFACES. 3Y9 
 
 ■wholly out of tlie way, nor in it. This I have learnt 
 from the practice of honest Montaigne." There is no 
 great risk in establishing this observation as an axiom in 
 literature ; for should a prefacer loiter, it is never diffi- 
 cult to get rid of lame persons, by escaping from them ; 
 and the reader may make a preface as concise as he 
 chooses. 
 
 It is possible for an author to paint himself in amiable 
 colours, in this useful page, without incurring the con- 
 tempt of egotism. After a -vmter has rendered himself 
 conspicuous by his industry or his genius, his admirers 
 are not displeased to hear something relative to him from 
 himself. Hayley, in the preface to his poems, has con- 
 veyed an amiable feature in his personal character, by 
 giving the cause of his devotion to literature as the only 
 mode by which he could render himself of some utility 
 to his country. There is a modesty in the prefaces of 
 Pope, even when this great poet collected his immortal 
 works ; and in several other writers of the most elevated 
 genius, in a Hume and a Robertson, which becomes their 
 happy successors to imitate, and inferior writers to con- 
 template with awe. 
 
 There is in prefaces a due respect to be shown to the 
 public and to ourselves. He that has no sense of self- 
 dignity, will not inspire any reverence in others ; and the 
 ebriety of vanity will be sobered by the alacrity we all 
 feel in disturbing the dreams of self-love. If we dare 
 not attempt the rambling prefaces of a Dryden, we may 
 still entertain the reader, and soothe him into good-humour 
 for our own interest. ThiSj perhaps, will be best ob- 
 tained by making the preface (like the symphony to an 
 opera) to contain something analogous to the work itself, 
 to attune the mind into a harmony of tone.* 
 
 ♦ See " Curiosities of Literature," vol. 1., for an article on Prefaces, 
 
380 LITEEAET CHARACTER. 
 
 STYLE. 
 
 EvEET period of literature has its peculiar style, deriTed 
 from some author of reputation ; and the history of a 
 language, as an object of taste, might be traced through 
 a collection of ample quotations from the most celebrated 
 authors of each period. 
 
 To Johnson may be attributed the establishment of 
 our present refinement, and it is with truth he observes 
 of his " Rambler," " That he had laboured to refine our 
 language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from 
 colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular 
 combinations, and that he has added to the elegance of 
 its construction and to the harmony of its cadence." In 
 this description of his own refinement in style and gram- 
 matical accuracy, Johnson probably alluded to the tappy , 
 carelessness of Addison, whose charm of natural ease 
 long afterwards he discovered. But great inelegance of 
 diction disgraced our language even so late as in 1'736, 
 when the " Inquiry into the Life of Homer " was pub- 
 lished. That author was certainly desirous of all the 
 graces of composition, and his volume by its singular 
 sculptures evinces his inordinate affection for his work. 
 This fanciful writer had a taste for polished writing, yet 
 he abounds in expressions which now would be consid- 
 ered as impure in literary composition. Such vulgarisms 
 are common — the Greeks fell to their old trade of one 
 tribe expelling another-^the scene is always at Athens, 
 and all the pother is some little jilting story — the haughty ' 
 Roman snuffed at the suppleness. If such diction had 
 not been usual with good writers at that period, I should 
 not have quoted Blackwall. Middleton, in his " Life of 
 Cicero," though a man of classical taste, and an historian 
 of a classical era, could not preserve himself from collo- • 
 quial inelegances ; the greatest characters are levelled by 
 
STYLE. 381 
 
 the poverty of Ms style. "Warburton, and his imitator 
 Hurd, and other living critics of that school, are loaded 
 with familiar idioms, which at present would debase even 
 the style of conversation. 
 
 Such was the influence of the elaborate novelty of 
 Johnson, that every writer in every class servilely copied 
 the Latinised style. Ludicrously mimicking the contor- 
 tions and re-echoing the sonorous nothings of our great 
 lexicographer ; the novelist of domestic life, or the agri- 
 culturist in a, treatise on turnips, alike aimed at the poly- 
 syllabic force, and the cadenced period. Such was the 
 condition of English style for more than twenty years. 
 
 Some argue in favour of a natural style, and reiterate 
 the opinion of many great critics that proper ideas will 
 be accompanied by proper words ; but though supported 
 by the first authorities, they are not perhaps sufiiciently 
 precise in their definition. Writers may think justly, and 
 yet write without any effect ; while a splendid style may 
 cover a vacuity of thought. Does not this evident fact 
 prove that style and thinking have not that inseparable 
 connexion which many great writers have pronounced ? 
 Milton imagined that beautiful thoughts produce beauti- 
 ful expression.. He says. 
 
 Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move 
 Harmonious numbers: 
 
 Writing is justly called an art ; and Rousseau says, it is 
 not an art easily acquired., Thinking may be the founda- 
 tion of style, but it is not the superstructure ; it is the 
 marble of the edifice, but not its architecture. The art 
 of presenting our thoughts to another, is often a process 
 of considerable time and labour; and the delicate task 
 of correction, ia the- development, of ideas, is reserved 
 only for writers of fine taste. There are several modes 
 of presenting an idea ; vulgar readers are only suscepti- 
 ble of the strong and palpable stroke: but there are 
 
332 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 many shades of sentiment, which, to seize on and to paint 
 is the pride and the labour of a skilful writer. A beau- 
 tiful simplicity itself is a species of refinement, and no 
 writer more solicitously corrected his works than Hume, 
 who excels in this mode of composition. The philoso- 
 pher highly approves of Addison's definition of fine 
 writing, who says, that it consists of sentiments which 
 are natural, without being obvious. This is a definition 
 of thought rather than of composition. Slienstone has 
 hit the truth ; for fine writing he defines to be generally 
 the efiect of spontaneous thoughts and a laboured style. 
 Addison was not insensible to these charms, and he felt 
 the seductive art of Cicero when he said, that " there is 
 as much difference in apprehending a thought clothed in 
 Cicero's language and that of a common author, as in 
 seeing an object by the light of a taper, or by the light 
 of the sun." 
 
 Mastnbkists in style, however great their powers, rather 
 excite the admiration than the affection of a man of taste; 
 because their habitual art dissipates that illusion of sin- 
 cerity, which we love to believe is the impulse which 
 places the pen in the hand of an author. Two eminent 
 literary mannerists are Cicero and Johnson. We know 
 the^e great men considered their eloquence as a deceptive! 
 art ; of any subject, it had been indifferent to them which 
 side to adopt ; and in reading their elaborate works, our 
 ear is more frequently gratified by the ambitious magni- 
 ficence of their diction, than our heart penetrated by the 
 pathetic enthusiasm of their sentiments. Writers who 
 are not mannerists, but who seize the appropriate tone of 
 their subject, appear to feel a conviction of what they at- 
 tempt to persuade their reader. It is observable, that it 
 is impossible to imitate with uniform felicity the noble 
 simplicity of a pathetic writer ; while the peculiarities of 
 a mannerist are so far from being difficult, that they are 
 displayed with nice exactjjess by middling writers, who, 
 
GOLDSMITH ASB JOHNSOIT. 383 
 
 although their own natural manner had nothing interest- 
 ing, have attracted notice by such imitations. We may 
 apply to some monotonous mannerists these verses of 
 Boileau ; 
 
 Voulez-vous du public meriter les amours 7 
 Sans cesse en ^crivant yariez vos discours. 
 On lit peu ces auteura nes pour nous enauier, 
 Qui toujouTS Bur un ton semblent psalmodier. 
 
 Would you the public's envied favours gain 1 
 Ceaseless, in writing, variegate the strain ; 
 The heavy author, who the fancy calms, 
 Seems in one tone to chant his nasal psalms. 
 
 Every style is excellent, if it be proper ; and that style 
 is most proper which can best convey the intentions of 
 the author to his reader. And, after all, it is style alone 
 by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an 
 author can have nothing truly his own but his style ; 
 facts, scientific- discoveries, and every kind of informa- 
 tion, may be seized by all, but an author's diction can- 
 not be taken from him. Hence very learned writers have 
 been neglected, while their learning has not been lost to 
 the world, by having been given by writers with more 
 amenity. It is therefore the duty of an author to learn 
 to write as well as to learn to think ; and this art can 
 only be obtained by the habitual study of his sensations, 
 and an intimate acquaintance with the intellectual facul- 
 ties. These are the true prompters of those felicitous ex- 
 pressions which give a tone congruous to the subject, and 
 which invest our thoughts with all the illusion, the beauty, 
 and motion of lively perception. 
 
 GOLDSMITH AND JOHNSON". 
 
 WE should not censure artists and writers for their 
 attachment to their favourite excellence. Who but an 
 
384 LITEEAET CHARACTER. 
 
 artist can value tlie ceaseless inquietudes of arduous per- 
 fection ; can trace the remote possibilities combined in a 
 close union ; the happy arrangement and the novel varia- 
 tion ? He not only is affected by the performance like 
 the man of taste, but is influenced by a peculiar sensation ; 
 for while he contemplates the apparent beauties, he traces 
 in his own mind those invisible processes by which the 
 final beauty was accomplished. Hence arises that species 
 of comparative criticism, which one great author usually 
 makes of his own manner with that of another great 
 writer, and which so often causes him to be stigmatised 
 with the most unreasonable vanity. 
 
 The character of Goldsmith, so underrated in his own 
 day, exemplifies this principle in the literary character. 
 That pleasing writer, without any perversion of intellect 
 or inflation of vanity, might have contrasted his powers 
 with those of Johnson, and might, according to his own 
 ideas, have considered himself as not inferior to his more 
 celebrated and learned rival. 
 
 Goldsmith might have preferred the felicity of his own 
 genius, which like a native stream flowed from a natural 
 source, to the elaborate powers of Johnson, which in some 
 respects may be compared to those artificial waters which 
 throw their sparkling currents in the air, to fall into mar- 
 ble basins. He might have considered that he had em- 
 bellished philosophy with poetical elegance ; and have 
 preferred the paintings of his descriptions, to the terse 
 versification and the pointed sentences of Johnson. He 
 might have been more pleased with the faithful represen- 
 tations of English manners in his " Vicar of Wakefield," 
 than with the borrowed grandeur and the exotic fancy 
 of the Oriental Rasselas. He might have believed, what 
 many excellent, crities have believed^ that in this age 
 comedy requires more genius than tragedy ; and with his 
 audienee he might have infinitely more esteemed his own 
 original humour, than Johnson's rhetorical declamation. 
 
SELF-OHABACTERS. 3S5 
 
 He might have thought, that with inferior literature he 
 displayed superior genius, and with less profundity more 
 gaiety. He might have considered that the facility and 
 vivacity of his pleasing compositions were preferable to 
 that art, that habitual pomp, and that ostentatious elo- 
 quence, which prevail in the operose labours of Johnson. 
 No one might be more sensible than himself, that he, ac- 
 cording to the happy expression of Johnson (when his 
 rival was in his grave), "tetigit et ornavit." Gold- 
 smith, therefore,' without any singular vanity, might have 
 concluded, from his own reasonings, that he was not an 
 inferior writer to Johnson : all this not having been con- 
 sidered, he has borne down to posterity as the vainest and 
 the most jealous of writers ; he whose dispositions were 
 the most inoffensive, whose benevolence was the most 
 extensive, and whose amiableness of heart has been con- 
 cealed by its artlessness, and passed over in the sarcasms 
 and sneers of a more eloquent rival, and his submissive 
 partisans. 
 
 SELF-CHARACTERS. 
 
 There are two species of minor biography which may 
 be discriminated ; detailing our own life and portraying 
 our own character. The writing our own life has been 
 practised with various success ; it is a delicate operation, 
 a stroke too much may destroy the effect of the whole. 
 If once we detect an author deceiving or deceived, it is 
 a livid spot which infects the entire body. To publish 
 one's own life has sometimes been a poor artifice to bring 
 obscurity into notice; it is the ebriety of vanity, and 
 the delirium of egotism. When a great man leaves some 
 memorial of his days, the grave consecrates the motive. 
 There are certain things which relate to ourselves, which 
 no one can know so well ; a great genius obliges posterity 
 25 
 
386 LITERARY CHABACTER. 
 
 when he records them. But they must be composed 
 ■with calmness, with simplicity, and with sincerity ; the 
 biographic sketch of Hume, written by himself, is a 
 model of Attic simplicity. The Life of Lord Herbert is , 
 a biographical curiosity. The Memoirs of Sir William 
 Jones, of Priestley, and of Gibbon, offer us the daily life 
 of the student ; and those of CoUey Gibber are a fine • 
 picture of the self-painter. We have some other pieces 
 of self-biography, precious to the philosopheif.* 
 
 The other species of minor biography, that of por- 
 traying our own character, could only have been invented 
 by the most refined and the vainest nation. The French 
 long cherished this darling egotism ; and" have a coUeisl 
 tion of these self-portraits in two bulky volumes. The 
 brilliant Fldchier, and the refined St. Evremond, have 
 framed and glazed their portraits. Every writer then 
 considered his character as necessary as his *'prefaee. 
 The fashion seems to have passed over to our country 5 
 Farquhar has drawn his character in a letter to a lady ; 
 and others of our writers have given us their own minia- 
 tures. 
 
 There was, as a book in my possession will testify, a 
 certain verse-maker of the name of Gantenac, who, in 
 1662, published in the city of Paris a volume, contaiamg 
 some thousands of verses, which were, as his countrymen^ 
 express it, de sa fa^on, after his own way. He fell so 
 Suddenly into the darkest and deepest pit of oblivion, 
 that not a trace of his memory would have remained, 
 had he not condescended to give ample information of _ 
 every particular relative to himself. He has acquainted ' 
 us with his size, and tells us, " that it is rare to see a man 
 smaller than himself. I have that in common with all 
 dwarfs, that if my head only were seen, I should be 
 
 * One of the most interesting is that of Gifford, appended to hia 
 translation of Juvenal ; it is a most remarkable record of the strug- 
 gles of its author in early life, told with candour and simplicity. — Ed. 
 
SELF-CHAEACTEESv 38Y 
 
 thought a large man."' This atom in creation then de- 
 scribes his oral and full face; his flery and eloquent eyes; 
 his vermil lips ; his robust constitution, and his efferves- 
 cent passions. He appears to hare been a most petulant, 
 honest, and dinainutive being. 
 
 The description of his intellect is the object of our curi- 
 osity. " I am as ambitious as any person can be ; but I 
 would not sacrifice my honour to my ambition. I am so 
 sensible to contempt, that I bear a mortal and iraplacabte 
 hatred against those who contemn me, and I know I could 
 never reconcile myself With them ; but I spare no attentions 
 for those I love ; I would give them my fortune and my 
 life. I sometimes lie ; but generally in affairs of gallantry, 
 where I voluntarily confirm falsehoods by oaths^ without, 
 reflection, for swearing with me is a habit. I am told- 
 that my mind is brilliant, and that I have a certain man- 
 ner in turning a thought which is quite my own. I am 
 agreeable in conversation, tliouigh I confess I am often 
 troublesome ; for I maintain paradoxes to display my* 
 genius, which savour too much of scholastic subterfuges. 
 I speak too often and too long; and as I ha^e some read- 
 ing, and a copious memory, I am fond of showing what- 
 ever I know. My judgment is not so soEd as my wit is 
 lively. I am often melancholy and unhappy; and this 
 sombrous disposition proceed* from niy numerous disap- 
 pointments in life. My verse is preferred to my prose ; 
 and it has been of some use to me in pleasing the fair 
 sex ; poetry is most adapted to persuade women ; but 
 otherwise it has been of no service to me, and has, I fear, 
 rendered me unfit for many advantageous occupations, in 
 which I might have drudged. The esteem of the fair 
 has, however, charmed away my complaints. This good 
 fortune has been obtained by me, at the cost of many 
 cares, and an unsubdued patience ; for I am one of those 
 who, in affairs of love, will sufier an entire year, to taste 
 the pleasures of one day." 
 
388 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 This character of Cantenac has some local features; 
 for an English poet would hardly console himself with, so 
 much gaiety. The Frenchman's attachment to the ladies 
 seems to be equivalent to the advantageous occupations 
 he had lost. But as the miseries of a literary man, 
 without conspicuous talents, are always the same at 
 Paris as in London, there are some parts of this charac- 
 ter of Cantenac which appear to describe them with 
 truth. Cantenac was a man of honour; as warm in his 
 resentment as his gratitude; but deluded by literary 
 vanity, he became a writer in prose and verse, and while 
 he saw the prospects of life closing on him, probably 
 considered that the age was unjust. A melancholy ex- 
 ample for certain volatile and fervent spirits, who, by 
 becoming authors, ^ther submit their felicity to the ca- 
 prices of others, or annihilate the obscure comforts of 
 life, and, like him, having " been told that their 'mind is 
 brilliant, and that they have a certain manner in turning 
 a thought," become writers, and complain that they are 
 " often melancholy, owing to their numerous disappoint- 
 ments." Happy, however, if the obscure, yet too sen- 
 sible writer, can suffer an entire year, for the enjoyment 
 of a single, day ! But for this, a man must have been 
 born in Prance. 
 
 ON READIKG. 
 
 Wetting is justly denominated an art ; I think that 
 reading claims the same distinction. To adorn ideaiS 
 with elegance is an act of the mind superior to that of 
 receiving them ; but to receive them with a happy dis- 
 crimination is the effect of a practised taste. 
 
 Yet it will be found that taste alone is not suiBcient to 
 obtain the proper end of reading. Two persons of equal 
 taste rise from the perusal, of the same book with very 
 
ON READING. 389 
 
 different notions : the one will have the ideas of the 
 author at command, and jBnd a new train of sentiment 
 awakened ; while the other quits his author in a pleasing 
 distraction, hut of the pleasures of reading nothing re- 
 mains but tumultuous sensations. 
 
 To account for these different effects, we must have re- 
 course to a logical distinction, which appears to reveal one 
 of the great mysteries in the art of reading. Logicians 
 distinguish between perceptions and ideas. Perception 
 is that faculty of the mind which notices the simple im- 
 pression of objects : but when these objects exist in the 
 mind, and are there treasured and arranged as materials 
 for reflection, then they are called ideas. A perception is 
 like a transient sunbeam, which just shows the object, 
 but leaves neither light nor warmth ; while an idea is 
 like the fervid beam of noon, which throws a settled and 
 powerful light. 
 
 Many ingenious readers complain that their memory 
 is defective, and their studies unfruitful. This defect 
 arises from their indulging the facile pleasures of percep- 
 tions, in preference to the laborious habit of forming 
 them into ideas. Perceptions require only the sensibility 
 of taste, and their pleasures are continuous, easy, and 
 exquisite. Ideas are an art of combination, and an ex- 
 ertion of the reasoning powers. Ideas are therefore 
 labours ; and for those who will not labour, it is unjust 
 to complain, if they come from the harvest with scarcely 
 a sheaf in their hands. 
 
 There are secrets in the art of reading which tend to 
 facilitate its purposes, by assisting the memory, and aug- 
 menting intellectual opulence. Some our own ingenuity 
 must form, and perhaps every student has peculiar habits 
 of study, as, in short-hand, almost every writer has a 
 system of his own. 
 
 It is an observation of the elder Pliny (who, having 
 been a voluminous compiler, must have had great 
 
390 lilTERART CnAEACTEE. 
 
 eatperience ia ibe art of reading), that tiere was no book 
 so bad but which contained something good. To read 
 every feook Would, however, be fatal to the interest of 
 most readers; but it is mot always necessary, in the 
 pursuits of learning, to read every book entire. Of 
 many books it is sufficient to seize the plan, and to 
 examine eome of their portions. Of the little supple- 
 ment at the close of a volume, few readers conceive the 
 utility ; but some of the most eminent writers in Eui-ope 
 have been great adepts in the art of index reading. I, 
 for my part, venerate the inventor of indexes; and I 
 know not to whom to yield the preference, either to 
 Hippocrates, who was the first great anatomiser of th« 
 human body, or to that iinknown labourer in literature, 
 who first laid open the nerves and arteries of a book. 
 Watts advises the perusal of the prefaces and the index 
 of a book, as they both give light on its contents. 
 
 The ravenous appetite of Johnson for reading is 
 expressed in a strong metaphor by Mrs. Knowles, who 
 «aid, "he knows how to read better than any on.e ; he 
 gets at the substance of a book directly : he tears out the 
 heart of it." Gibbon has a new idea in the " Art of 
 Reading ;" he says " we ought not to attend to the order 
 of our books so mnch as of our thoughts. The perusal 
 of a particular work gives birth jierhaps to ideas uncon- 
 nected with the subject it treats ; I pursue these ideas, 
 and quit my proposed plan of reading." Thus in the 
 midst of Homer he read Longinus ; a chapter of Longinus 
 led to an epistle of Pliny ; and having finished Longinus, 
 he followed the train of his ideas of the sublime and 
 beautiful in the "Enquiry" of Burke, and concluded by 
 comparing the ancient with the modern Longinus. 
 
 There are some mech.anical aids in reading which may 
 prove of great utility, and form a kind of rejuvenescence 
 of our early studies. Montaigne placed at the end of a 
 book which he intended not to i-eperuse, the time ho had 
 
ON READING. 891 
 
 read it, with a concise decision on its merits; "that," 
 eays he, " it may thus represent to me the air and 
 general idea I had conceived of the author, in reading 
 the work." We have several of these annotations. Of 
 ' Young the poet it is noticed, that whenever he came to a 
 striking passage he folded the leaf; and that at his 
 death, hooks have been found in his library which had long 
 resisted the power of closing : a mode more easy than use- 
 ful ; for after a length of time they must be again read to 
 know why they were folded. This difficulty is obviated by 
 those who note in a blank leaf the pages to be referred to, 
 with a word of criticism. Nor let us consider these mi- 
 nute directions as unworthy the most enlarged minds ; by 
 these petty exertions, at the most distant periods, may 
 learning obtain its authorities, and fancy combine its ideas. 
 Seneca, in sending some volumes to his friend Lucil- 
 ius, accompanies them with notes of particular passages, 
 " that," he observes, " you who only aim at the . useful 
 may be spared the trouble of examining them entire." I 
 Lave seen books noted by Voltaire with a word of 
 censure or approbation on the page itself^ which was his 
 usual practice ; and these volumes are precious to every 
 man of taste. Formey complained that the books he lent 
 Voltaire were returned always disfigured by his remarks ; 
 but he was a writer of the old school.* 
 
 A professional student should divide his readings into 
 a uniform reading which is useful, and into a diversified 
 reading which is pleasant. Guy Patin, an eminent 
 physician and man of letters, had a just notion of. this 
 manner. He . says, " I daily read Hippocrates, Galen, 
 Fernel, and other illustrious masters of my profession ; 
 this I call my profitable readings. I frequently read 
 Ovid, Juvenal, Horace, Seneca, Tacitus, and others, and 
 
 *, The account of Oldja and his manusoripts, in the third volume of 
 the " Curiosities of Literature," will furnish abundant proof of the 
 value of sufih disfigwations when the Work of certain hands. — Ei). 
 
392 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 these are my recreations." We must observe these 
 distinctions ; for it frequently happens that a lawyer or a 
 physician, with great industry and love of study, by 
 giving too much into his diversified readings, may 
 utterly neglect what should be his uniform studies. 
 
 A reader is too often a prisoner attached to the trium- . 
 phal car of an author of great celebrity ; and when he ' 
 ventures not to judge for himself, conceives, while he is: 
 reading the indifferent works of great authors, that the 
 ' languor which he experiences arises from his own 
 defective taste. But the best writers, when they are 
 voluminous, have a great deal of mediocrity. 
 
 On the other side, readers must not imagine that all 
 the pleasures of composition depend on the author, for 
 there is something which a reader himself must bring ta 
 the book that the book may please. There is a literary 
 appetite, which the author can no more impart than the. 
 most skilful cook can give an appetency to the guests. 
 When Cardinal Richelieu said to Godeau, that he did not 
 understand his verses, the honest poet replied that it was 
 not his fault. The temporary tone of the mind may be 
 unfavourable to taste a work properly, and we have had 
 many erroneous criticisms from great men, which may 
 often be attributed to this circumstance. The mind 
 communicates its infinn dispositions tOi.the book, and an 
 author has not only his own defects to account for, but 
 also those of his reader. There is something in compo- 
 ^sition like the game of shuttlecock, where if the reader . 
 do not quickly rebound the feathered cock to the author, 
 the game is destroyed, and the whole spirit of the work 
 falls extinct. 
 
 A frequent impediment in reading is a disinclination 
 in the mind, to settle on the subject; agitated by 
 incongruous and dissimilar ideas, it is with pain that we 
 admit those of the author. But on applying ourselves 
 with a gentle violence to the perusal of an interesting 
 
ON BEADING. 393 
 
 ■work, the mind soon assimilates to the subject; the 
 ancient rabbins advised their young students to apply 
 themselves to their readings, whether they felt an 
 inclination or not, because, as they proceeded, they 
 would find their disposition restored and their curiosity 
 awakened. 
 
 Readers may be classed into an infinite number of divi- 
 sions; but an author is a solitary being, who, for the 
 same reason he pleases one, must consequently displease 
 another. To have too exalted a genius is more prejudi- 
 cial to his celebrity than to have a moderate one ; for we 
 shall find that the most popular works are not the most 
 profound, but such as instruct those who require instruc- 
 tion, and charm those who are not too learned to taste 
 their novelty. Lucilius, the satirist, said, that he did not 
 write for Persius, for Scipio, and for Rutilius, persons 
 eminent for their science, but for the Tarentines, the 
 Consentines, and the Sicilians. Montaigne has com- 
 plained that he found his readers too learned, or too 
 ignorant, and that he could only please a middle class, 
 who have just learning enough to comprehend him. Con- 
 greve says, "there is in true beauty something which 
 vulgar souls cannot admire:" Balzac complains bitterly 
 of readers, — "A period," he cries, "shall have cost us 
 the labour of a day; we shall have distilled into an 
 essay the essence of our mind ; it may be a finished piece 
 of art ; and they think they are indulgent when they 
 pronounce it to contain some pretty things, and that the 
 style is not bad !" There is something in exquisite com- 
 position which ordinary readers can never understand. 
 
 Authors are vain, but readers are capricious. Some 
 will only read old» books, as if there were no valuable 
 truths to be discovered in modern publications; while 
 others will only read new books, as if some valuable 
 truths are not among the old. Some will not read a 
 book, because they are acquainted with the author ; by 
 
394 LITERAEY CHARAOTEE. 
 
 which the reader may be more injured than the author : 
 others not only read the hook, but would also read the 
 man ; by which the most ingenious author may be injured 
 by the most impertinent reader. 
 
 ON HABrrUATING OURSELVES TO AN INDI- 
 VIDUAL PURSUIT. 
 
 Two things in human life are at continual variance, 
 and without escaping from the one we must be separated 
 from the other ; and these are ennui and pleasure. Ennui 
 is an afflicting sensation, if we may thus express it, from 
 a want ofi sensation ; and pleasure is greater pleasure 
 according to the quantity of sensation. That sensation 
 is received in proportion to the capacity of our organs ; 
 and that practice, or, as it has been sometimes called, 
 " educated feeling," enlarges this capacity, is evident in 
 ' such familiar instances as those of the blind, who have a 
 finer tact, and the jeweller, who has a finer sight, than 
 other men who are not so deeply interested in refining 
 their vision and their touch. Intense attention is, there- 
 fore, a certain means of deriving more numerous pleasures 
 from its object. 
 
 Hence it is that the poet, long employed on a poem, 
 has received a quantity of pleasure which no reader can 
 ever feeL In the progress of any particular pursuit, 
 there are a hundred fugitive sensations which are too 
 intellectual to be embodied into language. Every artist 
 knows that between the thought that first gave rise to 
 his design, and each one which appears in it, there are 
 innumerable intermediate evanescences of sensation which 
 no man felt but himself These pleasures are in number 
 according to the intenseness of his faculties and the 
 quantity of his labour. 
 
 It is so in any particular pursuit, from the manufactur- 
 
HABITtTAimG OtTRSBLTES, ETC. 395 
 
 itig of pins to the construction of philosophical systems. 
 Every individual caii exert that quantity of mind neces- 
 sary to his -wants and adapted to his situation; the 
 quality of pleasure is nothing in the present question : 
 for I think that we are mistaken concerning the grada- 
 tions of human felicity. It does at first appear, that an 
 astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, 
 must feel a more exquisite delight than a farmer who is 
 conducting his team ; or a poet experience a higher grati- 
 fication in modulating verses than a trader in arranging 
 Sums. But the happiness of the ploughman and the 
 trader may be as satisfactory as that of the astronomer 
 and the poet. Our mind can only be conversant with 
 those sensations which surround us, and possessing the 
 skill of managing them, we can form an artificial felicity ; 
 it is certain that what the soul does not feel, no more 
 affects it than what the eye does not see. It is thus that 
 the trader, habituated to humble pursuits, can never be 
 unhappy because he is not the general of an army ; for 
 this idea of felicity he has never received. The philoso- 
 pher who givEs his entire years to the elevated pursuits 
 of mind, is never unhappy because he is not in posses- 
 sion of an Indian opulence, for the idea of accumulating 
 this exotic splendour has never entered the range of his 
 combinations. Nature, an impartial mother, renders 
 felicity as perfect in the school-boy who scourges his top, 
 as in the astronomer who regulates his star. The thing 
 contained can only be equal to the container ; a full glass 
 is as full as a full bottle ; and a human soul may be as 
 much satisfied in the lowest of human beings as in the 
 highest. 
 
 In the progress of an individual pursuit, what philoso- 
 phers call the associating or suggesting idea is ever 
 busi«d, and in its beautiful effects genius is most deeply 
 concerned ; for besides those trains of thought the gi'eat 
 ' ■'-'U in tn during his actual crm^-^'-^'-' ■ - ^•■.■•■:~.. ■ 
 
396 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 habit accompanies real genius through life in the activity 
 of his associating idea, when not at his work ; it is at all 
 times pressing and conducting his spontaneous thoughts, 
 and every object which suggests them, however ap- 
 parently trivial or unconnected towards itself, making 
 what it wills its own, while instinctively it seems in- 
 attentive to whatever has no tendency to its own pur- 
 poses. 
 
 Many peculiar advantages attend the cultivation of 
 one master passion or occupation. In superior minds it 
 is a sovereign that exiles others, and in inferior minds 
 it enfeebles pernicious propensities. It may render us 
 useful to our fellow-citizens, and it imparts the most per- 
 fect independence to ourselves. It is observed by a great 
 mathematician, that a geometrician would not be unhappy 
 in a desert. 
 
 This unity of design, with a centripetal force, draws 
 all the rays of our existence ; and often, when accident 
 has turned the mind firmly to one object, it has been 
 discovered that its occupation is another name for hap- 
 piness ; for it is a mean of escaping from incongruous 
 sensations. It secures us from the dark vacuity of soul, 
 as well as from the whirlwind pf ideas ; reason itself is a 
 passion, but a passion full of serenity. 
 
 It is, however, observable of those who have devoted 
 themselves to an individual object, that its importance is 
 incredibly enlarged to their sensations. Intense atten- 
 tion magnifies like a microscope; but it is possible to 
 apologise for their aj)parent extravagance from the con- 
 sideration, that they really observe combinations not 
 perceived by others of inferior application. That this 
 passion has been carried to a curious violence of aifec- 
 tion, literary history afibrds numerous instances. In 
 reading Dr. Burney's " Musical Travels," it would seem 
 that music was the prime object of human life ; Richard- 
 son, the painter, in his treatise on his beloved art, closes 
 
ON NOVELTY IN LITEEATTTRE. 397 
 
 all by affirming, that, " Raphael is not only equal, but 
 superior to a Virgil, or a Livy, or a Thuoydides, or a 
 Homer V and that painting can reform our manners, 
 inerease our opulence, honour, and power. Denina, in 
 his " Revolutions of Literature," tells us that to excel in 
 historical composition requires more ability than is exer- 
 cised by the excelling masters of any other art ; because 
 it requires not only the same erudition, genius, imagina- 
 tion, and taste, necessary for a poet, a painter, or a phi- 
 losopher, but the historian must also have some peculiar 
 qualifications; this served as a prelude to his own his- 
 tory.* Helvetius, an enthusiast in the fine arts and polite 
 literature, has composed a poem on Happiness ; and 
 imagines that it consists in an exclusive loye of the 
 cultivation of letters and the arts. All this shows that 
 the more intensely we attach ourselves to an individual 
 object, the more numerous and the more perfect are our 
 sensations ; if we yield to the distracting variety of 
 opposite pursuits with an equal passion, our soul is placed 
 amid a continual shock of ideas, and happiness is lost by 
 mistakes. 
 
 ON NOVELTY IN LITERATURE. 
 
 " All is said," exclaims the lively La Bruyere ; but at 
 the same moment, by his own admirable Reflections, 
 confutes the dreary system he would establish. An 
 opinion of the exhausted state of literature has been a 
 popular prejudice of remote existence ; and an unhappy 
 idea of a wise ancient, who, even in his day, lamented 
 
 * One of the most amusing modern instances occurs in the Preface 
 to the late Peter Buchan's annotated edition of " Ancient Ballads and 
 Songs of the North of Scotland " (2 vols. 8vo, Edin. 1828), in which' 
 he declares—" No one has yet conceived, nor has it entered the mind' 
 of man, what patience, perseverance, and general knowledge are neces- 
 sary for an editor of a Collection of Ancient Ballads." — Ed. 
 
398 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 that " of books there is no end," has heen transcribed in 
 many books. He who has critically examined any branch 
 of literature, has discovered how little of original inven' 
 tion is to be found even in the most excellent works. To 
 add a little to his predecessors satisfies the ambition of 
 the first geniuses. The popular notion of literary nov- 
 elty is an idea more fanciful than exact. Many are yet 
 to learn that our admired originals are not such as they 
 mistake them to be ; that the plans of the most original 
 pei'formances have been borrowed ; and that the thoughts 
 of the most admired compositions are not wonderful dis- 
 coveries, but only truths, which the ingenuity of the 
 author, by arranging the intermediate and accessaiy 
 ideas, has unfolded from that confused sentiment, which 
 those experience who are not accustomed to think with 
 depth, or to discriminate with accuracy. This Novelty 
 in Literature is, as Pope defines it, 
 
 "What oft was thought, Ijut ne'er so well expreas'd. 
 
 Novelty, in its rigid acceptation, will not be found in any 
 judicious production. 
 
 Voltaire looked on everything as imitation. He ob- 
 serves that the most original writers borrowed one from 
 another, and says that the instruction we gather from 
 books is like fire — we fetch it from our neighbours, kindle 
 it at home, and communicate it to others, till it becomes 
 the property of all. He traces some of the finest com- 
 positions to the fountain-head ; and the reader smiles 
 when he perceives that they have travelled in regular 
 succession through China, India, Arabia, and Greece, to 
 France and to England. 
 
 To the obscurity of time are the ancients, indebted 
 for that originality in which they are imagined to excel, 
 but we know how frequently they accuse each other ; and. 
 to have borrowed copiously from preceding writers was 
 not considered criminal by such illustrious authors as 
 
ON NOYELTT IN LITEBATTTRB 399 
 
 Plato and Cicero. The uEneid of Virgil displays little 
 invention in the incidents, for it unites the plan of the 
 Iliad and the Odyssey. 
 
 Our own early writers have not more originality than 
 modern genius may aspire to reach. To imitate and to 
 rival the Italians and the French formed their devotion, 
 Chaucer, Gower, and Gawin Douglas, were all spirited 
 imitators, aad frequently only masterly translators. 
 Spenser, the father of so many poets, is himself the child 
 of the Ausonian Muse. Milton is, incessantly borrowing 
 from the poetry of his day. In the beautiful Masque of 
 Comus he preserved all the circumstances of the work he 
 imitated. Tasso opened for him the Tartarean Gulf; the 
 sublime description of the bridge may be found in Sadi, 
 who borrowed it from the Turkish theology ; the para- 
 dise of fools is a wild flower, transplanted from the wil- 
 derness of Ariosto. The rich poetry of Gray is a won- 
 derful tissue, woven on the frames, and composed with 
 the gold threads, of others. To Cervantes we owe But- 
 ler ; and the united abilities of three great wits, in their 
 Martinus Scriblerus, could find no other mode of con- 
 veying their powers but by imitating at once Don 
 Quixote and Monsieur Oufle. Pope, like Boileau, had all 
 the ancients and moderns in his pay ; the contributions 
 he levied were not the pillages of a bandit, but the taxes 
 of a monarch. Swift is much indebted for the plans of 
 his two very original performances : he owes the " Trav- 
 els of Gulliver" to the " Voyages of .Cyrano de Bergerao 
 to the Sun and Moon ;" a writer, who, -without the acute- 
 ness of Swift, has wilder flashes of fancy ; Joseph War- 
 ton has observed many of Swift's strokes in Bishop 
 Godwin's " Man in the Moon," who, in his turn, must have 
 borrowed his work from Cyrano. " The Tale of a Tub " 
 is an imitation of such various originals, that they are toQ 
 numerous here to mention. Wotton observed, justly, 
 that in many places the author's wit is not his own. 
 
400 IITERART CHARACTER. 
 
 Dr. Ferriar's " Essay on the Imitations of Sterne'-' might 
 he considerably augmented. Such are the writers, how- 
 ever, who imitate, but remain inimitable ! 
 
 Montaigne, with honest naivete, compares his writings 
 to a thread that binds the flowers of others ; and that, by 
 incessantly pouring the waters of a few good old authors 
 into his sieve, some drops fall upon his paper. The good 
 old man elsewhere acquaints us with a certain stratagem 
 of his own invention, consisting of his inserting whole 
 sentences from the ancients, without acknowledgment; 
 that the critics might blunder, by giving nazardes to 
 Seneca and Plutarch, while they imagined they tweaked 
 his nose. Petrarch, who is not the inventor of that ten- 
 der poetry of which he is the model, and Boccaccio, called 
 the father of Italian novelists, have alike profited by a 
 studious perusal of writers, who are now only read by 
 those who have more curiosity than taste. Boiafdo has 
 imitated Pulci, and Ariosto, Boiardo. The madness of 
 Orlando Furioso, though it wears, by its extravagance, a 
 very original air, is only imitated from Sir Launcelot in 
 the old romance of " Morte Arthur," with which, Warton 
 observes, it agrees in every leading circumstance ; and 
 what is the Cardenio of Cervantes but the Orlando, of 
 Ariosto ? Tasso has imitated the Iliad, and enriched his 
 poem with episodes from the JEneid. It is curious to 
 observe that even Dante, wild and original as he appears, 
 when he meets Virgil in the Inferno, warmly expresses 
 his gratitude for the many fine passages for which he was 
 indebted to his works, and on which he says he had " long 
 meditated." Moliere and La Fontaine are considered to 
 possess as much originality as any of the French writers ; 
 yet the learned Manage calls Moliere " un grand et habile 
 picoreur ;" and Boileau tells us that La Fontaine bof" 
 rowed his style and matter from Marot and Rabelais, and 
 took his subjects from Boccaccio, Poggius, and Ariosto. 
 Nor was the eccentric Rabelais the inventor of most of 
 
YEES DE SOCIBTB. 4:01 
 
 his burlesque narratives ; and he is a very close imitator 
 of Folengo, the inventor of the macaronic poetry, and 
 not a little indebted to the old Faeezie of the Italians. 
 Indeed Marot, Villon, as well as those we have noticed, 
 profited by the authors anterior to the age of Francis I. 
 La Bruyere incorporates whole passages of Publius Syrus 
 in his work, as the translator of the latter abundantly 
 shows. To the " Turkish Spy" was Montesquieu be- 
 holden for his " Persian Letters," and a numerous crowd 
 are indebted to Montesquieu. Corneille made a liberal 
 use of Spanish literature ; and the pure waters of Racine 
 flowed from the fountains of Sophocles and Euripides. 
 
 This vein of imitation runs through the productions of 
 our greatest authors. Vigneul de Marville compares 
 some of the first writers to bankers who are rich with 
 the assembled fortunes of individuals, and would be often 
 ruined were they too hardly drawn on. 
 
 VERS DE socrfiTiS. 
 
 Plint, in an epistle to Tusous, advises him to intermix 
 among his severer studies the softening charms of poetry ; 
 and notices a species of poetical composition which merits 
 critical animadversion. I shall quote Pliny in the lan- 
 guage of his elegant translator. He says, " These pieces 
 commonly go under the title of poetical amusements ; 
 but these amusements have sometimes gained as much 
 reputation to their authors as works of a more serious 
 nature. It is surprising how much the mind is enter- 
 tained and enlivened by these little poetical compositions, 
 as they turn upon subjects of gallantry, satire, tender- 
 ness, politeness, and everything, in short, that concerns 
 life, and the affairs of the world." 
 
 This species of poetry has been carried to its utmost 
 
 2S 
 
402 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 pei'fection by the French. It has heen diseriminated by 
 them, from the mass of poetry, under the apt title of 
 " Potsies leghres" and sometimes it has been significantly 
 called " Yers de SociSte.''^ The French writers have 
 formed a body of this fugitive poetry which no European 
 nation can rival ; and to which both the language and 
 genius appear to be greatly favourable. 
 
 The " Poesies Ughres" are not merely compositions of a 
 light and gay turn, but are equally employed as a vehicle 
 for tender and pathetic sentiment. They are never long, 
 for they are consecrated to the amusement of society. 
 The author appears to have composed them for his pleas- 
 vire, not for his glory ; and he charms his readeft, because 
 he seems careless of their approbation. 
 
 Every delicacy of sentiment must find its delicacy of 
 expression, and every tenderness of thought muSf be 
 softened by the tenderest tones. Nothing trite ot trivial 
 must enfeeble and chill the imagination ; nor must the 
 ear be denied its gratification by a rough or careless 
 verse. In these works nothing is pardoned'; a word 
 may disturb, a line may destroy the charm. 
 
 The passions of the poet may form the subjects of his 
 verse. It is in these writings he delineates himself; he 
 reflects his tastes, his desires, his humours, his amours, 
 and even his defects. In other poems the poet disappears 
 lander the feigned character he assumes ; here alon^' he 
 speaks, here he acts. He makes a confidant of the reader, 
 interests him in his hopes and his sorrows ; we admire 
 the poet, and conclude with esteeming the man. The 
 poem is the complaint of a lover, or a conipliment to a ' 
 patron, a vow of friendship, or a hymn of gratitude. 
 
 These poems have often, with great success, displayed 
 pictures of manners ; for here the poet colours the ob- 
 jects with all the hues of social life. Reflection must 
 not be amplified, for these are pieces devoted to the 
 fancy; a scene may be painted throughout the poem ; a 
 
YEES DE SOCIBTE. 403 
 
 sentiment must be conveyed in a verse. In the " Grongar 
 Hill " of Dyer we discover some strokes which may serve 
 to exemplify this criticism. The poet, contemplating the 
 distant landscape, observes — 
 
 A step metliinks may pass the stream, 
 So little distant dangers seem ; 
 So we mistake the future's face, 
 Ejed through Hope's deluding glass. 
 
 It must not be supposed that, because these poems are 
 concise, they are of easy production; a poet's genius 
 may not be diminutive because his pieces are so ; nor 
 must we^all them, as a fine sonnet has been called, a difB- 
 cult trifle. A circle may be very small, yet it may be as 
 mathematically beautiful and perfect as a larger one. 
 To such compositions we may apply the observation of 
 an ancient critic, that though a little thing gives perfec- 
 tion, yet perfection is not a little thing. 
 
 The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse 
 with the world as with the studies of taste; one to 
 whom labour is negligence, refinement si science, and art 
 a nature. 
 
 Genius will not always be sufficient to impart that 
 grace of amenity. Many of the French nobility, who 
 cultivated poetry, have therefore oftener excelled in 
 these poetical amusements than more professed poets. 
 France once delighted in the amiable and ennobled 
 names of Nivernois, Boufflers, and St. Aignan ; they have 
 not been considei-ed as unworthy rivals of Chaulieu and 
 Bernard, of Voltaire and Gresset. 
 
 All the minor odes of Horace, and the entire Anac- 
 . reon, are compositions of this kind ; effusions of the 
 heart, and pictures of the imagination, which were pro- 
 duced in the. convivial, the amatory, arid the pensive 
 hour. Our nation has not always been successful in 
 these performances ; they have not been kindred to its 
 genius. With Charles II. something of a gayer and 
 
4:04: LITERARY .CHARACTER. 
 
 more airy taste was communicated to our poetry, but it 
 was desultory and incorrect. Waller, both by his habits 
 and his genius, was well adapted to excel in this lighter 
 poetry ; and he has often attained the perfection which 
 the state of the language then permitted. Prior has a 
 variety of sallies; but his humour is sometimes gross, 
 and his versification is sometimes embarrassed. He knew 
 the value of these charming pieces, and he had drunk of 
 this Burgundy in the vineyard itself He has some trans- 
 lations, and some plagiarisms ; but some of his verses to 
 Chloe are eminently airy and pleasing. A diligent selec- 
 tion from our fugitive poetry might perhaps present us 
 -with many of these minor poems ; but the '* Vers de 
 Soci&t^" form a species of poetical composition which 
 may stUl be employed with great, success. 
 
 THE GENHJS OF MOLIllRE. 
 
 The genius of comedy not only changes with the age, 
 but appears different among different people. Manners 
 and customs not only vary among European nations, but 
 are alike mutable from one age to another, even in the 
 same people. These vicissitudes are often fatal to comic 
 writers ; our old school of comedy has been swept off 
 the stage : and our present uniformity of manners has 
 deprived our modem writers of those rich sources of 
 invention when persons living more isolated, society was 
 less monotonous ; and Jonson and Shad well gave us 
 what they called " the hitm&urs,'" — that is, the individual 
 or particular characteristics of men.* 
 
 * Aubrey has noted this habit of our two greatest dramatists, when 
 spealcing of. Shakspeare' he says—" The humour of the constable in A 
 Midsummer Mght's Dream, he happend to take at Grondon in Bucks ; 
 which is the roade from London to Stratford ; and there was living 
 that coostable in 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Ben Jonson and 
 
THE GENIUS OF MOLlfiEB. 4,05 
 
 But however taste and modes of thinking may. he 
 inconstant, and customs and manners alter, at hottom 
 the groundwork is Nature's, in every production of 
 comic genius. A creative genius, guided by an uner- 
 ring instinct, though he draws after the contemporary 
 models of society, will retain his pre-eminence beyond 
 his own age and his own nation ; what was temporary 
 and local disappears, but what appertains to universal 
 nature endures. The scholar dwells on the grotesque 
 pleasantries of the sarcastic Aristophanes, though the 
 Athenian manners, and his exotic personages, have long 
 vanished. 
 
 Moli^re was a creator in the art of comeinf ; and al- 
 though his personages were the contemporaries of Louis 
 the Fourteenth, and his manners, in the critical accepta- 
 tion of the term, local and temporary, yet his admirable 
 genius opened that secret path of Nature, which is so 
 rarely found among the great names of the most literary 
 nations.- Cervantes remains single in Spain ; in England 
 Shakspeare is a consecrated name ; and centuries may 
 pass away before the French people shall witness another 
 Molifere. 
 
 The history of this comic poet is the tale of powerful 
 genius creating itself amidst the most adverse elements. 
 We have the progress of that self-education which struck 
 out an untried path of its own, from the time Moliere 
 had not yet acquired his art to the glorious days when 
 
 he did gather humours of men dayly, wherever they came." Shadwell, 
 whose best plays were produced in the reign of Charles II., was a pro- 
 fessed imitator of the style of Jonson ; and bo closely described the 
 manners of his day that he was frequently accused of direct personali- 
 ties, and obliged to alter one of his plays, The Humorists^ co avoid an 
 outcry raised against him. Sir Walter Scott has recorded, in the Pre- 
 face to his "fortunes of Nigel," the obligation he was undej to Shad- 
 well's comedy, The Squire of Alsatia, for the vivid description it ena- 
 bled him to giye of the lawless denizens of the old Sanctuary of White- 
 friars.— Eb. 
 
406 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 he gave his country a Plautus in his farce, a Terence in his 
 composition, and a Menander in his moral truths. But 
 the difficulties overcome, and the disappointments incur- 
 red, his modesty and his confidence, and, what was not 
 less extraordinary, his own domestic life in perpetual 
 conflict with his character, open a more strange career, 
 in some respects, than has happened to most others of 
 the high order of his genius^ 
 
 It was long the fate of Molifere to experience that rest- 
 less importunity of genius which feeds on itself, till it 
 discovers the pabulum it seeks. Moli^re not only suf- 
 fered that tormenting impulse, but it was accompanied 
 by the unhappiness of a mistaken direction. And this 
 has been the lot of some who for many years have thus 
 been lost to themselves and to the public. 
 
 A man born among the obscure class of the people, 
 thrown among the itinerant companies of actors^for 
 France had not yet a theatre — occupied to his last hours 
 by too devoted a management of his own dramatic corps ; 
 himself, too^ an original actor in the characters by him- 
 self created ; with no better models of composition than 
 the Italian farces aW improvista, and whose fantastic gaiety 
 he, to the last, loved too well ; becomes, the personal fa- 
 vourite of the most magnificent monarch, and the intimate 
 of the most refined circles. Thoughtful observer of these 
 Uew scenes and new personages, he sports with the afiected 
 precieuses and the flattering marquises as with the nd'cve 
 ridiculousness of the, bourgeois, and the wild pride and 
 egotism of the parvenus ; and with more profound de- 
 signs and a hardier hand unmasks the impostures of false 
 pretenders in all professions. His scenes, such was their 
 verity, seem but the reflections of his reminiscences. 
 His fertile facility when touching on transient follies ; his 
 wide comprehension, and his moralising vein, in his more 
 elevated comedy, display, in this painter of man, the 
 poet and the philosopher, and, above all, the great moralt 
 
THE GENIUS OF MOLlfeRB. 407 
 
 satirist. Molifere has shown that the most successful 
 reformer of the manners of a people is a great comic 
 poet. 
 
 The youth Pocquelin — this was his family name — was 
 designed by the tapissier, his father, to be the heir of the 
 hereditary honours of an ancient standing, which had 
 maintained the Pocquelins through four or five genera- 
 tions by the articles of a furnishing' upholsterer. His 
 grandfather was a haunter of the small theatres of that 
 day, and the boy often accompanied this venerable critic 
 of the fe,mily to his favourite recreations. The actors 
 were usually more excellent than their pieces ; some had 
 carried the mimetic art to the perfection of eloquent ges- 
 ticulation. In these loose scenes of inartificial and bur- 
 lesque pieces was the genius of Moliere cradled and 
 nursed. The changeful scenes of the Thedtre de Bour- 
 gogne deeply busied the boy's imagination, to the great 
 detriment of the tapisserie of all the Pocquelins. 
 
 The father groaned, the grandfather clapped, the boy 
 remonstrated till, at fourteen years of age, he was con- 
 signed, as " nn niauvais sujet" (so his father qualified 
 him),. to a college of the Jesuits at Paris, where the au- 
 thor of the "Tartufie" passed five years, studying — ^for 
 the bar ! 
 
 Philosophy and logic were waters which he deeply 
 drank; and sprinklings of his college studies often 
 pointed the satire of his more finished comedies. To 
 ridicule false learning and false taste one must be inti- 
 mate with the true. 
 
 On his return to the metropolis the old humour broke 
 out at the representation of the inimitable Scaramouch 
 of the Italian theatre. The irresistible passion drove 
 him. from his law studies, and cast young Pocquelin 
 among a company of amateur actors, whose fame soon 
 enabled them not to play gratuitously. Pocquelin was 
 the manager and the modeller, for under his studious eye 
 
408 LITBRAET CHARACTER. 
 
 this company were induced to imitate Nature with the 
 simplicity the poet himself wrote. 
 
 The prejudices of the day, both civil and religious^ had 
 made these private theatres — no great national theatre 
 yet existing — the resource only of the idler, the dissi- 
 pated, and even of the unfortunate in society. The 
 youthful adventurer aifectionately offered a free admis- 
 sion to the dear Pocqraelins. They rejected their entries 
 with horror, and sent their genealogical tree, drawn 
 afresh, to shame the truant who had wantoned into the 
 luxuriance of genius. To save the honour of the paren- 
 tal upholsterers Pocquelin concealed himself under the 
 immortal name of Moli^re. 
 
 The future creator of French comedy had now passed 
 his thirtieth year, and as yet his reputation was confined 
 to his own dramatic corps — a pilgrim in the caravan of 
 ambulatory comedy. He had provided several tempo- 
 rary novelties. Boileau regretted the loss of one, Le 
 Doeteur Amoureux / and in others we detect the abor- 
 tive conceptions of some of his future pieces. The severe 
 judgment of Moli^re suffered his skeletons to perish ; 
 but, when he had discovered the art of comic writing, 
 with equal discernment he resuscitated them. 
 
 Not only had Moli^re not yet discovered the true bent 
 of his genius, but, still more unfortunate, he had as 
 greatly mistaken it as when he proposed turning avocat, 
 for he imagined that his most suitable character was 
 tragic. He wrote a tragedy, and he acted in a tragedy; 
 the tragedy he composed was condemned at Bordeaux ; 
 the mortified poet flew to Grenoble ; still the unlucky 
 tragedy haunted his fancy ; he looked on it with paternal 
 eyes, in which there were tears. Long after, when Ra- 
 cine, a youth, oflTered him a very unactable tragedy,* 
 
 * The tragedy written by Racine was called TMagene et Gharidee, 
 and founded on the tale by Heliodorus. It waa the first attempt of 
 its author, and submitted by him. to Moli^re, while director of the 
 
THE GENIUS OF MOLIERE. 409 
 
 Molifere presented him with his own : — " Take this, for I 
 am convinced that the subject is highly tragic, notwith- 
 standing my failure." The great dramatic poet of 
 France opened his career hy recomposing the condemned 
 tragedy of the comic wit in La Thebdide. In the illu- 
 sion that he was a great tragic actor, deceived by his 
 own susceptibility, though his voice denied the tones of 
 passion, he acted in one of Corneille's tragedies, and 
 quite allayed the alarm of a rival company on the an- 
 nouncement. It was not, however, so when the author- 
 actor vivified one of his own native personages ; then, 
 inimitably comic, every new representation seemed to be 
 a new creation. 
 
 . It is a remarkable feature, though not perhaps a sin- 
 gular one, in the character of this great comic writer, 
 that he was one of the most serious of men, and even of a 
 melancholic temperament. One of his lampooners wrote 
 a satirical comedy on the comic poet, where he figures as 
 "Molifere hypochondre." Boileau, who knew him intir 
 mately, happily characterised Moliere as le Contemplpn 
 teur. This deep pensiveness is revealed in his physiog- 
 nomy. 
 
 The genius of Molifere, long undiscovered by himself, 
 in its first attempts in a higher walk did not move alone ; 
 it was crutched by imitation, and it often deigned to 
 plough with another's heifer. He copied whole scenes 
 from Italian comedies and plots from Italian novelists : 
 his sole merit was their improvement. The great comic 
 satirist, who hereafter was to people the stage with a 
 dramatic crowd who were to live on to posterity, had 
 not yet struck at that secret vein of originality — the 
 fairy treasure which one day was to cast out such a 
 
 Theatre of the Palais Koyal ; the latter had no favourable impression 
 of its success if produced, but suggested La Thebdide as a subject for 
 his genius, and advanced the young poet 100 louis while engaged 
 on his work, which was successfully produced in 1664. — Ed. 
 
410 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 prodigality of invention. His two first comedies, 
 HEtourdi and Le D^pit Amoureux, which he had only 
 ventured to bring out in a provincial theatre, were 
 grafted on Italian and Spanish comedy. Nothing inore 
 original ofiered to his imagination than the Roman, the 
 Italian, and the Spanish drama ; the cunning adroit 
 slave of Terence ; the tricking, bustling Gracioso of 
 modern Spain ; old fathers, the dupes of some scape- 
 grace, or of their own senile follies, with lovers sighing 
 at cross-purposes. The germ of his future powers may, 
 indeed, be discovered in these two comedies, for insensi- 
 bly to himself he had fallen into some scenes of natural 
 simplicity. In 12 Etourdi, Mascarille, " le roi des servi- 
 teurs," which Molifere himself admirably personated, is 
 one of those defunct characters of the Italian comedy no 
 longer existing in society ; yet, like our Touchstone, but 
 infinitely richer, this new ideal personage still deHghtS 
 by the fertility of his expedients and his perpetual and 
 vigorous gaiety. In JLe DSpU Amoweux is the exquis- 
 ite scene of the quarrel and reconciliation of the lovers. 
 In this fine scene, though perhaps but an amplification 
 of the well-known ode of Horace, Donee gratus eram tibi, 
 Moli^re consulted his own feelings, and betrayed his 
 future genius. 
 
 It was after an interval of three or four years that the 
 provincial celebrity of these comedies obtained a repre- 
 sentation at Paris ; their success was decisive. This was 
 an evidence of public favour which did not accompany 
 MoliSre's more finished productions, which were so far 
 unfortunate that they were more intelligible to the few; 
 in fact, the first comedies of Moli^re were not written 
 above the popular taste ; the spirit of true comedy, in a 
 profound knowledge of the heart of man, and in the deli- 
 cate discriminations of individual character, was yet un- 
 known. Moli6re was satisfied to excel his predecessors, 
 but he had not yet learned his art. 
 
THE -GENIUS OF M0LI£;RE. 4,U 
 
 The rising poet was now earnestly sought after ; a 
 more extended circle of society now engaged his contem- 
 plative habits. He looked around on living scenes no 
 longer through the dim spectacles of the old comedy, and 
 he projected a new species, which was no longer to de- 
 pend on its conventional grotesque personages and its 
 forced incidents; he aspired to pleasS a more critical 
 audience by making his dialogue the conversation of so- 
 ciety, and his characters its portraits. 
 
 Introduced to the literary coterie of the Hotel de Ram- 
 bouillet, a new view opened On the favoured poet. To 
 occupy a seat in this envied circle was a distinction in 
 society. The professed object of this reunion of nobility 
 and literary persons, at the h&tel of the Marchioness of 
 Rambouillet, was to give a higher tone to all France, by 
 the cultivation of the language, the intellectual refine- 
 ment of their compositions, and last, but not least, to 
 inculcate the extremest delicacy of manners. The recent 
 civil dissensions had often violated the urbanity of the 
 court, and a grossness prevailed in conversation which 
 offended the scrupulous. This critical circle was composed 
 of both sexes. They were to be the arbiters of taste, 
 the legislators of criticism, and, what was less tolerable, 
 the models of genius. No work was to be stamped into 
 currency which bore not the mint-mark of the h&tel. 
 
 In the annals of fashion and literature no coterie has 
 presented a more instructive and amusing exhibition of 
 the abuses of learning, and the aberrations of ill-regulated 
 imaginations, than the Hotel de Rambouillet, by its in- 
 genious absurdities. Their excellent design to refine the 
 language, the manners, and even morality itself, branched 
 out into every species of false refinement ; their science 
 ran into trivial pedantries, their style into a fantastic 
 jargon, and their spiritualising delicacy into the very 
 puritanism of prudery. Their frivolous distinction be- 
 tween the mind and the heart, which could not always 
 
412 LITERARY CHARACTER, 
 
 be made to go together, often perplexed them as much 
 as their own jargon, -which was not always intelligible, 
 even to the initiated. The French Academy is said to 
 have originated in the first meetings of the Hdtel de 
 Rambouillet ; and it is probable that some sense and 
 taste, in its earliest days, may have visited this society, 
 for we do not begin such refined follies without some 
 show of reason. 
 
 The local genius of the h6tel was feminine, though the 
 most glorious men of the literature of France were among 
 its votaries. The great magnet was the famed Mademoi- 
 selle Scudery, whose voluminous romances were their 
 code ; and it is supposed these tomes preserve some of 
 their lengthened conversaziones. In the novel system of 
 gallantry of this great inventor of amorous and metaphyT 
 sical " twaddle," the ladies were to be approached as 
 beings nothing short of celestial paragons ; they were 
 addressed in a language not to be found in any dictionary 
 but their own, and their habits were more fantastic than 
 their language : a sort of domestic chivalry formed their 
 etiq,uette. Their baptismal names were to them profane, 
 and their assumed ones were drawn from the folio roman-i 
 ces — those Bibles of love. At length all ended in a sort 
 of Freemasonry of gallantry, which had its graduated 
 orders, and whoever was not admitted into the mysteries 
 was not permitted to prolong his existence — that is, his 
 residence among them. The apprenticeship of the craft 
 was to be served under certain Introd/ucers to Buelles. 
 
 Their card of invitation was either a rondeau or an 
 enigma, which served as a subject to open conversation. 
 The lady received her visitors reposing on that throne of 
 beauty, a bed placed in an alcove ; the toilet was mag^ 
 nificently .arranged. The space between the bed and the 
 wall was called the Huelle,* the diminutive of la -Rue ; 
 
 * In a portion of the ancient Louvre, still preserved amid-the changes 
 to which it has been subjected, is the old wainscoted bedroom of the 
 
THE GENIUS OF MOLlfeRE. 413 
 
 and in this narrow street, or " Fop's alley," walked the 
 favoured. But the chevalier who was graced hy the 
 honorary title of VAlcoviste, was at once master of the 
 bousehold and master of the ceremonies. His chai-acter 
 is pointedly defined by St. Evremond, as " a lover whom 
 the Prtcieuse is to love without enjoyment, and to enjoy 
 in good earnest her husband with aversion." TJie scene 
 ofiered no indecency to such delicate minds, and much 
 less the impassioned style which passed between les cMres, 
 as they called themselves. Whatever offered an idea, of 
 what their jargon denominated charnelle, was treason 
 and exile. Years passed ere the hand of the elected 
 maiden was kissed by its martyr. The celebrated Julia 
 d'Angennes was beloved by the Duke de Montausier, but 
 fourteen years elapsed ere she would yield a " yes." 
 When the faithful 'Julia was no longer blooming, the Al- 
 coviste duke gratefully took up the remains of her 
 beauty. 
 
 Their more curious project was the reform of the style 
 of conversation, to purify its grossness, and invent novel 
 terms for familiar objects. Manage drew up a " Petition 
 of the Dictionaries," which, by their severity of taste, 
 had nearly become superannuated. They succeeded 
 better with the mwrchandes des modes and the jewellers, 
 furnishing a vocabulary excessively priaieuse, by which 
 people bought their old wares with new names. At 
 length they were so successful in their neology, that with 
 great difficulty they understood one another. It is, how- 
 ever, worth observation, that the orthography invented 
 by the prkcieuses — who, for their convenience, rejected all 
 the redundant letters in words — was adopted, and is now 
 used ; and tbeir pride of exclusiveness in society intro- 
 duced the singular term s'encaiutiller, to describe a 
 person who haunted low company, while their morbid 
 
 great Henry IV., -vrith the carved recess and the ruelle, as described 
 above : it is a most interesting fragment ofregal domestic life. — Ed. 
 
Hi ' LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 purity had ever on their lips the word obscinitS, terms 
 which Molifere ridicules, but whose expressiveness has 
 presei-ved them in the language. 
 
 Ridiculous as some of these extravagances now appear 
 to us, they had heen so closely interwoven with the 
 elegance of the. higher ranks, and so intimately associated 
 with genius and literature, that the veil of fashion con- 
 secrated almost the mystical society, since we find among 
 its admirers the most illustrious names of France. 
 
 Into this elevated and artificial circle of society our 
 youthful and unsophisticated poet was now thrown, with 
 a mind not vitiated by any prepossessions of false taste, 
 studious of nature and alive to the ridiculous. But how 
 was the comic genius to strike at the follies of his illus- 
 trious friends — to strike, but not to wound ? A provin- 
 cial poet and actor to enter hostilely into the sacred 
 precincts of these Exclusives ? Tormented by his genius 
 Molifere produced Les PrMeuses Ridicules, but admirably 
 parried, in his preface, any application to them, by aver- 
 ring that it was aimed at their imitators — their spurious 
 mimics in the country. The Pr&cieuses Ridicules was 
 acted in the presence of the assembled H6tel de Ram- 
 bouillet with immense applause. A central voice from 
 the pit, anticipating the host of enemies and the fame of 
 the reformer of comedy, exclaimed, "Take courage, 
 Molifere, this is true comedy." The learned Menage was 
 the only member of the society who had the good sense 
 to detect the drift ; he perceived the snake in the grass. 
 " We must now," said this sensible pedant (in a femote 
 allusion to the fate of idolatry and the introduction of 
 Christianity) to the poetical pedant, Chapelain, " follow 
 the counsel which St. Remi gave to Clo\«is — we must 
 burn all that we adored, and adore what we have burned." 
 The success of the comedy was universal ; the company 
 doubled their prices; the country gentry flocked to 
 witness the marvellous novelty, which far exposed that 
 
THE GEmUS OP MOLlJlRB. 415 
 
 false taste, that romance-impertinence, and that sickly- 
 affectation which had long disturbed the quiet of families. 
 Cervantes had not struck more adroitly at Spanish rodo- 
 montade. 
 
 At this universal reception of the JVicieuses Midicules, 
 Molifere, it is said, exclaimed — " I need no longer study 
 Plautus and Terence, nor poach in the fragments of 
 Menander ; I have only to study the world." It may be 
 doubtful whether the great comic satirist at that moment 
 caught the sudden revelation of his genius, as he did 
 subsequently in his Tartuffe, his Misanthrope, his Bour- 
 geois Qentilhomme, and others. The JPrtcieuses Ridi- 
 cules was the germ of his more elaborate Femmes Savan- 
 tes, which was not produced till after an interval of twelve 
 years. 
 
 Molifere returned to his old favourite canevas, or plots 
 of Italian farces and novels, and Spanish' comedies, which, 
 being always at hand, furnished comedies of intrigue. 
 JOEcole des Maris is an inimitable model of this class. 
 
 But comedies which derive their chief interest from 
 the ingenious mechanism of their plots, however poignant 
 the delight of the artifice of the denouement, are some- 
 what like an epigram, once known, the brilliant point is 
 blunted by repetition. This is not the- fate of those 
 representations of men's actions, passions, and manners,-" 
 in the more enlarged sphere of human nature, where an 
 eternal interest is excited, and will charm on the tenth 
 repetition. 
 
 No ! Moli&re had not yet discovered his true genius ; 
 he was not yet emancipated from his old seductions. A 
 rival company was reputed to have the better actors for 
 tragedy, and Moli&re resolved to cortipose an heroic 
 drama on the passion of jealousy — a favorite one on 
 which he was incessantly ruminating. Don Garde de 
 J^avarre, ou Le Prince Jaloux, the hero personated by 
 himself, terminated by the hisses of the audience. 
 
416 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 The fall of the Prince Jaloux was nearly fatal to the 
 tender reputation of the poet and the actor. The world 
 became critical: the marquises, and the pr^cieuses, and 
 recently the bourgeois, who were sore from SganareUe, 
 ou Xi6 Goeu Tmaffinaire, were up in arms ; and the rival 
 theatre maliciously raised the halloo, flattering them- 
 selves that the comic genius of their dreaded rival would 
 be extinguished by the ludicrous convulsed hiccough to 
 which MoliSre was liable in his tragic tones, but which 
 he adroitly managed in his comic parts. 
 
 But the genius of Molifere was not to be daunted by 
 cabals, nor even injured by his own imprudence. Z.e 
 Prince Jaloux was condemned in February, 1661, and 
 the same year produced VEcole des Maris and Les 
 Fdcheux. The happy genius of the poet opened on his 
 Zoiluses a series of dramatic triumphs. 
 
 Foreign critics — Tiraboschi and Schlegel — ^have 'depre- 
 ciated the Frenchman's invention, by insinuating that 
 were all that Molifere borrowed taken from him, little 
 would remain of his own. But they were not aware of 
 his dramatic creation, even when he appropriated the 
 slight inventions of others ; they have not distinguished 
 the eras of the genius of Molifere, and the distinct classes 
 of his comedies. Molifere had the art of amalgamating 
 > many distinct inventions of others into a single inimit- 
 able whole. Whatever might be the herbs and the 
 reptiles thrown into the mystical caldron, the incantation 
 of genius proved to be truly magical. 
 
 Facility and fecundity may produce inequality, but, 
 when a man of genius works, they are imbued with a 
 raciness which the anxious diligence of inferior minds 
 can never yield. Shakspeare, probably, poured forth 
 many scenes in this spirit. The multiplicity of the 
 pieces of Moli^re, their different merits, and their distinct 
 classes — all written within the space of twenty years — 
 display, if any poet ever did, this wonder-working faculty. 
 
THE GENIUS 01* MOLlJilRE. 417 
 
 The truth is, that few of his tjomedies are finished works ; 
 he never satisfied himself, even in his most applauded 
 productions. Necessity bound him to furnish novelties 
 for his theatre ; he rarely printed any work. Les 
 Fdcheyx, an admirable Series of scbnes, in three acts, 
 and in verse, was " planned, written, rehearsed, and 
 represented in a single fortnight." Many of his dramatic 
 efiusions were precipitated on the stage; the humorous 
 scenes of Monsieur de Pouroeaugnac were thrown out to 
 enliven a royal f§te. 
 
 This versatility and felicity of composition rdade every- 
 thing with Moli^re a subject for comedy. He invented 
 two novelties, such as the stage had never before wit- 
 nessed. Instead of a grave defence fi'om the malice of 
 liis critics, and the flying gossip of the court circle, 
 Molifere found out the art of congregating the public to 
 The Quarrels of Authors. He dramatised his critics. 
 In a comedy without a plot, and in scenes which seemed 
 rather spoken than written, and with characters more 
 real than personated, he displayed his genius by collect- 
 ing whatever had been alleged to depreciate it ; and La 
 Critique de VEcoU des Femmes is still a delightful pro- 
 duction. This singular drama resembles the sketch- 
 book of an artist, the croquis of portraits— the loose 
 hints of thoughts, many of which we discover were more 
 fully delineated in his subsequent pieces. With the 
 same rapid conception he laid hold of his embarrass- 
 ments to furnish dramatic novelties as expeditiously as 
 the king required. Louis XIV. was himself no indif- 
 ferent critic, and more than once suggested an incident 
 or a character to his favourite poet. In I? Impromptu de 
 Versailles, Molidre appears in his own person, and in the 
 midst of his whole company, with all the irritable impa- 
 tience of a manager who had no piece ready. iVi'iidst 
 this green-room bustle Moli&re is advising, reprimanding, 
 and imploring, his " ladies and gentlemen." The char- 
 
 27 
 
418 LITERART CHARACTER. 
 
 aeters in this piece are, in fact, the actors themselves, 
 "who appear under their own names ; and Moli&re himself 
 reveals many fine touches of his own poetical character, as 
 well as his managerial. The personal pleasantries on his 
 own performers, and the hints for plots, and the sketches 
 of character which the poet incidentally throws out, 
 form a perfect dramatic novelty. Some of these he him- 
 self subsequently adopted, and others have been followed 
 up by some dramatists without rivalling Moli&re. The 
 Figaro of Beaumarchais is a descendant of the Masoar- 
 iUe of Moli6re ; but the glory of rivalling Molifere was 
 reserved for our own stage. Sheridan's Critic, or oi 
 Tragedy Rehearsed, is a congenial dramatic satire with 
 these two pieces of Molifere. 
 
 The genius of Moliore had now stepped out of the re- 
 stricted limits of the old comedy ; he now looked on the 
 moving world with other eyes, and he pursued the ridic- 
 ulous in society. These fresher studies were going on at 
 all hours, anA'°every object was contemplated with a view 
 to comedy. His most vital characters have been traced 
 to living originals, and some of his most ludicrous scenes 
 had occurred in reality before they delighted the audience. 
 Monsieur Jourdain had expressed his astonishment, " qu'il 
 faisait de la prose," in the Count de Soissons, one of tl^e 
 uneducated noblemen devoted to the chase. The me- 
 morable scene between Trissotin and Vadius, their 
 mutual compliments terminating in their mutual con- 
 tempt, had been rehearsed by their respective authors— the 
 Abb6 Cottin and M6nage. The stultified booby of Limo- 
 ges, Monsieur de Pouroeaugnac, and the mystified mil- ' 
 lionaire, Le Bourgeois G-entilhomine, were copied after 
 life, as was Sganardle, in Le. M'edeoin malgr'e lui. The 
 portraits in that gallery of dramatic paintings, Le Mis- 
 anthrope, have names inscribed under them ; and the 
 immortal Tartuffe was a certain bishop of Autun. No 
 dramatist has conceived with greater variety the female 
 
THE GENItrS OF MOLlilRE. 419 
 
 character ; the women of Moliere have a distinctness of 
 feature, and are touched with a freshness of feeling, 
 MoliSre studied nature, and his comic humour is never 
 checked by that unnatural wit where the poet, the more 
 he discovers himself, the farther he removes himself from 
 the personage of his creation. The quickening spell 
 which hangs over the dramas of Moliere is this close at- 
 tention to nature, wherein he greatly resembles our 
 Shakspeare, for all springs from its source. His unob- 
 trusive genius never occurs to ns in following up his char- 
 acters, and a whole scene leaves on our mind a complete 
 but imperceptible effect. 
 
 The style of Molifere has often been censured by the 
 fastidiousness of his native critics, as has and du style 
 familier. This does not offend the foreigner, who is 
 often struck by its simplicity and vigour. Molifere pre- 
 ferred the most popular and naive expressions, as well as 
 the most natural incidents, to a degree which startled 
 the morbid delicacy of fashion and fashionable critics. 
 He had frequent occasions to resist their petty remon- 
 strances ; and whenever Moliere introduced an incident, 
 or made an allusion of which he knew the truth, and 
 which with him had a settled meaning, this master of 
 human life trusted to his instinct and his art. 
 
 This pure and simple taste, ever rare at Paris, was the 
 happy portion of the genius of this Frenchman. Hence 
 he delighted to try his farcical pieces, for we cannot im- 
 agine that ■^hey were his more elevated comedies, on his 
 did maid-setvant. This maid, probably, had a keen relish 
 for comic humour, for once when Molifere read to her the 
 comedy of another writer as his own, she soon detected 
 the trick, declaring that it could not be her master's. 
 Hence, to8, our poet invited even children to be present 
 on such rehearsals, and at certain points would watch 
 their emotions. Hence, too, in his character of manager, 
 he taught his actors to study nature. An actress, apt to 
 
420 LITBBABT CHAEACTEU. 
 
 Speak freely, told him, " You torment us all ; but you 
 never Speak to my husband." This man, originally a 
 candle-snuffer, was a perfect child of nature, and acted 
 the Thomas Diaforius, in Le Malade Imaginaire. Moli^re 
 replied, " I should be sorry to say a word to him ; I should 
 spoil his acting. Nature has provided him with better 
 lessons to perform his parts than any which I could give 
 him." We may iUiagine Shakspeare thus addressing his 
 company, had the poet been also the manager. 
 
 A remarkable incident in the history of the genius of 
 Molifere is the frequent recurrence of the poet to the 
 passion of jealousy. The "jaundice in the lover's eye," 
 he has painted with every tint of his imagination. " The 
 green-eyed monster " takes all shapes, and is placed in 
 every position. Solemn, or gay, or satirical, he some- 
 times appears in agony, but often seems to make its 
 " trifles light as air," only ridiculous as a source of con- 
 solation. Was Zi6 GontemplM^w comic in his melan- 
 choly, or melancholy in his comic humour ? 
 
 The truth is, that the poet himself had to pass through 
 those painful stages which he has dramatised. The dor 
 inestic life of Molifere was itself very dramatic ; it afforded 
 Goldoni a comedy of five acts, to reveal the secrets of the 
 family circle of Molifere ; and I'Abbate Chiari, an Italian 
 novelist and playwright, has taken for a comic subject, 
 Molihre, the Jealous Sashand. 
 
 The French, in their "petite morale" on conjugal 
 fidelity, appear so tolerant as to leave little sympathy 
 for the real sufferer. Why should they else have treated 
 domestic jealousy as a foible for ridicule, rather than a 
 subject for deep passion? Their tragic drama exhibits 
 no Othello, nor their comedy a Kitely, or a Su^icioiii 
 ■ITusband. Molifere, while his own heart was t*lie victim, 
 conformed to the national taste, by often placing the 
 object on its comic side. Domeistic jealousy is a passion 
 which admits of a great diversity of subjects, from the 
 
THE GENIUS OF MOLlJiRIii. ^gj 
 
 tragic or the pathetic, to the ahsurd and the ludicrous. 
 We have them all in Molidre. Moliere often was him- 
 self " Le Cocu Imaginaire ;" he had been in the position 
 of the guardian in HEcole des Maris. Like Arnolphe 
 in JVEcole des Fbmmes, he had taken on himself to rear 
 a young wife who played the same part, though with less 
 innocence ; and like the Misanthrope, where the scene 
 between Alceste and Celimfene is " une des plus fortes 
 qui existant au th6S.tre," he was deeply entangled in the 
 wily cruelties of scornful coquetry, and we know that at 
 times he suffered in the " hell of lovers " the torments 
 of his own Jealous Prinae. 
 
 "When this poet cast his fate with a troop of comedians, 
 as the manager, and whom he never would abandon, when 
 at the height of his fortune, eould he avoid accustoming 
 himself to the relaxed habits of that gay and sorrowful 
 race, who, " of imagination all compact," too often partake 
 of the passions they inspire in the scene ? The first actress, 
 Madame Bdjard, boasted that, with the exception of the 
 poet, she had never dispensed her personal favours but 
 to the aristocracy. The constancy of Moliere was inter- 
 rupted by another actress, Du Pare ; beautiful but insen- 
 sible, she only tormented the poet, and furnished him 
 with some severe lessons for the coquetry of his Celim^ne, 
 in lie Misanthrope. The facility of the transition of the 
 tender passion had more closely united the susceptible 
 poet to Mademoiselle de Brie. But Madame Bejard, not 
 content to be the chief actress, and to hold her partner- 
 ship in " the properties," to retain her ancient authority 
 over the poet, introduced, suddenly, a blushing daughter, 
 some say a younger sister, who had hitherto resided at 
 Avignon, and who she declared was the offspring of the 
 count of Modena, by a secret marriage. Armande Be- 
 jard soon attracted the paternal attentions of the poet. 
 6he became the secret idol of his retired moments, while 
 he fondly thought that he could mould a young mind,, in 
 
4,22 LITEEARY CHARACTER. 
 
 its innocence, to his own sympatHes. The mother and 
 the daughter never agreed. Armande sought his protee- 
 tion ; and one day rushing into his study, declared that 
 she would marry her friend. The elder Bejard freely 
 consented to avenge herself on De Brie. De Brie was 
 indulgent, though "the little creature," she observed, 
 was to be yoked to one old enough to be her father. 
 Under the same roof were now heard the voices of the 
 three females, and Moli^re meditating scenes of feminine 
 jealousies. 
 
 Moli^re was fescinated by his youthful wife; her 
 lighter follies charmed : two years riveted the connubial 
 chains. Molifere was a husband who was always a lover. 
 The actor on the stage was the very man he personated. 
 Mademoiselle Molifere, as she was called by the public, 
 wais the Lucile in ie Sourgeois Qentilhomine. With 
 what fervour the poet feels her neglect ! with what eager- 
 ness he defends her from the animadversions of the friend 
 who would have dissolved the spell ! 
 
 The poet was doomed to endure more poignant sorrows 
 than slights. Mademoiselle had the art of persuading 
 Molifere that he was only his own " cocu imaginaire ;" 
 but these domestic embarrassments multiplied. M'ade- 
 moiselle, reckless of the distinguished name she bore, 
 while she gratified her personal vanity by a lavish ex- 
 penditure, practised that artful coquetry which attracted 
 a crowd of loungers. Moli^re found no repose in his 
 own house, and retreated to a country-house, where, how- 
 ever, his restless jealousy often drove him back to scenes 
 which he trembled to witness. At length came the last 
 argument of outraged matrimony — he threatened con- 
 finement. To prevent a public rupture, Molifere consent- 
 ed to live under the same roof, and only- to meet at the 
 theatre. Weak only in love, however divided from his 
 wife, Moli^re remained her perpetual lover. He said, in 
 confidence, " I am born with every disposition to tender- 
 
THE GENIUS OP MOLlfeRE. 423 
 
 ness. When I married, she was too young to betray any 
 evil inclinations. My studies were devoted to her, but I 
 soon discovered her indifference. I ascribed it to her 
 temper ; her foolish passion for Count Guiche made too 
 much noise to leave me even this apparent tranquillity 
 I resolved to live with her as an honourable man, whose 
 reputation does not depend on the bad conduct of his 
 wife. My kindness has not changed her, but my com- 
 passion has increased. Those who have not experienced 
 these delicate emotions have never truly loved. In her 
 absence her image is before me ; in her presence, I am 
 deprived of all reflection ; I have no longer eyes for her 
 defects ; I only view her amiable. Is not this the last 
 extreme of folly ? And are you not surprised that I, 
 reasoning as I do, am only sensible of the weakness 
 which I cannot throw off?" 
 
 Few men of genius have left in their writings deeper 
 impressions of their personal feelings than Molifere. 
 With strong passions in a feeble frame, he had duped his 
 imagination that, like another Pygmalion, he would 
 create a woman by his own ait In silence and agony 
 he tasted the bitter fruits of the disordered habits of the 
 life of a comedian, a manager, and a poet. His income 
 was splendid; but he himself was a stranger to dissipa- 
 tion. He was a domestic man, of a pensive and even 
 melancholy temperament. Silent and reserved, unless in 
 conversation with that more intimate circle whose literar 
 ture aided his genius, or whose friendship consoled for 
 his domestic disturbances, his habits were minutely me- 
 thodical; the strictest order was observed throughout 
 his establishment; the hours of dinner, of writing, of 
 amusement, were allotted, and the slightest derangement 
 in his own apartment excited a morbid irritability which 
 , would interrupt his studies for whole days. 
 
 Who,' without this tale of Moli^re, could conjecture, 
 that one skilled in the workings of our nature would 
 
424 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 have ventured on the perilous experiment of equalinng 
 sixteen years against forty — ^weighing roses against grey 
 looks — to convert a wayward coquette, through her 
 capricious womanhood, into an attached wife? Yet, 
 although Mademoiselle could cherish no personal love 
 for the intellectual being, and hastened to change the 
 immortal name she bore for a more terrestrial man, she 
 seems to have been impressed by a perfect conviction of 
 his creative genius. When the Archbishop of Paris, in 
 the pride of prelacy, refused the rights of sepulture to 
 the corpse of Molifere the actoe, it was her voice which 
 reminded the world of Molifere the poet, exclaiming — 
 " Have they denied a grave to the man to whom Greece 
 would have raised an altar !" 
 
 THE SENSIBILITY OF RACINE. 
 
 The " Memoirs of the poet Racine," composed by his 
 son, who was himself no contemptible poet, may be 
 classed among those precious pieces of biography so de- 
 lightful to the philosopher who studies human nature, 
 and the literary man whose curiosity is interested in the 
 history of his republic. Such works are rare, and rank 
 in merit next to autobiographies. Such biographical 
 sketches, like Boswell's of Johnson, contain what we 
 often regret is wanting in the more regular life of a 
 professed biographer. These desultory memoirs interest 
 by their warmth, their more personal acquaintance with 
 the hero, and abound with those minuter strokes which 
 give so much life to the individual character. ' 
 
 The prominent feature in the character of Racine was 
 an excessive tenderness of feeling; his profound sensi- 
 bility even to its infirmity, the tears which would cover 
 his face, and the agony in his heart, were perhaps na- 
 tional. But if this sensibility produced at times the 
 
SENSIBILITY OF SACINB. 425 
 
 softest emotions, if it made him the poet of lovers, and 
 even the poet of imagination, it also rendered him too 
 feelingly alive to criticism, it embittered his days with 
 too keen a perception of the domestic miseries which all 
 men must alike undergo. 
 
 During a dramatic perforjnance at St. Cyr, the youth- 
 ful representative of Esther suddenly forgot her part ; 
 the agitated poet exclaimed, "Oh, mademoiselle, you 
 are ruining my piece !" Terrified at this reprimand, the 
 young actress wept ; the poet flew to her, wiped away 
 her tears, and with contagious sympathy shed teavs him- 
 self. " I do not hesitate," says Louis Racine, " to relate 
 such minute circumstances, because this facility of shed- 
 ding tears shows the goodness of the heart, according to 
 the observation of the ancients — 
 
 ayaBol S apiZanpat^ avdpeg. 
 
 This morbid state of feeling made his whole literary 
 life uneasy ; unjust criticism affected him as much as the 
 most poignant, and there was nothing he dreaded more 
 than that his son should become a writer of tragedies; 
 "I will not dissimulate," he says, addressing his son, 
 " that in the heat of composition we are not sometimes 
 pleased with ourselves ; but you' may believe me, when 
 the day after we look over our work, we are astonished 
 not to find that excellence we admired in the evening ; 
 and when we reflect that even what we find good ought 
 to he still better, and how distant we are still from per- 
 fection, we are discouraged and dissatisfied. , Besides all 
 this, although the approbation I have received has been 
 very flattering, the least adverse criticism, even miserable 
 as it might be, has ^.Iways occasioned me more vexation 
 than all the praise I received could give me pleasure." 
 And, again, lie endeavors to impress on him that the 
 favour he received from the world he owed not to hi^ 
 verses. "Do not imagine that they are my verses that 
 
426 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 attract all these kindnesses. Corneille composes verses 
 a hundred times finer than mine, but no one regards him. 
 His verses are only applauded from the mouths of the 
 actors. I do not tire men of the world by reciting my 
 works ; I never allude to them ; I endeavour to amuse 
 them with matters which please them. My talent in 
 their company is, not to make them feel that I have any 
 genius, but to show them that they possess some them- 
 selves. When you observe the duke pass several hours 
 with me, you would be surprised, were you present, that 
 he frequently quits me without my having uttered three 
 words ; but gradually I put him in a humour of chatting, 
 and he leaves me more satisfied with himself than with 
 me." When Rochefoucault said that.Boileau and Racine 
 had only one kind of genius, and could only talk about 
 their own poetry, it is evident that the observation should 
 not have extended to Racine, however it might to Boi- 
 leau. It was Racine's excessive sensibility which made 
 him the finest dramatic reciter. The celebrated actress. 
 Mademoiselle Champmesld,* the heroine of his tragedies, 
 had no genius whatever for the stage, but she had b.eauty, 
 voice, and memory. Racine taught her first to compre- 
 hend the verses she was going to recite, showed her the 
 appropriate gesture, and gave her the variable tones, 
 which he even sometimes noted down. His pupil, faith- 
 ful to her lessons, though a mere actress of art, on the 
 stage seemed ipspired by passion; and as she, thus 
 formed and fashioned, naturally only played thus effect- 
 
 * Raoina first met this actress at the Marquis de Sevigne's petit 
 sotipers ; so much lamented by his more famous mother in one of her 
 admirable letters, who speaks of "the Raoines and the Despreaus's" 
 who assisted his prodigality. , In one of Madame de Sevigne's letters, 
 dated in 1612, she somewhat rashly declares, "Racine now writes his 
 dramas, not for posterity, but for Mademoiselle Champmesle ;" she had 
 then forsaken the marquis for the poet, who wrote Boxane in Bc^anet 
 expressly for her.~ED. 
 
THE SENSIBILITY OP EACINB. 427 
 
 ively in the dramas of her preceptor, it was supposed 
 that love for the poet inspired the actress. 
 
 When Racine read aloud he diffused his own enthusi- 
 asm; once vrith Boileau and Nicole, amid a literary- 
 circle, they talked of Sophocles, whom Racine greatly 
 admired, but from whom he had never dared to borrow 
 a tragic subject. Taking up a Greek Sophocles, and 
 translating the CEdipus, the French poet became so 
 deeply imbued with the Greek tragedian, that his audit- 
 ors caught all the emotions of terror and pity. " I have 
 seen," says one of those auditors, " our best pieces repre- 
 sented by our best actors, but never anything approached 
 the agitation which then came over us ; and to this dis- 
 tant day I have never lost the recollection of Racine, 
 with the volume in his hand, full of emotion, and we alV 
 breathlessly pressing around him." 
 
 It was the poet's sensibility that urged him to make 
 the most extraordinary sacrifice that ever poet made ; 
 he wished to get rid entirely of that poetical fame to 
 which he owed everything, and which was at once his 
 pleasure, his piide, and his property. His education had 
 been a religious one, in the Port-Royal;* but when 
 Nicole, one of that illustrious fraternity, with undistin- 
 guishing fanaticism, had once asserted that all dramatic 
 writers were public poisoners of souls, Racine, in the 
 pride and strength of his genius, had eloquently repelled 
 the denouncement. But now, having yet only half run 
 his unrivalled course, he turned aside, relinquished its 
 glory, repented of his success, and resolved to write no 
 more tragedies.f He determined to enter into the austere 
 
 * For an aofiount of this very celebrated religious foundation, its for- 
 tunes and misfortunes, see the " Curiosities of Literature," vol. i., p. 
 94— Ed; 
 
 f Bacine ultimately conceived an aversion for his dramatic offspring 
 and could never be induced to edit a proper edition of his works, or 
 even give a few lessons in declamation to a juvenile prinoeas, who ae- 
 
428 UTERAEY CHARACTEB. 
 
 order of the Chartreux ; but his confessor, more rational 
 than his penitent, assured him that a .character so feeling 
 as his own, and so long accustomed to the world, could 
 not endure that terrible solitude. He advised him to 
 marry a woman of a serious turn, and that little domes- 
 tic occupations would withdraw him from the passion he 
 seemed most to dread, that of writing verses. 
 
 The marriage of Racine was an act of penance — ^neither 
 love nor interest had any share in the union. His wife 
 was a good sort of woman, but perhaps the most insen- 
 sible of her sex ; and the properest person in the world to 
 mortify the passion of literary glory, and the momentary 
 exultation of literary vanity.* It is scarcely credible, but 
 most certainly true, since her own son relates the fact, 
 that the wife of Racine had neither seen acted, nor ever 
 read, nor desired to read, the tragedies which had ren- 
 dered her husband so celebrated throughout Europe ; she 
 had only learned some of their titles in conversation. 
 She was as insensible to fortune as to fame. One day, 
 when Racine returned from Versailles, with the princely 
 gift from Louis XIV. of a purse of 1000 louis, he hastened 
 to embrace his wife, and to show her the treasure. But 
 she was full of trouble, for one of the children for two 
 days had not studied. " We will talk of this another 
 time," exclaimed the poet ; " at present let us be happy.' 
 
 But she insisted he ought instantly to reprimand this 
 child, and continued her complaints; while Bolieau in 
 astonishment paced to and fro, perhaps thinking of his 
 Satire on Women, and exclaiming, " What insensibility ! 
 Is it possible that a purse of 1000 louis is not worth a 
 thought !" This stoical apathy did not arise in Madame 
 
 lected hia AxtdromaqvA for the aubjeet, perhaps out of compliment' to 
 the poet, whose first visit became in consequence hia last. — 15d. 
 
 * The lady he chose was one Catherine de Romanet, whose family 
 was of great respectability but of small fortune. She Is not described 
 as possessicg any marked personal attractions. — Ei>. 
 
THE SENSIBILITY OF EAOINE. 429 
 
 Racine from the grandeur, but the littleness, of her mind. 
 Her prayer-books and her children were the sole objects 
 that interested this good ■woman. Racine's sensibility 
 was not mitigated by his marriage; domestic sorrows 
 weighed heavily on his spirits : when the illness of his 
 children agitated him, he sometimes exclaimed, " Why 
 did I expose myself to all this ? Why was I persuaded 
 not to be a Chartreux ?" His letters to his childi-en are 
 those of a father and a friend ; kind exhortations, or pa- 
 thetic reprimands ; he enters into the most domestic 
 detail, while he does not conceal fi'om them the medioc- 
 rity of their fortune. "Had you known him in his 
 family," said Louis Racine, " you would be more alive 
 to his poetical character, you would then know why his 
 verses are always so full of sentiment. He was never 
 more pleased than when, permitted to be absent from the 
 court, he could come among us to pass a few days. 
 Even in the presence of strangers he dared to be a father, 
 and used to join us in our sports. I well remember our 
 processions, in which my sisters were the clergy, I the 
 rector, and the author of 'Athaliah,' chanting with us, 
 carried the cross." 
 
 At length this infirm sensibility abridged his days. 
 He was naturally of a melancholic temperament, apt to 
 dwell on objects which occasion pain, rather than on 
 those which exhilarate. Louis Racine observes that his 
 character resembled Cicero's description of himself, more 
 inclined to dread unfortunate events, than to hope for 
 happy ones ; semper magis adversos rerum exittts metuens 
 quam sperans secundos. In the last incident of his life 
 his extreme sensibility led him to imagine as present a 
 misfortune which might never have occurred. 
 
 Madame de Maintenon, one day in conversation with 
 the poet, alluded to the misery of the people. Racine 
 observed it was the usual consequence of long wars : the 
 subject was animating, and he entered into it with all 
 
4:30 IITEEART CHARACTER. 
 
 that enthusiasm peculiar to himself. Madame de Main- 
 tenon was charmed with his eloquent effusion, and 
 requested him to give her his observations in writing, 
 assuring him they should not go out of her hand. She 
 was reading his memoir when the king entered her 
 apartment ; he took it up, and, after having looked over 
 a few pages, he inquired with great quickness who was 
 the author. She replied it was a secret ; but the king 
 was peremptory, and the author was named. The king 
 asked with great dissatisfaction, " Is it because he writes 
 the most perfect verses, that he thinks that he is able to 
 become a statesman ?" 
 
 Madame de Maintenon told the poet all that had 
 pasped, and declined to receive his visits for the presenj.r 
 Racine was shortly after attacked with violent fever. In 
 the languor of recovery he addressed Madame de Main- 
 tenon to petition to have his pension freed from some 
 new tax ; and he added an apology for his presumption 
 in suggesting the cause of the miseries of the people, 
 with an humiliation that betrays the alarms that existed 
 in his mind. The letter is too long to transcribe, but it 
 is a singular instance how genius can degrade itself 
 when it has placed all its felicity on the varying smiles 
 of . those we call the great. Well might his friend 
 Boileau, who had nothing of his sensibility nor imaginar 
 tion, exclaim, with his good sense, of the court ;t- 
 
 Qael B^jour etranger, et pour vous et pour moi 1 
 
 Racine afterwards saw Madame de Maintenon walking in 
 the gardens of Versailles; she drew aside into a retired 
 all6e to meet him ; she exhorted him to exert hi? 
 patience and fortitude, and told him that all would end 
 well. " No, madam," he replied, " never !" " Do you 
 then doubt," she said, " either my heart, or my influence ?" 
 He replied, "I acknowledge your influence, and know 
 your goodness to me ; but I have an aunt who loves me 
 
THE SENSIBILITY OP RACINE. 431 
 
 in quite a different manner. That pious -woman every- 
 day implores God to besto-w- on me disgrace, humiliation," 
 and occasions for penitence, and she has more influence 
 than you." As he said these -words, the sound of a 
 carriage -was heard ; " The king is c6ming !" said Madame 
 de Maiatenon ; " hide yourself !" 
 
 To this last point of misery and degradation -was this 
 great genius reduced. Shortly after he died, and -was 
 buried at the feet of his master in the chapel of the stu- 
 dious and religious society of Port-Royal. 
 
 The sacred dramas of Esther and Athaliah -were among 
 the latter, productions of Racine. The fate of Athaliah, 
 his 'masterpiece, -was remarkable. The public imagined 
 that it -was a piece -written only for children, as it -jvas 
 performed by the young scholars of St. Cyr, and received 
 it so coldly that Racine -was astonished and disgusted.* 
 He earnestly requested Boileau's opinion, -who main- 
 tained it was his capital -work. " I understand these 
 things," said he, " and the public y reviendra." The pre- 
 diction -was a true one, but it -was accomplished too late, 
 long after the death of the author ; it was never appre- 
 ciated till it was publicly performed. 
 
 Boileau and Racine derived little or no profit from the 
 booksellers. Boileau particularly, though fond of money, 
 was so delicate on this point that he gave all his works 
 away. It was this that made him so bold in railing at 
 those authors qui mettent kiir Apollon aux gages cPun 
 
 ♦They -were -written at the reqiiest of Madame de Maintenon, for 
 the pupils of her favourite establishment at St. Cyr ; she was anxious 
 that they should be perfect in declamation, and she tried them -with 
 the poet's Androrhaque, but they recited it with so much passion and 
 feeling that they alarmed their patroness, who told Racine " it -was so 
 ■well done. that she would be careful they should never act that drama 
 ag;ain," and urged him to write plays on sacred subjects expressly for 
 their use. He had not written a play for upwards of ten years ;' he 
 now composed hie Esther, making that character a flattering reflection 
 of Malntenon's career. — Ed. 
 
432 LITERAET CHARACTER. 
 
 Ubraire, and lie declared that he had only inserted these 
 verses, 
 
 Je sai qu'um noble esprit peut sans honte et sans crime 
 Tirer de son travail ua tribut legitime, 
 
 to console Racine, who had received some profits from 
 the printing of his tragedies. Those profits were, how- 
 ever, inconsiderable ; the truth is, the king remunerated 
 the poets. 
 
 Racine's first royal mark of favour was an order signed 
 by Colbert for six hundred livres, to ffive Mm the means 
 of continuing his studies of the belles-lettres. He received, 
 by an account found among his papers, above forty thou- 
 sand livres from the cassette of the king, by the hand of 
 the first valet-de-chambre. Besides these gifts, Racine 
 had a pension of four thousand livres as historiographer, 
 and another pension as a man of letters. 
 
 Which is the more honourable ? to crouch for a salary 
 btought by the hand of the first valet-de-chambre, or to 
 exult in the tribute ofiered by the public to an author ? 
 
 OF STERNE. 
 
 Cervantes is immortal — Rabelais and Sterne have 
 passed away to the curious. 
 
 These fraternal geniuses alike chose their subjects 
 from their own times. Cervantes, with the innocent de- 
 sign of correcting a temporary folly of his countrymen, 
 so that the very success of the design might have proved 
 fatal to the work itself; for when he had cut ofi" the 
 heads of the Hydra, an extinct monster might cease to 
 interest the readers of other times, and other manners. ■ 
 But Cervantes, with judgment equal to his iriventioti, 
 and with a cast of genius made for all tiipes, delighted 
 his contemporaries and charms his posterity. He looked 
 
OF STBRSTB. 433 
 
 to the world and Collected other follies than the Spanish 
 ones, and to another' age than the administration of the. 
 duke of Lerma ; with more genuine pleasantry than any 
 writer from the days of Lucian, not a solitary spot has- 
 soiled' the purity of his page ; while there is scarcely a 
 subject in human nature for which we might not find 
 some apposite illustration. His style,, pure as his thoughts,, 
 is, however, a magic which ceases to work in all transla- 
 tions, and Cervantes is not Cervantes in English' or in- 
 French ; yet still he retains his popularity among all the 
 nations of Europe ; which is- more than we can say even 
 of our Shakspeare ! 
 
 Rabelais and Sterne were not perhaps inferior ■ iti 
 genius, and they were read with as much avidity and 
 delight as the Spaniard. " Le docte Rabelais" had 
 the learning which the Englishman wanted; while ^un- 
 happily Sterne undertook to satirise false erudition, 
 which requires the knowledge of the true. Though the 
 Papemanes, on whom Rabelais has exhausted his gro- 
 tesque humour and his caustic satire,. have not yet walked 
 off the stage, we' pay a heavy price in the grossness of 
 his ribaldry and his tiresome balderdash for odd stories » ' 
 and flashes of witty humour. Rabelais hardly finds 
 readers even in France, with the exception of a few liter- 
 ary antiquaries. The day has passed when a gay dis- 
 solute abb6 could obtaina rich abbey by getting Rabelais- 
 by heart, for the perpetual improvement of his patron — 
 and Rabelais is now little more than a Rabelais by 
 tradition.* 
 
 * The clergy were not so unfavourable to Rabelais as might have 
 been expected. He was through life protected by the Cardinal Jean 
 du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, who employed him in various im-portiaal; 
 negotiations; and it is recorded of him that he refused a scholar admit- 
 tance to his table because he had not read his works. This famili- 
 arity with- his grotesque romance was also shared by Cardinal Duprat 
 wlio is said to have always carried a copy of it with him, as if it was 
 bis breviary The anecdote of the priest who obtained promotion from 
 28 
 
434 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 In my youth the world doted on Sterne ! Martin Sher- 
 lock ranks him among " the luminaries of the century." 
 Forty years ago, young men in their most facetious 
 humours never failed to find the archetypes of society in 
 the Shandy family — every good-natured soul was uncle 
 Toby, every humorist was old Shandy, every child of 
 Nature was Corporal Trim ! It may now be doubted 
 whether Sterne's natural dispositions were the humorous 
 or the pathetic : the pathetic has survived ! 
 
 There is nothing of a more ambiguous nature than 
 Strong humour, and Sterne found it to be so ; and latterly, 
 in despair, he asserted that " the taste for humour is the 
 gift of heaven !" I have frequently observed how 
 humour, like the taste for olives, is even repugnant to 
 some palates, and have witnessed the epicure of humour 
 losft it all by discovering how some have utterly rejected 
 his favourite relish! Even men of wit may not 'taste 
 humour ! The celebrated Dr. Cheyne, who was not 
 himself deficient in originality of thinking with great 
 learning and knowledge, once entrusted to a friend 
 a remarkable literary confession. Dr. Cheyne assured 
 'him that "he could not read 'Don Quixote' with any 
 pleasure, nor had any taste for ' Hudibras' or ' Gulliver ;' 
 and that what we call wit and humour in these authors 
 he considered as false ornaments, and never to be found 
 in those compositions of the ancients which we most 
 admire and esteem."* Cheyne seems to have held 
 Aristophanes and Lucian monstrously cheap! The 
 ancients, indeed, appear not to have possessed that comic 
 quality that we understand as humour, nor can I dis- ' 
 
 , a knowledge of his works is given iu the " Curiosities of Literature," 
 vol. ii., p. 10. — Ed. 
 
 * This friend, it now appears, was Dr. King, of Oxford, whose 
 anecdotes hare recently been published. This curious fact is given ip 
 a strange hodge-podge, entitled " The Dreamer ;" a remarkable instance 
 where a writer of learning often conceives that to be humour, which 
 to others is not even intelligible I 
 
OF STERNE. '' 4.35 
 
 cover a word which exactly corresponds with our term 
 humour in any language, ancient or modem. Cervantes 
 excels in that sly satire which hides itself under the 
 cloak of gravity, but this is not the sort of humour which 
 so beautifully plays about the delicacy of Addison'^ 
 page; and both are distinct from the broader and 
 ■ stronger humour of Sterne. 
 
 The result of Dr. Cheyne's honest confession was expe- 
 rienced by Sterne, for while more than half of the three 
 kingdoms were convulsed with laughter at his humour, 
 the other part were obdurately dull, to jt. Take, for 
 ffistance, two very opposite effects produced by 
 " Tristram Shandy" on a man of strong original humour 
 himself, and a wit who 4iad more delicacy, and sarcasm 
 than force and originality. The Rev. I*hilip Skelton 
 declared that " after reading ' Tristram Shandy,' he could 
 not for two or three days attend seriously to his de- 
 votion, it filled him with so many ludicrous ideas." But 
 Horace Walpole, who found his " Sentimental Journey" 
 very pleasing, declares that of " his tiresome ' Tristram 
 Shandy,' he could never get through- three volumes." 
 
 The literary life of Sterne was a short one : it was a 
 blaze of existence, and it turned his head. With his 
 personal life we are only acquainted by tradition. Was 
 the great sentimentalist himself unfeeling, dissolute, and 
 titterly depravSd? Some anecdotes which one of his 
 companions* communicated to me, confirm Garrick's 
 account preserved in Dr. Bumey's collections, that "He 
 was more dissolute in his conduct than his writings, and 
 getierally drove every female away by his ribaldry. 
 He degenerated in. London like an ill-transplanted 
 shrub ; the incense of the great spoiled his head, and 
 their ragouts his stomach. He grew sickly and proud — 
 an invalid in body and mind." Warburton declared 
 
 * Caleb Whitefoord, the wit once famed for hia invention of cross- 
 readings, which appeared under the name of " Papirius Cursor." 
 
4!3a ■ LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 that " he was an irrecoveraMe scoundrel."' Authenticated 
 fects ^i"e, however, wanting for a? judicious summary ofi 
 the real character of the founder of sentimental writing. 
 An impenetraWe mystery hangs over his family conduct ; 
 (te has thrown many sweet donjestic touches iii his, own 
 ijiemoirs and letters, addressed to his daughter: hut it 
 would seem that he was often parted from his family., 
 After he had earijpstly solicited the return of his wife 
 from France, thpugh she did, return, he was suffered to 
 dje in. utter neglect. 
 
 His sermons have been phserved to be characterised 
 by an, air of levity ;, he attempted this unusug,! manner. It 
 was probably a caprice which, induced' him. to introduce 
 one of his sermons, in " Tristranw Shandy ;" it was fixing 
 q,, diamond in' black velvet, and the contrast set off the 
 brilliancy. But he seems then to. have had no design of 
 publishing his "Sermons." One day, in low frpitits, ''com- 
 plaining to GaJeb Whitefooi;d of the state, of his finan- 
 ces, Caleb asked him, " if he had- no sermons like the one 
 iip.' ' Tristram Shandy' ?"' But Sterne had no notion that 
 *' sermons" were saleable, for two preceding, ones had 
 Itasspd unnoticed. " If you could hit on a striking title, 
 take my word; &>r it that they would go dow^n." The 
 next dq.y Sterile made his appearance in, raptures. "I 
 have it!" he eried: "Dramatic Sermons, by Torick." 
 "Vyith great diffi,oulty he was persuaded to drop this 
 allusion to the church and the playhouse !* 
 
 We ape 1a?ld: in the short addition to his- own memoirs,. 
 Ijial "he submitted tp fafcC' on the 18th day of March, 
 
 * He published these two volumes of discourses yndfer the title of 
 *' Torick's Sermons," because, as he stated- in his preface, it would 
 *( best servB the booksellers' purpose, as Torick's name is possibly of 
 the two the I more .known-; "-but, fearing the, censure of, the world; he 
 Sldde4 a, second title-page with, his own name, " to, ease the.minds of 
 those who see a jest, and the danger which lurka under it, where no 
 )est is meant." AH thi^ did not free, Sterne from miuch severe 
 Cfitioism, — Ed. 
 
OF STBRNB. 4gY 
 
 1V68, at his lodgiugs m Bond-street." But it does W?)t 
 appear to have been noticed that Stetne died -with neither 
 friend nor relation by his side ! ^a hired nurse was the sole 
 companion of the man whose wit found adt&irers iti every 
 street, but wh-ose heart, it would seem, could not draw: 
 one to his death-bed. We cannot say whether Stern€, 
 who had long been dying, had resolved to practise his 
 own prin'ciple,-'---when he made the philosopher Shandy, 
 who had a fine Baying for everyth'ijig, deliver his opinion 
 on death — that " there is no terror, brother Toby, i5i its 
 looks, but what it bortows from grotafe and convulsions 
 — and the blowing of noses, and the wiping 'away of 
 tears with the bottoms of cartains in a dying man's l-oota. 
 Strip it of these, what is it ?" ■ I find the moment of his 
 death described in a singular book, the " Life 6f a Foot- 
 man." I give it with all its particulars. *' In tlie mont^ 
 of January,' 1768, we set ofi" f(»r London. We stopped 
 for some time at Almack's house in Pail-Mall. My mastet 
 afterwards took Sir James Gray's house ia Clifibi-d-street^ 
 who was going ambassador to Spaili. He now began 
 house-keeping, hired a French cook, a house-maid, and 
 kitchen-maid, and kept a great Seal of the best company. 
 About this time, Mr. Sterae, the celebrated author, wa% 
 taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond-street, tie 
 was sometimes called ' Tristram Shandy,"* and sometimes 
 ' Yorick ;' a very great favourite of the gentlemen's. One 
 day my master had companyto dinner who were speaking 
 about him: the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of March, 
 the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Graftoii, Mr. Garrick, 
 Mr. Hume, and Mr. James. ' John,"* said my master, ' go 
 and inquire how Mt» Sterne is to-day.' I went, returned, 
 and said, — I T^ent to Mr. Sterne's lodging ; the mistress 
 opened the door ; I inquired how he did. She told me 
 to go,up to the nurse ; I went into the room, and he was 
 just a-dying. I waited ten minutes ; but in five he said, 
 ' lyTow it is come !' He put up his hand as if to stop a 
 
438 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 blow, and died in a minute. The gentlemen were all 
 very sorry, and lamented him very much."* 
 Such is the simple narrative of the death of this wit !f 
 Some letters and papers of Sterne are now before me 
 which reveal a piece of secret history of our sentimentalist. 
 The letters are addressed to, a young lady of the name of 
 De Fourmantel, whose ancestors wei-e the Berangers de 
 Fourmantel, who during the persecution of the French 
 Protestants by Louis' XIV. emigrated to this country: 
 thej' were entitled to extensive possessions in St.- DomiA- 
 go, but were excluded by their Protestantism. The 
 elder sister became a Catholic, and obtained the estates ; 
 the younger adopted the name of Beranger, and was a 
 
 * " Travels in various parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, during a 
 series of thirty years and upwards, by John Miodonald, a eadet of the 
 family of Kippooh, in Invernesahire, who after the ruiri of his,family, 
 in 1765, was thrown, when a* child, on tlie wide world, &o. Printed 
 for the author, 1790." — He served u number of noblemen and gentle- 
 men in the humble station of a footman. There is such an air of truth 
 and sincerity throughout the work that I entertain no doubt of its 
 genuineness. 
 
 •f Sterne was buried in the ground belonging to the parish of,, St. 
 George's, Hanover Square, situated in the Bayswater Road. His 
 funeral was " attended only by two gentlemen in a mourning coach, no 
 bell tolling ;" and his grave has been described as " distinguished by 
 • a plain headstone, set up with an un suitable' inscription, by a tippling 
 fratwnity of Freemasons." In 1761, long before his death, was 
 published a satire on the tendencies of his writings, mixed with a good 
 deal of personal censure, in a pamphlet entitled "A Funeral Discourse, 
 occasioned by the much lamented death of Mr Yoriok, preaclied befdre 
 a very mixed society of Jemmies, Jessamies, Methodists, and Clirisiians, 
 at a nocturnal meeting in Petticoat Lane ; by Christopher ■Plagellsta, 
 A. M." As one of the minor "CuriositiesofLiterature" this tract is worth 
 noting ; its author, in a .preface, says that " it has been maiiciousiy, or 
 ' laiher stupidly, reported that the late Mr. Sterne, ^ias Torick, is not 
 dead ; but that, on tbe contrary, he is writing a fifth and sixth, and 
 has carried his plan as far as a fiftieth and sixtieth volume of the book 
 called ' The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy ;' but they are 
 rather to be attributed to his ghastly ghost, which is said to walk the 
 purlieus of Covent Garden and Drury Lane." — En. 
 
OP STERNE. 439 
 
 governess to the Countess of Bristol. The paper states 
 that Catherine de Fourmantel formed an attachment to 
 Sterne, and that it was the expectation of their friends 
 that they ■would be united; hut that oh a visit Sterne 
 became acquainted with a lady, whom he married in the 
 space of one month, after having paid his addresses to 
 Miss de Fourmantel for live years. The consequence 
 was, the total derangement of intellect of this young 
 lady. She was confined in a private madhouse. Sterne 
 twice saw her there ; and from observation on her state 
 drew the " Maria" whom he has so pathetically described. 
 The elder sister, at the instigation of the father of the 
 communicator of these letters, came to England, and 
 took charge of the unhappy Maria, who died at Paris. 
 " For many years," says the writer of this statement, 
 " my mother had the handkerchief Sterne alludes to." 
 The anxious wish of Sterne was to have his letters 
 returned to him. In this he 'failed; and such, as they 
 are, without date, either of time or place, they are now 
 before me. 
 
 The billets-doux are unquestionably authentic, but the 
 statement is inaccurate. I doubt whether the narrative 
 be correct in stating that Sterne married after an acquaint- 
 ance of one month ; for he tells us in his Memoirs that 
 he courted his wife for two years ; he, however, married 
 in 1741. The " Sermon of Elijah," which he presents to 
 Miss de Fourmantel in one of these letters, was not pub- 
 lished till 1747. Her disordered mind could.not therefore 
 have been occasioned by the sudden marriage of Sterne. 
 A sentimental intercourse evidently existed bet-«veen 
 them. He perhaps sought in her sympathy, consolation 
 for his domestic infelicity ; he communicates to her the, 
 minutest events of his early fame ; and these letters, 
 which certainly seem very like love-letters, present a pic- 
 ture of his life in town in the full flower of his fame eager 
 with hope and flushed with success. 
 
440 LITBRAET CHAEACTEB. 
 
 (LETTEE I. 
 
 " Mt deae Kiitt, — I beg you -will accept of the in- 
 closed sermon, which I do not make you a present of 
 merely 'because it was wrote by myself, but because there 
 is a beautiful character in it of a tender and compassionate 
 mind in the picture given of Elijah. Read it, my dear 
 Kitty, and believe me when I assure you that I see some- 
 thing of the same kind and gentle disposition im your 
 heart which I have painted in the prophet's, which has 
 attached me so much to you and your interest, that I 
 •shall live and die 
 
 " Your affectionate and faitiful servant, 
 
 *' Laurence Steeni:. 
 
 " P. S. — ^If possible, I will see you this afternoon be- 
 fore I go to Mr. Fothergil's. Adieu, dear friend, — ^I had 
 the pleasure to drink your health last night." 
 
 XBTTEE II. 
 
 "Mt deae. Kitty, — If this billet catches you in bed, 
 you are a lazy, sleepy little slut, and I am a giddy, fool- 
 ish, unthinking fellow, for keeping you so late up — but 
 this Sabbath is a day of rest, at the same time that it is 
 a day of sorrow ; for I shall not see my dear creature to- 
 day, unless you meet me at Taylor's half an hour after 
 twelve ; but in this do as you like. I have ordered Mat- 
 thew to turn thief, and steal you a quart of honey ; what 
 is honey to the sweetness of thee, who art sweeter than 
 all the flowers it comes from ! I love you to distraction, 
 Kitty, and will love you on so to eternity — so adieu, and 
 believe, what time will only prove me, that I am, 
 
 "Yours." 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 ** Mt beae Kittt, — I have sent you a pot of sweet- 
 meats and a pot of honey — neither of thfem half so sweet 
 
OF STERNE. 441 
 
 as yourself — but don't be vaia upon this, or presume to 
 grow Bour upon this character of sweetness I give you ; 
 for if you do I shall send you a pot of pickles (by the 
 way of contraries) to sweeten you up, and bring you to 
 yourself again — whatever changes happen to you, believe 
 me that I am unalterably yours, and according to your 
 mottOj such a one, my .dear Kitty, 
 
 " Qui ne cbangera pas qu'ea mouranj:. 
 
 «L. S." 
 
 He came up to town in lYBO, to publish the two first 
 volumes of " Shandy," of which the first edition had 
 appeared at York the preceding year. 
 
 LETTEE IT. 
 
 " London, May 8. 
 
 "Mt dbae KiTTT, — I have arrived here safe and sound 
 — except for the hole in my heart which you have made, 
 like a dear enchanting slut as you are. — I shall take 
 lodgings this morning in Piccadilly or the Hayinarket, 
 and before I send this letter will let you know where to 
 direct a letter to me, which letter I shall wait for by the 
 jetura of the post with great impatience. 
 
 " I have the greatest honours paid me, and most civil- 
 ities shown m« that were ever known from the great ; 
 and am engaged already to ten noblemen and men of 
 fashion to dine. Mr. Garrick pays me all and more hon- 
 our than I could look for : I dined with him to-day, and 
 he has prompted numbers of great people to carry me to 
 dine with them — ^he has given me an order for the liberty 
 of his boxes, and of every part of his house, for the whole 
 season ; and indeed leaves nothing undone that can do 
 me either service or credit. He has undertaken the 
 whole management of the booksellers, and will procure 
 me a great price — but more of this in my next. 
 
 " And now, my dear girl, let me assure you of the 
 truest friendship for you that ever man bore towards a 
 
442 LITEEAET OHARACTEK. 
 
 woman — wherever I am, my heart ifi warm towards you, 
 and" ever shall' be, till it is cold forever. I thank you for 
 the kind proof you gave me of your desire ' to make my 
 heart easy in ordering yourself to be denied to you know 
 who — while I am so miserable to be separated from my 
 dear, dear Kitty, it would have stabbed my soul to have 
 thought such a fellow could have the liberty of coming 
 near you.— ^I therefore take this proof of your love and 
 good principles most kindly — and have as much faith 
 and dependence upon you in it, as if I was at your elbow 
 — ^would to God I was at this moment — ^for I am sitting 
 solitary and alone in my bedchamber (ten o'clock at 
 night after the play), and would give & guinea for a 
 squeeze of your hand. I send my soul perpetually out to 
 see what you are ardoing — wish I could convey my body 
 with it — adieu, dear and kind girl. Ever your kind friend 
 and affectionate admirer. * 
 
 " I go to the oratorio this night. My service to your 
 mamma." 
 
 LBTTBE V. 
 
 " My dbae Kitty, — Though I have but a moment's 
 time to spare, I would not omit writing you an account 
 of my good fortune ; my Lord Fauconberg has this day 
 given me a hundred and sixty pounds a year, which I 
 hold with all my preferment; so that all or the most 
 part of' my sorrows and tears are going to be wiped 
 away. — I have but one obstacle to my happiness now 
 left — and what that is you know as well as I.* 
 
 " I long most impatiently to see my dear Kitty. I 
 had a purse of guineas given me yesterday by a bishop — 
 all will do well in time. 
 
 " From morning to night my lodgings, which by the 
 
 * Can this allude to the death of hia wife ? — that very year he tells 
 his daughter he had taken a house at York, " for your mother and 
 yourself." 
 
HTTME, EOBBRTSOIT, AND BIECH. 4,4.3 
 
 bye are the genteelest in town,* are full of the greatest 
 company, — I dined these two days with two ladies of 
 the bedchamber — ^then with Lord Rockingham, Lord 
 Edgcumb, Lord Winchelsea, Lord Littleton;, a bishop, 
 &c., &c. 
 
 " I assure you, my dear Kitty, th'at Tristram is the 
 fashion. — Pray to God I may see my dearest girl soon 
 and welL — Adieu. 
 
 " Tour affectionate friend, 
 "L. Steenb." 
 
 HUME, ROBERTSOlSr, AND BIRCH. 
 
 The rarest of literary characters is such an historian 
 as Gibbon ; but we know the price which he paid for his 
 • acquisitions — unbroken and undeviating studies. Wilkes, 
 a mere wit, could only discover the drudgery -of com- 
 pilation in the profound philosopher and painter of men 
 and of nations. A speculative turn of mind, delighting 
 in generalising principles and aggregate views, is usually 
 deficient in that closer knowledge, without which every 
 step we take is on the fairy-ground of conjecture and 
 theory, very apt to shift its unsubs1;fintial scenes. The 
 researchers are like the inhabitants of a city who live 
 among, its ancient edifices, and are in the market-places 
 and the streets : but the theorists, bcoupied by perspec- 
 tive views, with a more artist-like pencil may impose on 
 us a general resemblance of things ; but often shall we 
 find in those shadowy outlines how the real objects are 
 nearly, if not wholly lost — ^for much is given which is 
 fanciful, and much omitted which is true. 
 
 Of our two popular historians, Hume and Robertson, 
 alike in character but different in genius, it is much to be 
 lamented that neither came to their tasks with the 
 
 * They were the second hpuse from St. Alban's Street, Pall Mall. 
 
iii UTERART CHARACTER. 
 
 previous sttidifes of kalf a life ; and their speculative or 
 theoretical histories are of so much the less value when- 
 ever they arfe deficient in that closer research which can 
 be obtained only in one way :; not the most agreeable to 
 those literary adventurers, for such they are, however 
 high they rank in the class of genius, "who grasp at eatly 
 celebrity, and depend n3.ore on themselves than on their 
 regea,rches. 
 
 In some curious letters to the literary antiquary Dr. 
 Birch, Robertson acknowledges " my chief object is to 
 aclorn, as far as I am capable of adorning, the history of 
 a period which deserves to be better known." He prob- 
 ably took his lesson from Voltaire, the reigning author , 
 of that day, and a great favourite with Robertson. Vol- 
 taire indeed tell us, that no writers, but those who have 
 composed tragedies, can throw any interest into a his- 
 toiy ; that we must know to paint and excite* the 
 passions ; and that a history, like a dramatic piece, must 
 have situation, intrigue, and catastrophe; an observation 
 which, however true, at least shows that there can be but 
 a moderate quantity of truth in such agreeable narratives. 
 Robertson's notion of adorning history was the pleasing 
 labour of genius — it was to amplify into vastness, to 
 colour into beauty, and to arrange the objects of his med- 
 itation with a secret artifice of disposition. Such an 
 historian is a sculptor, who, though he display a correct 
 semblance of nature, is not less solicitous to display 
 the niiracles of his art, and enlarges his figures to a co- 
 lossal dimension. Such is theoretical history. 
 
 The theoretical historian communicates his own char- 
 acter to his history ; and if, like Robertson, he be pro- 
 found and politic, he detects the secret motives of hiS 
 actors, unravels the webs of cabinet councils, explains- 
 projects that were unknown, and details stratagems 
 which never took place. When we admire the fertile 
 conceptions of the Queen Regent, of Elizabeth, and of 
 
HUME, EOBERTgbsr, AND BIRCH. 445 
 
 Bothwell, we are often defrauding Robertson of whatever- 
 admiration may be duC'TO such deep policy. 
 
 When Hume received from Dr. Birch Forbes's Manu- 
 scripts and Murdin's 'State-papers, in great haste he writes 
 to his brother historian : — " What I wrote yon with regard 
 .to Mary, &c., was from the printed histories and papers. 
 But I am now sorry to tell you that by Murdin's State- 
 papers, the fatter is put beyond all question; I got 
 these paper^'during the holidays by Dr. Birch's means ; 
 and as soon as I rtfad them Iran to Millain, and, desired 
 him very -earnestly to stop the publication of your his- 
 tory till t should write to you, and give you an oppor- 
 tunity of correcting a mistake so important ; but he 
 absolutely refused compliance. He said that your book 
 was now finished; that the whole narrative of Mary's, 
 trial must be wrote over again ; that it was uncertain- 
 whether the new narrative could be brought within the 
 same compass with the old : that this change would re- 
 quire the cancelling a great many sheets ; that there were 
 scattered ^assa^es through the volumes founded on your 
 theory." What an interview was this of Andrew Millar 
 and David Hume ! truly the bibliopole shone to- greater 
 advantage than the two theoretical historians I' And so 
 the world had, and eagerly received, what this critical 
 bookseller declared " required the new printing (that is,, 
 the new writing) of a great part of the edition !?' 
 
 When this successful history of Scotland invited- Rob- 
 ertson to pursue this newly-discovered province of philo? 
 sophical or theoretical history, he' was long irresolute in. 
 his designs, and so unpractised- in those researchesi he 
 was desirous- of "attempting, that: his admirers would have: 
 lost his popular productions, had not a fortunate intro-, 
 ductlon to.Dr. Birch, whose life had' been spent in histori- 
 cal' pursuits, enabled the Scottish historiian to, open many 
 a clasped; book, and' to drink of many, a sealed fountain. 
 Robertson was long undecided whether to write the his' 
 
4:4:6 LITER ART CHARACTER. 
 
 tory of Greece, of Leo X., that 6f William III. and Queen 
 Anne, or that of Charles V., ahd perhaps many other 
 subjects. 
 
 We have a curious letter of Lord . Orford's, detailing 
 the purport of a visit Robertson paid to him to inquire 
 after materials for the reigns of Williarti and Anne; he . 
 seemed to have .little other knowledge than what he had 
 taken upon trust. "I painted to him," says Lord Or- 
 ford, " the difficulties and the want of materials — but the 
 booksellers will out-argue me." Both -the historian and 
 " the booksellers" had resolved on another history : and 
 Robertson looked upon it as a task which he wished to 
 have set to him, and not a glorious toil long maWred in 
 his mind. But how did he come prepared to the very 
 dissimilar subjects he proposed? When he resolved to 
 write the history of Charles V., he confesses to Dr. Birch : 
 " I never had access to any copious libraries, and do not 
 pretend to any extensive hnowledge of authors ; but I 
 have made a list of such as I thought most essential to the 
 subject, and have put them down as I found them men- 
 tioned in any hooli I happened to read. Your erudition 
 and knowledge of books i.s injfinitely superior to mine, 
 and I doubt not but you will be able to make such addi» 
 tions to my catalogue as may be of great use to me. ' I 
 know very well, and to my sorrow, how servilely histo- 
 rians copy from one another, and how little is to be learned 
 from reading many books ; but at the same time, when 
 one writes upon any particular period, it is both necessary 
 and decent for him to consult every book relating to it 
 upon which he can lay his hands." This avowal proves 
 that Robertson knew little of the history of Charles V. 
 till he began the task; and he further confesses that "he 
 had no knowledge of the Spanish or German," which, for" 
 the history of a Spanish monarch and a Gferman emperor, 
 was somewhat ominous of the nature of the projected^ 
 history. 
 
HUME, EOBEETSOIT, AND BIBOH. 447 
 
 Yet Robertson, though he once thus acknowledged, as 
 we see, that he "■never had access to any copious libra- 
 ries, and did not pretend to any extensive knowledge of 
 authors" seems to have acquired from his friend, Dr. 
 Birch, who was a genuine researcher in manuscripts as 
 well as printed books, a taste even for bibliographical 
 bstentation, as appears by that pompous and voluminous 
 list of authors prefixed to his " History of America ;" the 
 most objectionable of his histories, being a perpetual 
 apology for the Spanish Government, adapted to the 
 Ineridian of the court of Madrid, rather than to the 
 cause of humanity, of truth, and of philosophy. I under- 
 stand, from good authority, that it would not be difficult 
 to prove that our historian had barely examined them, 
 and probably had never turned over half of that decep- 
 tive catalogue. Birch thought so, and was probably a 
 little disturbed at the overwhelming success of our elo- 
 quent and penetrating historian, while his own historical 
 labours, the most authentic materials of history, but not 
 history itself, hardly repaid the printer. Birch's publica- 
 tions are either originals, that is, letters or state-papers ; 
 or they are narratives drawn from originals, for he never 
 wrote but from manuscripts. They are the true materia 
 histonca. 
 
 Birch, however, must have enjoyed many a secret tri- 
 umph over our popular historians, who had introduced 
 their beautiful philosophical histoi-y into our literature ; 
 the dilemma in which they sometimes found themselves 
 must have amused him. He has thrown out an oblique 
 stroke at Robertson's " pomp of style, and fine eloquence," 
 " which too often tend to disguise the real state of the 
 facts."* "When he received from Robertson the present 
 of his "Charles V.," after the just tribute of his praise, 
 he adds some regret that the historian had not been so 
 fortunate as to have seen Burghley's State-papers, " pub- 
 * See "Curioaities of Literature," vol. iii., p. 387. 
 
448 niERART CHARACTER. 
 
 listed since Christmas," and a manuscript trial of Mary, 
 Queen of Scots^ in Lord Royston's possession. Alas! 
 such is the fate of speculative history ; a Christmas may 
 come, and overturn the elaborate castle in the air. Can 
 •we forbear a smile when we heair Robertson, who had 
 projected a history of British America, of which we pos- 
 sess two chapters, when the rebellion and revolution 
 broke out, congratulate himself that he had not made 
 any further progress ? " It is lucky that my American 
 History was not finished before this event ; how many 
 plausible theories that I should have been entitled to 
 form are contradicted by what has now happened !" A 
 fair confession ! 
 
 Let it not be for one moment imagined that this 
 articlte is designed to depreciate the genius of Hume and' 
 Robertson, who are the noblest of our modern authors, 
 and exhibit a perfect idea of the literary character.* 
 
 Forty-four years ago, I transcribed from their originals' 
 the correspondence of the historian with the literary anti- 
 quary. For the satisfaction of the reader, I here preserve 
 these literary relics. 
 
 Letters between Dr. Birch and Dr. W. Hobertson, relcctwe 
 to the Sistories of Scotland and of CharU&' Y. 
 
 "to de. biech. 
 
 " GrLApSMUIE, 19 Sept. ItST. 
 
 " Reveebnd Sie, — Though I have not the good for- 
 tune to be known to you personally, Tdm so' happy as to 
 be no strangei" to your writings, to which I have been in- 
 debted for much useful instruction. And' as I have heard 
 from my friends. Sir David Dalrymple and Mr. Davidson, 
 that your disposition to oblige' was equal to your kriowl- 
 ed'gej I now presume to write to you and to ask your as-' 
 sistance without any apology. 
 
 "I have been engaged for some time in writing the 
 
HUME, EOBBBTSON', A^D BIRCH. 449 
 
 history of Scotland from the death of James V. to the 
 accession of James VL to the throne of England, , My 
 • chief object is to adorn (as far as I am capable of adorn- 
 ing) the history of a period which, on account of the 
 greatness of the events, and their close connection with 
 the transactions in England, deserves to be better known. 
 But as elegance of composition, even w'here a writer can 
 attain that, is but a trivial merit without historical truth 
 and accuracy, and as the prejudices and rage of factions, 
 both religious and political, have rendered almost every 
 fact, in the period which I have chosen, a matter of 
 doitbt or of controversy, I have therefore taken aU the 
 pains in my power to examine the evidence on both 
 sides with exactness. You know how copious the maie- 
 ria historica in this period is. Besides all the common 
 historians and printed collections of papers, I have con- 
 sulted several manuscripts which are to be found in this 
 country. I am persuaded that there are still many manu- 
 scripts worth my seeing to be met with in England, and 
 for that reason I propose to pass some time in London 
 this winter. I am impatient, however, to know what 
 discoveries of this kind I may expect, and what are the 
 treasures before me, and with regard to this I beg leave 
 to consult you. 
 
 "I was afraid for some time that Dr. Forbes's Collec- 
 tions had been lost upon his death, but I am glad to find 
 by your ' Memoirs ' that they are in the possession of Mr. 
 Yorke. I see likewise that the ' D6p6ohes ds Beaumont ' 
 are in the hands of the same gentleman. But I have no 
 opportunity of consulting your ' Memoirs ' at present, 
 and I caimot remember whether the ' Didp^ohes de Fene- 
 lon ' be still preserved or not. I see that Carte has made 
 a great use of them in a very busy period from 1563 to 
 1576. I know the strength of Carte's prejudices so well, 
 that I dare say many things may be found there that he 
 could not see, or would not publisL May I beg the 
 23 
 
450 LITBKA.Rr CHARACTEB. 
 
 favour of you to let me know whether Fenelon's papers 
 be yet extant and accessible, and to give me some gen- 
 eral idea of what Dr. Forbes's Collections contain with 
 regard to Scotland, and whether the papers they consist 
 of are different from those published by Haynes, Ander- 
 son, &c. I am far from desiring that you should enter 
 into any detail that would be troublesome to you, but 
 some short hint of the nature of these Collections would 
 be extremely satisfying to my curiosity, and I shall es- 
 teem it a great obligation laid upon me. 
 
 " I have brought my work almost to a conclusion. If 
 
 you would be so good as to suggest anything that you 
 
 thought useful for me to know or to examine into, I shall 
 
 receive your directions with great respect and gratitude. 
 
 " I am, with sincere esteem, 
 
 » Rev^ Sir, Y' m. ob. & m. h. S', 
 " Wm. Robeetson." 
 
 to dk. biech. 
 
 " Edinburgih, 1 Jan. 1759. 
 
 " Dbae Sir, — If I had not considered a letter of mere 
 compliment as an impertinent interruption to one who is 
 so busy as you commonly are, I would long before this 
 have made my acknowledgments to you for the civilities 
 which you was so good as to show me while I was in 
 London. I had not only a proof of your obliging dis- 
 position, but I reaped the good effects of it. 
 
 " The papers to which I got access by your means, 
 especially those from Lord Royston, have rendered my 
 work more perfect than it could have otherwise been. 
 My history is now ready for publication, and I have de- 
 sired Mr. Millar to send you a large paper copy of it in 
 my name, which I beg you may acqept as a testimony of 
 ray regard and of my gratitude. He will likewise trans- 
 
HUME, EOBERTSON, AND BIRCH. 451 
 
 mit to you another copy, •which I must entreat you to 
 present to my Lord Royston, with such acknowledg- 
 ments of his favours toward me as are proper for me to 
 make. I have printed a short appendix of original 
 papers. You will observe that there are several inaccu- 
 racies in the press work. Mr. Millar grew impa,tient to 
 have the book published, so that it was impossible to 
 send down the proofs to me. I hope, however, the 
 papers will be abundantly intelligible. I published 
 them only to confirm my own system, about particular 
 facts, not to obtain the character of an antiquarian. If, 
 upon perusing the book, you discover any inaccuracies, 
 either with regard to style or facts, whether of great or 
 of small importance, I will esteem it a very great favour 
 if you'll be so good as to communicate them to me. I 
 shall likewise be indebted to you, if you'll let me know 
 what reception the book meets with among the literati 
 of your acquaintance. I hope you will be particularly 
 pleased with the critical dissertation at the end, which is 
 the production of a co-partnership between me and your 
 friend Mr. Davidson. Both Sir D. Dalrymple and he 
 offer compliments to you. If Dean Tucker be in town 
 this winter, I beg you will offer my compliments to him, 
 " I am, w. great regard, D'. Sir, 
 
 " Y' m. obed'. & mrt. o. ser'., 
 
 " William Robeetsoit. 
 " My address is, one of the ministers of Ed." 
 
 TO DE. BIECH. 
 
 "Mmlmrg'h, 13 Dec. 1769. 
 " Deae Sie, — I beg leave once more to have recourse 
 to your good nature and to your love of literature, and 
 to presume upon putting you to a piece of trouble. 
 After considering several subjects for another history, I 
 have at last fixed upon the reign of Charles V., which 
 
453 LITERARY CHA.EACTER. 
 
 contains the first establishment of the J)resent political 
 Bystem of Europe. I have begun to labour seriously 
 upon my task. One of the first things requisite was to 
 form a catalogue of books which must be consulted. As 
 I never had access to very copious libraries, I do not 
 pretend to any extensive knowledge of authors, but I 
 have made a list of such as I thought most essential to 
 the subject, and have put them down just in the order 
 which they occurred to me, or as I found them mentioned 
 in any book I happened to read. I beg you would be 
 so good as to look it over, and as your erudition' and 
 knowledge of books is infinitely superior to mine, I 
 doubt not but you'll be able to make such additions to 
 my catalogue as may be of great use to me. I know 
 very well, and to my sorrow, how servilely historians 
 copy from one another, and how little is to be learned 
 from reading many books, but at the same time when 
 one writes upola any particular period, it is both necessary 
 and decent for him to consult every book relating to it, 
 upon which he can laiy his hands. I am sufficiently 
 ■master of French and Italian ; but have no knowledge 
 of the Spanish or German tongues. I flatter myself 
 that I shall not sufier much by this, as the two former 
 languages, together with the Latin, will supply me with 
 books in abunda*ce. Mr. Walpole informed me some 
 time ago, that in the catalogue of Harleian MSS. in the 
 British Museum, there is a volume of papers relating to 
 Charles V., it is No. 295. I do not expect much from it, 
 but it would be extremely obliging if you would take the 
 trouble of looking into it and of informing me in gen- 
 eral what it contains. In the catalogue I have inclosed, 
 this mark X is prefixed to ,all the books which I can get 
 in this coiinti'y ■; if you yoursel:^ or any friend with whom 
 you can use freedom, have any of the other books in my 
 list, and will be so good as to send them to Mr. Millar, 
 he will forward them to me, and I shall receive them 
 
HUME, ROBERTSON, AND BIRCH. 453 
 
 •with great gratitude and return them. with, much punctu- 
 ality. I beg leave to offer compliments to all our com- 
 mon friends, and particularly to Dean Tucker, if he be 
 in town this season. I wish it were in my power to 
 confer any return for all the trouble you have taken in 
 my behal f ' " 
 
 FKOM DE. BIRCH TO THE EEV. DE. EOBEBTSON AT 
 EDINBUEGH. 
 
 "I/mdon, 3 Jany. 1760. 
 
 "Dbak Sie, — Your letter of the 13 Dee', was partiou- 
 larly agreeable to me, as it acquainted me with your 
 resolution to resume your historic pen, and to undertake 
 a subject which, from its importance and extent, and 
 your manner of treating it, will be highly acceptable to 
 the public. 
 
 " I have perused your list of books to be eonsulted on 
 this occasion; and after transcribing it. have delivered It 
 to Mr. Millar ; and shall now make some additions to it. 
 
 " The new ' Histoire d'AUemagne ' by Father Barre, 
 chancellor of the University of Paris, published a few 
 years' ago in several volumes in q°., is a work of very 
 good credit, and to be perused by you ; as is likewise 
 the seooud edition of 'Abr6ge chronologique de I'llis- 
 toire & du Droit publiq d'AUemagne,' just printed at 
 Paris, and formed upon the plan of President Ilenault's 
 ' Nouvel Abrege chronologique de I'Histoire de France,' 
 in which the reigns of Francis I. and Henry H, will \>e 
 proper to be seen by you, 
 
 *' The ' Memoires pour servii- a I'Histoire du Cardinal 
 Granvelle,' by Father Rosper Levesque, a Benedictin 
 monk, which were printed at Paris in two vol'. 12°. in 
 1753, contain some particulars relating to Charles V. 
 But this performance is much less curious than it might 
 have been, considering that the author had the advantage 
 
454 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 of a vast collection, above an hundred volumes of the 
 Cardinal's original papers, at Besan9on. Among these 
 are the papers of his eminence's father, who was chan'- 
 cellor and minister to the Emperor Charles V. 
 
 " Bishop Burnet, in the ' Summary of Affairs before 
 the Restoration,' prefixed to his ' History of his Own 
 Time,' mentions a life of Frederick Elector Palatine, who 
 first reformed the Palatinate, as curiously written by 
 Hubert Thomas Leodius. This book, though a very rare 
 one, is in my study and shall be sent to you. You will 
 find in it many facts relating to your Emperor. The 
 manuscript was luckily saved when the library of Hey- 
 delberg was plundered and conveyed to the Vatican 
 after the taking of that city in 1622, and it was printed 
 in 1624, at Francfort, in 4*°. The writer had been secre- 
 tary and councillor to the elector. 
 
 "Another book which I shall transmit to yoif*is a 
 valuable collection of state papers, made by Mons'. 
 Rivier, and printed at Blois, in 1665, in two vols.' f". 
 They relate to the rdgns of Francis I., Plenry II., and 
 Francis IL of France. The indexes Will direct you to 
 such passages- as concern the Emperor. 
 
 " As Mons'. Amelot de la Houssaie, who was extremely 
 conversant in modern history, has, in the 1'*. tome of his 
 ' Memoires Historiques Politiques et Litt^raires,' from p.' 
 156 to 193, treated of Charles V., I shall add that book 
 to my parcel. 
 
 " VarUlas's ' Life of Henry 11. of France ' should be 
 looked into, though that historian has not at present 
 much reputation for exactness and veracity. 
 
 . " Dr. Fiddes, in his ' Life of Cardinal Wolsey,' has 
 frequent occasion to introduce the EmperorJ'his contem- 
 porary, of which Bayle in his Dictionary gives us ■ an 
 express article and not a short one, for it consists of eight 
 of his pages. 
 
 "Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth's preceptor, when 
 
HUME, EOBEETSOIf, AND BIRCH. 455 
 
 he was secretary to S'. Richard Morysin amb. from K. 
 Edward VI. to the imperial court, wrote to a friend of 
 his ' a report and discourse of the affairs and state of 
 Germany and the Emperor Charles's court. This was 
 printed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth ; but the copies 
 of that edition are now very rare. However this will 
 be soon made public, being reprinted in an edition of all 
 the author's English works now in the press. 
 
 " The ' Epitres des Princes,' translated from the Italian 
 by Belleforest, will probably supply you with some few 
 thipgs to your purpose. 
 
 " Vol 295 among the Harleian MSS. contains little re- 
 markable except some letters from Henry VIIl's amb'. in 
 Spain, in 1518, of which you may see an abstract in the 
 printed catalogue. 
 
 " In Dr. Hayne's ' Collection of State Papers in the 
 Hatfield History,' p. 56, is a long letter of the lord of the 
 council of Henry VIIL, in 1546, to his amb'. with the 
 Emperor." 
 
 TO DK. BIECH. 
 
 Metract from a letter of Dr. Robertson, dated College 
 of Edinburgh, Oct. 8, 1765. 
 
 « * * * I have met with many interruptions in carry? 
 ing on my ' Charles V.,' partly from bad health, and 
 partly from the avocations arising from performing the 
 duties of my office. But I am now within sight of land. 
 The historical part of the work is finished, and I am 
 busy with a preliminary book, in which I propose to give 
 a view of the progress in the state of society, laws, man- 
 ners, and arts, from the irruption of the barbarous 
 nations to the beginning of the sixteenth century. This 
 is a laborious undertaking ; but I flatter myself that I 
 shall be able to finish it in a few months. I have kept 
 the books you was so good as to sendme, and shall 
 return them carefully as soon as my Wpj-kiis dope." , 
 
456 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 OF VOLUMtlSrOUS WORKS INCOMPLETE BY 
 THE DEATHS OF THE AUTHORS. 
 
 In those " Dances of Death " -where every profession is 
 shown as taken by surprise in the midst of their unfin- 
 ished tasks, where the cooik is viewed in flight, overset- 
 ting his caldron of soup, and the physician, while 
 inspecting his patient's urinal, is himself touched by the 
 grim visitor, one more instance of poor mortality may 
 be added in the writers of works designed to be pursued 
 through'.a long series of volumes. The French have an 
 appropriate designation for such woAs, which they call 
 '' ouvrck/es de longue Jialeine" and it has often happened 
 that the haleine has closed before the work. 
 
 Works of literary history have been particularly sub- 
 ject to this mortifying check on intellectual entei-prise, 
 and human life has not yielded a sufficient portiofl for 
 the communication of extensive acquirement ! Afte^ 
 years of reading and writing, the literary historian, who 
 in his innumerable researches is critical as well as erudite, 
 has still to arbitrate between conflicting opinions ; to 
 resolve on the doubtful, to clear up the obscure, and to 
 grasp at remote researches : — ^but he dies, and leaves his 
 favourite volumes little more than a project ! 
 
 Feelingly the antiquary Hearne laments this general 
 fbrgetfulness of the nature of all human concerns in the 
 mind of the antiquary, vfho is so busied with other times 
 and so interested for Other persons than those about him. 
 " It is the! business of a good antiquary, as of a good 
 man, to have mortality always before him." 
 
 A few illustrious scholars have indeed escaped the fate 
 reserved for most of their brothers. A long life, and the; 
 art of multiplying that life not only by an early attach" 
 ment to study, but by that order and arrangement which 
 shortehs our researches, have sufliced for a Muratori. 
 With such a student time was a great capital which he 
 
OF INCOMPLETE VOLUMINOtTS -WORKS. 457 
 
 knew to put out at compound interest ; and this Varro 
 of the Italians, who performed an infinite number of 
 things in the circumscribed period of ordinary life, ap^ 
 pears not to have felt any dread of leaving his volumin- 
 ous labours unfinished, but rather of wanting one to 
 begin. This literary Alexander thought he might want 
 a world to conquer 1 Mnratori was never perfectly happy 
 unless employed in two large works at the same time, 
 and so much dreaded the state of literary inaction, that 
 he was incessantly importuning his friends to suggest to 
 Mm objects worthy of his future composition. The flame 
 kindled in his youth burned clear in his old age ; and it 
 was in his senility that he produced the twelve quartos 
 of his Annali cP Italia as an addition to his twenty-nine 
 folios of his Herum Jtalicarum Scripfores, and the six 
 folios of the Antiquitates Medii ^vi ! Yet these vast 
 edifices of history are not all which this illustrious Italian 
 has raised for his fatherland. Gibbon in his Miscellane- 
 ous Works has drawn an admirable character of Mui-a- 
 tori< 
 
 But such a fortunate result has rarely accompanied 
 the labours of the literary worthies of this order. Tira- 
 boschi indeed lived to complete his great national his- 
 tory of Italian literature ; but, unhappily for us, Warton, 
 after feeling his way through the darker ages of our 
 poetry, and just conducting us to a brighter region, in 
 planning the map of the country of which he had only a 
 Pisgah view, expires amid his volumes ! Our poetical 
 antiquary led us to the opening gates of the paradise of 
 our poetry, when, alas ! they closed on him and on us ! 
 The most precious portion of Warton's history is but the 
 fragment of a fragment. 
 
 Life passes away in collecting materials^-the marble 
 lies in blocks— and sometimes a colonnade is erected, or, 
 even one whole side of a palace indicates the design of 
 the architect. Count Mazzuchelli, early in life, formed » 
 
458 LITERARY CHAEACTEK. 
 
 nolble but too mighty a project, in which, ho-wever, he 
 considerably advanced. This was an historical and criti- 
 cal account of the memoirs and the writings of Italian 
 authors ; he even commenced the publication in alpha- 
 betical order, but the six invaluable folios we possess 
 only contain the authors the initial letters of whose 
 names are A and B ! This great literary historian had 
 finished for the press other volumes, which the torpor of 
 his descendants has suffered to lie in a dormant state. 
 Rich in acquisition, and judicious in his decisions, the 
 days of the patriotic Mazzuchelli were freely given to 
 the most curious and elegant researches in his national 
 literature ; his correspondence is said to consist of forty 
 volumes ; with eight of literary memoirs, besides the 
 lives of his literary contemporaries; — but Europe has 
 been defrauded of the hidden treasures. 
 
 The history of Baillet's " Jugemens des ScavattS sur 
 les Principaux Ouvrages des Auteurs," or Decisions of 
 the Learned on the Learned, is a remarkable instance 
 how little the calculations of writers of research serve 
 to ascertain the period of their projected labour. Baillet 
 passed his life in the midst of the great library of the 
 literary family of the Lamoignons, and as an act of grati- 
 tude arranged a classified catalogue in thirty-two folio 
 volumes ; it indicated not only what any author had pro- 
 fessedly composed on any subject, but also marked those 
 passages relative to the subject which other writers had 
 touched on. By means of this catalogue, the philosophi- 
 cal patron of Baillet at a single glance discovered the 
 great results of human knowledge on any object of his 
 inquiries. This catalogue, of equal novelty and curiosity, 
 the learned came to study, and often transcribed its pre- 
 cious notices. Amid this world of books, the skill and 
 labour of Baillet prompted him to collect the critical 
 opinions of the learned, and from the experience he had 
 acquired in the progress of his colossal catalogue, as a 
 
OF. IKCOMPLBTE YOLTTMIXOTTS 'WORKS. 459 
 
 preliminary, sketched one of the most magnificent plans 
 of literary history. This instructive project has been 
 preserved by Monnoye in his edition. It consists of six 
 large divisions, -with innumerable subdivisions. It is a 
 map of the human mind, and presents a view of the 
 magnitude and variety of literature, which few can con- 
 ceive. The project was too vast for an individual; it 
 now occupies seven quartos, yet it advanced no farther 
 than the critics, translators, and poets, forming little 
 more than the first, and a commencement of the second 
 great division ; to more important classes the laborious 
 projector never reached ! 
 
 Another literary history is the " Bibliotheque Fran- 
 goise" of Goujet, left unfinished by his death. He had 
 designed a classified history of French literature ; but of 
 its numerous classes he has only concluded that of the 
 translators, and not finished the second he had com- 
 menced, of the poets. He lost himself in the obscure 
 times of French Literature, and consumed sixteen years 
 on his eighteen volumes ! 
 
 A great enterprise of the Benedictines, the "Histoire 
 Littdraire de la France," now consists of twelve large 
 quartos, which even its successive writers have only been 
 able to carry down to the close of the twelfth century !* 
 
 David Clement, a bookseller, and a book-lover, designed 
 the most extensive bibliography which had ever appeared ; 
 this history of books is not a barren nomenclature, the 
 particulars and dissertations are sometimes curious : but 
 the diligent life of the author only allowed him to pro- 
 ceed as far as the letter H! The alphabetical order 
 ■yvhioh some writers have adopted has often proved a sad 
 memento of human life ! The last edition of our own 
 "Biographia Britannica," feeble, imperfect, and inade- 
 quate as the writers were to the task the booksellers had 
 
 * This work haa been since resumed. 
 
460 IITBEAET CHAEACTBB. 
 
 chosen them to execute, remains still a monutnent vhioh 
 every literary Englishman may hlush to see so hopelessly 
 interrupted. 
 
 When Le Grand D'Aussy, whose " Fabliaux " are so 
 well known, adopted, in the warmth of antiquarian imag- 
 ination, the plan suggested by the Marquis de Paulmy, 
 •first sketched in the Melanges tiris cPune grande JBibli-' 
 oth&que, of a picture of the domestic life of the French 
 people from their earliest periods, the subject broke upon 
 him like a vision ; it had novelty, amusement, and curi- 
 osity ; " le sujet m'enparut neuf, riche et piqicant." He 
 revelled amid the scenes of their architecture, the inte- 
 rior decoi-ations of their houses, their changeable dress, 
 their games, and recreations ; in a word, on all the parts 
 which were most adapted to amuse the fancy. But when 
 he came to compose the more detailed work, the fairy 
 scene faded in the length, the repetition, and the never- 
 ending labour and weariness ; and the three volumes 
 which we now possess, instead of sports, dresses, and 
 architecture, exhibit only a very curious, but not always 
 a very amusing, account of the food of the French 
 nation. 
 
 No one has more fully poured out his vexation of 
 spirit — he may excite a smile in those who have never 
 experienced this toil of books and manuscripts — but he 
 claims the sympathy of those who would discharge their 
 public duties so faithfully to the public. I shall preserve 
 a striking picture of these thousand task-works, coloured 
 by the literary pangs of the voluminous author, who is 
 doomed never to finish his curious work : — 
 
 " Endowed with a courage at all proofs, with health 
 which, till then, was unaltered, and which excess of 
 labour has greatly changed, I devoted myself to write 
 the lives of the learned of the sixteenth century. Re- 
 nouncing all kinds of pleasure, working ten to twelve 
 hours a-day, extracting, ceaselessly copying; after this 
 
OF moOMPLETE VOLUMmOUS WORKS. 461 
 
 Bad life I now wished to draw breatli, turn over what I 
 had amassed, and aaTange 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 con- 
 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 recollec- 
 tion of that moment of alarm without a feeling of invol- 
 untary terror. What a business is this, good God, of a 
 compiler ! In trath, 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 chamge my 
 facts as well as wiy ideas ; six times has my hand re- 
 copied my work ; and, however fatiguing this may be, it 
 certainly is not that portion of my task which has cost 
 me most." 
 
 The history of the " Bibliotheca Brittanica " of the late 
 Dr. Watt may serve as a mortifying example of the 
 length of labour and the brevity of life. To this gigantic 
 work the patient zeal of the writer had devoted twenty 
 years; he had just arrived at the point of publication, 
 when death folded down his last page; the son who, 
 during the last four years, had toiled under the direction 
 of his father, was chosen to occupy his place. The work 
 was in the progress of publication, when the son also 
 died ; and strangers now reap the fruits of their com- 
 bined labours. 
 
 One cannot forbear applying to this subject of volumin- 
 ous designs, which must be left unfinished, the forcible 
 reflection of Johnson on the ;planting of trees,: "There 
 is a frightful interval between the seed and timber. He 
 that caknlates the growth of trees has the unwelcome 
 remembrance of the shortness of life driven hard upon 
 him. He knows that he is doing what will never benefit 
 
462 LITESABT CZIARACTEB. 
 
 himself; and, when he rejoices to see the stem arise, is 
 disposed' to repine that another shall cut it down. 
 
 OF DOMESTIC NOVELTIES AT FIRST CON- 
 DEMNED. 
 
 It is amusing enough to discover that things, now 
 considered among the most useful and eVen agreeable 
 acquisitions of domestic life, on their first introduction 
 ran great risks of being rejected, by the ridicule or the 
 invective which they encountered. The repulsive effect 
 produced on mankind by the mere strangeness of a thing, 
 which at length we find established among our indispen- 
 sable conveniences, or by a practice which has now become 
 one of our habits, must be ascribed sometimes to a proud 
 perversity in our nature ; sometimes to the crossing of 
 our interests, and to that repugnance to alter what is 
 known for that which has not been sanctioned by our 
 experience.. This feeling has, however, within the last 
 half century considerably abated ; but it proves, as in 
 higher matters, that some philosophical reflection is re- 
 quired to determine on the usefulness, or the practical 
 ability, of every object which comes in the shape of 
 novelty or innovation. Could we conceive that man 
 had never discovered the practice of washing his hands, 
 but cleansed them as animals do their paws, he would for 
 certain have ridiculed and protested against the inventor 
 of soap, and as tardily, as in other matters, have adopted 
 the invention. A reader, unaccustomed to minute research- 
 es, might be surprised, had he laid before him the history 
 of some of the most familiar domestic articles which, in 
 their origin, incurred the ridicule of the wits, and had to 
 pass through no short ordeal of time in the strenuous 
 opposition of the zealots against domestic novelties. 
 The subject requires no grave investigation; we will, 
 
DOMESTIC NOVELTIES AT FIBST CONDEMNED. 433 
 
 therefore, only notice a few of universal use. They will 
 sufficiently demonstrate that, however obstinately man 
 moves in " the march of intellect," he must be overtaken 
 by that greatest of innovators — Time itself; and that, 
 by his eager adoption of what he had once rejected, and 
 by the universal use of what he once deemed unuseful, 
 he will forget, or smile at the difficulties of a former 
 generation, who were baffled in their attempts to do 
 what we all are now doing. 
 
 FoBKS are an Italian invention ; and in England were 
 BO perfect a novelty in the days of Queen Bess, that 
 Fjmes Moryson, in his curious "Itinerary," relating a 
 bargain with the patrone of a vessel which was to convey 
 him from Venice to Constantinople, stipulated to be fed 
 at his table, and to have " his glass or cup to drink in 
 peculiar to himself, with his knife, spoon, and forleP 
 This thing was so strange that he found it necessary to 
 describe it.* It is an instrument "to hold the meat 
 
 * Modern researeli has shown that forks were not so entirely un- 
 known as was imagined when the above was written. In vol. xxvii. of 
 the " ArehsBologia," published by the Society of Antiquaries, is an 
 engraving of a fork and spoon of tlie Anglo-Saxon era ; tliey were 
 found with fragments of ornaments in silver and brass, all of which 
 had been deposited in a box, of whicli there were some decayed re- 
 mains; together with about seventy pennies of sovereigns from Coen- 
 wolf, King of Mereia (a.d. 796), to Ethelstan (a.d. 878, 890). The inven- 
 tories of royal and noble persons in the middle ages often name forks. 
 They were made of precious materials, and sometimes adorned with 
 jewels like those named in the inventory of the Duke of Normandy, 
 in 1363, "une ouiller d'or et une foureliette, et aux deux fonts deux 
 saphirsi" and In the Inveiitory of Charles V. of Prance, in 1380, 
 "une euillier et une foureliette d'or, ofi il y a ij balays et X perlea.'' 
 Their use seems to have been a luxurious appendage to the dessert, to 
 lift fi^uit, or take sops from wine. Thus Piers Gavestpn, the celebrated 
 favourite of Edward III., is described to have had three silver forks 
 to eat pears with; and the Duchess of Orleans, in 1390, had one fork 
 of gold to take sops from wine (a prendre la soupe oil vin). They 
 appear to have been entirely restricted to this use, and nevef adopted 
 us now, to lift meat at ordinary meals. They were carried about the 
 
464 LITBBAEY CHAEACTEE. 
 
 ■while he outs it ; for they hold it ill-manners that one 
 should touch the meat with his hands."* At the close 
 of the sixteenth century were our ancestors eating' as 
 the Turkish noblesse at present do, with only the free use 
 of their fingers, steadying their meat and conveying it to 
 their mouths by their mere manual dexterity. They 
 were, indeed, most indelicate in their habits, scattering 
 on the table-cloth all their bones and parings. To pfirify 
 their tables, the servant bore a long wooden " voiding- 
 knife," by which he scraped the fragments from the table, 
 into a basket, called " a voider." Beaumont and Fletcher 
 describe the thing, 
 
 They sweep the table with a wooden dagger. 
 
 Fabling Paganism had probably raised into a deity the 
 little man who fii-st taught us, as Ben Jonson describes 
 its excellence — 
 
 the laudable use of forks, 
 To the sparing of napkins. 
 
 This personage is well-known to have been that odd 
 compound, Coryat the traveller, the perpetual butt of- 
 the wits. He positively claims this immortality. "I 
 myself thought good to imitate the Italian fashion by 
 this FORKED cutting of meat, not only while I was in 
 Italy, but also in Germany, and oftentimes in England 
 since I came home." Here the use of forks was, however, 
 long ridiculed ; it was reprobated in Germany, where 
 some uncleanly saints actually preached against the un- 
 natural custom "as an insult on Providence, not to touch 
 our meat with our fingers." It is a curious fact, that 
 forks were long interdicted in the Congregation de St. 
 
 person in decorated cases, and only used on certain occasions, and 
 then only by the highest Classes ; hence their comparative rarity. — 
 Ed. 
 
 * Moryaon's " Itinerary," part i., p. 20S, 
 
DOMESTIC KOTELTIES AT FIRST OONDEMNBD. 405 
 
 Maur, and were only used after a protracted struggle be- 
 tween the old members, zealous fpr their traditions, and 
 the young reformers, for their fingers.* The allusions to 
 the use of the fork, which we find in all the .dramatic 
 writers through the reigns of James the Fir^t .awd 
 Charles the First, show that it was still considered as a 
 strange affectation and novelty. The fork does mot ap- 
 peagito have been in general use .before the Kestoration! 
 On the introduction of farks there appears to have beea 
 some difiiculty in the manner .they were to be h.eld and 
 used. In T^he Fox, Sir PoUtic Would-be, counselling 
 Peregrine at Venice, observes — 
 
 Then you must learn the uae 
 And handling of your silver fork at meals. 
 
 Whatever this art may be, either we have yet to learn 
 it, or there is more than one way in which it may be 
 practised. D'Archenholtz, in his "Tableau de 1' Angler 
 terre," asserts that "an Englishman may be discovered 
 anyvrhere, if he be observed at table, because he places 
 his fork upon the left side of his plate ; a Frenchman- 
 'by using the fork alone without the knife ; and a ^Ger, 
 man, by planting it perpendicularly into his plate ; and 
 a Russian, by using it as a toothpick." 
 
 Toothpicks seem to have come in with forks, as younger 
 brothers of the table, and seem to have been borrowed 
 from the nice manners -of the stately Yenetians. This 
 implement of cleanliness was, however, doomed to the 
 same anathema as the fantastical ornament of " the com- 
 plete Signer," the Italianated Englishman. How would 
 the writers, who caught " the manners as they rise," 
 have been astonished that now no decorous person 
 would be unaccompanied by what Massinger in con- 
 tempt calls 
 
 Thy ease of tooUxpitka land thy ssilver fer^ I 
 
 * I find this circumstance oouoerning forks mentioned in the "jDic- 
 tionnaire de Treyoux." 
 30 
 
466 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 Umbeellas, in my youth, were not ordinary things-; 
 few but the macaroni's of the day, as the dandies were 
 then called, would venture to display them. For a long 
 while it was not usual for men to carry them without in- 
 curring the brand of effeminacy ; and they were vulgarly 
 considered as the characteristics of a person whom the 
 mob then hugely disliked — namely, a mincing French- 
 man. At first a single umbrella seems to have Jpen 
 kept at a coffee-house for some extraordinary occasion 
 — ^lent as a coach or chair in a heavy shower — ^but not 
 commonly carried by the walkers. The Female Tatler 
 advertises "the young gentleman belonging to the 
 custom-house, who, in fear of rain, borrowed the umbrella 
 from Wines' Coffee-house, shall the next time be wel- 
 come to the maid's pattens!''' An umbrella carried by a 
 man was obviously then considered an extretne effemi- 
 nacy. As late as in 1778, one John Macdonald, k foot- 
 man, who has written his own life, informs us, that when 
 he carried " a fine silk umbrella, which he had brought 
 from Spain, he could not with any comfort to himself use 
 it ;■ the people calling out ' Frenchman ! why don't you 
 get a coach ?' " The fact was, that the hackney-coachmen 
 and the chainnen, joining with the true esprit de corps, 
 were clamorous against this portentous rival. This foot- 
 man, in 1778, gives us further information: — "At this 
 time there were no umbrellas worn in London, except in 
 noblemen's and gentlemen's houses, where there was ■ a 
 large one hung in the hall to hold over a lady or a gen- 
 tleman, if it rained, between the door and their carriage." 
 His sister was compelled to quit his arm one day, from " 
 the abuse he drew down on himself by his umbrella. 
 But he adds that "he persisted for three months, till 
 they took no further notice of this novelty. Foreignera 
 began to use theirs, and then the English. Now it is 
 become a great trade in London."* The state of our 
 
 * Umbrellas are, however, an invention of great antiquity, and may 
 
DOMESTIC IffOTBLTIES AT FIRST CONDEMNED. 467 
 
 population might now, in some degree, he ascertained: by 
 the number of umbrellas. 
 
 Coaches, on their first invention, oflFered a fruitful 
 source of declamation, as an inordinate luxury, particu- 
 larly among the ascetics of monkish Spain. The Spanish 
 biographer of Don John of Austria, describing that 
 golden age, the good old times, when they only used 
 "carts drawn by oxen, riding in this manner to court," 
 notices that it was found necessary to prohibit coaches 
 by a royal proclamation, " to such a hfeight was this 
 infernal vice got, which has done so much injury to Cas- 
 tile." In this style nearly every domestic novelty has 
 been attacked. The injury inflicted on Castile by the 
 introduction of coaches could only have been felt by the 
 purveyors of carts and oxen for a morning's ride. The 
 same circumstances occurred in this country. When 
 coaches began to be kept by the gentry, or were hired 
 out, a powerful party found their " occupation gone !" 
 Ladies would no longer ride on pillions behind their foot- 
 men, nor would take the air, where the air was purest, on 
 the river. Judges and counsellors from their inns would 
 no longer be conveyed by water to Westminister Hall, or 
 jog on with all their gravity on a poor palfrey. Consid- 
 erable bodies of men were thrown out of their habitual 
 employments — ^the watermen, the hackneymen, and the 
 
 be seen in the soulpturea of ancient Egypt and Assyria. They are 
 also depicted on early Greek vases. But the most curious fact con- 
 nected with their use in this country seems to be the knowledge GUI' 
 Saxon ancestors had of them ; though the use, in accordance with the 
 earliest custom, appears to have been as a shelter or mark of distinc- 
 tion for royalty. In ' Oasdmon's " Metrical Paraphrase of , Parts of 
 Scripture," now in the British Museum (Harleian MS. No. 60.!), an 
 Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the tenth century, is the drawing or a 
 king, who has an umbrella held over his head by an attendant, in the 
 same way as it is borne over modern eastern kings. The form is pre- 
 cisely similar to those now in use, though, as noted above, they were 
 an entire novelty when re-introduced in the last century. — Ed. 
 
468 litbea:et chaeactee. 
 
 saddlers. Families ■were tiow jolted, in a heavy wOodea 
 machine, into splendour and ruin. The disturbances and 
 opposition these 'Coaches created 'we should hardly now 
 haT« fcnoWn, had not Taylor, the Wateripoet* and man, 
 Beht down to us an invective against coaches, in 1623, 
 dedicated Hio all who are grieved with "the world run^ 
 ning on wheels." 
 
 'Taylor, a humorist and satirist, as well as waterman, 
 'conveys some information in ithis rare tract of the period 
 'when coaches began to be :more (generally used — " Within 
 ■enr memories our nobiMty and igentry could ride well- 
 toounted, and sometimes walk on foot gallantly attended 
 ■with fourscore brave fellows in blue coats, which was a 
 ^lory to our nation far girea'ter than forty of .these 
 leathern timbrels. Then the name of a coach was heathen 
 Oreek. Whoever saw, but upon extraordinary occasions, 
 Sir Philip iSidney and Sir Francis Drake ride in a coach ? 
 They made small nse of looaches;; there weme but few in 
 -those times, and they were deadly foes to sloth and 
 effeminacy. It is in the memory of many when in the 
 'whole kingdom there was not one ! It is a doubtful 
 <juestion whether the devil hronght'tobaeco into England 
 in a coach, for 'both appeared at the same time." It ap- 
 ipeai-s 'that femilies, for the «afce of their exterior show, 
 Wisetrably coHtracted their domestic establishment'; for 
 Taylor, the Water-poet, complains that when they used 
 ^formerly to keep from ten to a hundred proper serying- 
 tden, they ndWmade the best ishilft, and for the sake of 
 'fhei;r coach and horses had only " a butterfly page, a 
 trotting footman, and a sti-ff-drinking coachman, a codfc, 
 ■ft clerk, a steward, and a butler, which hath forced an 
 army of tall fellows to the igateihouses," or >prisons. Of 
 
 * Taylor Was ioliginalfy a iliaEBa waterman, hence ithe term, 
 '"■Watelr-pOet" -givsn him. Bis attack upon ooaohea "was published 
 with this quaint title, " The world runnes on wlieeles, or, odds, betwixt 
 carts and eoaehes^" It is an unsparing. satire. — Ed. 
 
DOMESTIC NOVELTIES AT FIRST CONDEMNED. 4i@$ 
 
 one of the evO effects- of this- new fashion of coao]iirri<iiRg 
 this satirist of the town 'wittily observesi, that, as: soon as 
 a man was knighted, hvs lady was lamed for ever, and 
 could not on any account be seen but in a eoach* As 
 hitherto our females had been accustomed to robugt 
 exeroise, on foot or on horseback, they were no^ Ibrced 
 to substitute a domestic artificial exercise in sawing bjili- 
 lets, swinging, or rolling the great roller in the alleys of 
 their garden. In the change of this ne-w fashion th-ey 
 found out the ineoaveniMace of a sedentary life passed ia 
 their coaches.* 
 
 Even at this early period of the introduction of ©oaehes, 
 they were not only costly in the ornaments— in velvets^ 
 damasks, taffetas, silver and gold lace, fringes of all 
 Borts — ^but their greatest pains were in matohing their 
 coach-horses. " They must be all of a colour, lomgiitiide, 
 latitude, cressitude, heightj length, thickness, breadth (I 
 muse they do not weigh them in a pair of balances) ; and 
 when once matched with a great, deal of care, if one of 
 them chance to die, then is the coach maimed till a meet 
 mate be found, whose corresponding may be as equivalent 
 to the surviving palfrey, in all respects, as like as a broom 
 to a besom, barm to yeast, or codlings to boiled applest" 
 This is good natural humour. He proceeds — " They use 
 
 * Stow, In hia " Chconiclea," has preserved the date of the first in- 
 troduotiou of coaches into England, as well as the name of the first 
 driver, and first English coaohmaker. "In the year ISffd GuUHam 
 3oonen, a Dutchraan, became the qneeu'a coadiman, and was the first 
 tliat brought the use of coaches into England. After a whilp divers 
 great ladies, with, as great jealousie of the queen's displeasure, made 
 them coaches, and rid in them up and down the country, to the great 
 admiration of all the beholders; bat tht»n, by little and Kttle, they 
 grew usual among the nobEity and others of sorte, and withia twenty 
 years beeamei a great trade of eoaehmaltin^;" and he alsa nates tihal 
 ia the year of their introduction to England " Walter , Rippon made a 
 cache for the Earl of Rutland, which was the first cocfte that was ever 
 made in England." — Ed. 
 
470 ■ LITERARY C3ARACTER. 
 
 more diligence in matching their coach-horses than in the 
 marriage of their sons afli daughters." A gi-eat fashion, 
 in its novelty, is often extravagant ; true elegance and 
 utility are never at first combined; good sense and 
 experience correct its caprices. They appear to have 
 exhausted more cost and curiosity in their equipages, on 
 th;eir first introduction, than since they have become ob- 
 jects of ordinary use. Notwithstanding this humorous 
 invective on the calamity of coaches, and that "house- 
 keeping never decayed till coaches came into England'; 
 and that a ten-pound rent now was scarce twenty shil- 
 lings then, till the witchcraft of the coach quickly mounted 
 the price of all things." The Water-poet, were he now 
 living, might have acknowledged that if, in the changes 
 of time, some trades disappear, other trades rise up, 
 and in an exchange of modes of industry the nation loses 
 nothing. The hands which, like Taylor's, rowed boats; 
 came to drive coaches. These complainers on all novel- 
 ties, unawares always , answer themselves. Our satirist 
 affords us a most prosperous view of the condition of 
 " this new trade of coachmakers, as the gainfullest about 
 the town. They are apparelled in sattins and velvets, 
 are masters of the parish, vestrymen, and fare like the 
 Emperor Heliogabalus and Sardanapalus — seldom with- 
 out their mackeroones, Parmisants (macaroni, with Par- 
 mesan cheese, I suppose), jellies and kickshaws, with 
 baked swans, pasti-ies hot or cold, red-deer pies, which 
 they have from their debtors, worships in the country !" 
 Such was the sudden luxurious state of our first great 
 coachmakers ! to the deadly mortification of all water- 
 men, hackneymen, and other conveyanders of our 
 loungers, thrown out of employ ! 
 
 Tobacco. — ^It was thought, at the time of its introduc- 
 tion, that the nation would be ruined by the use of 
 tobacco, iiike all novel tastes the newly-imported leaf 
 maddened all ranks among us. " The money spent in 
 
DOMESTIC ISrOYELTIBS AT FIEST COITDEMNBD. 4.7 J 
 
 smoke is unknown," said a writer of that day, lamenting 
 over this " new trade of tobacco, in which he feared that 
 there were more than seven thousand tobacco-houses.'* 
 James the First, in his memorable "Counterblast to 
 Tobacco," only echoed from the throne the popular cry ; 
 but the blast was too weak against the smoke, and vainly 
 his paternal majesty attempted to terrify bis liege chilr 
 dren that " they were making a sooty kitchen in their 
 inward parts, soiling and infecting them with an unctuous 
 kind of soot, as hath been found in some great tobacco- 
 eaters, that after their death were opened." Tho infor- 
 mation was perhaps a pious fraud. This tract, which 
 has incurred so much ridicule, was, in truth, a merito; 
 rious effort to allay the extravagance of the moment. 
 But such, popular excesses end themselves ; and the 
 royal author might have left the subject to the town- 
 satirists of the day, who found the theme inexhaustible 
 for ridicule or invective. 
 
 Coal. — The established use of our ordinary fuel, coal, 
 may be ascribed to the scarcity of wood in the environs 
 of the metropolis. Its recommendation was its cheap- 
 ness, however it destroys everything about us. It has 
 formed an artificial atmosphere which envelopes the great 
 capital, and it is acknowledged that a purer air has 
 often proved fatal to him who, from early life, has only 
 breathed in sulphur and smoke. Charles Fox once said 
 to a friend, " I cannot live in the country ; my constitu- 
 tion is not strong enough." Evelyn poured out a famous 
 invective against "London Smoke." "Imagine," he 
 cries, " a solid tentorium or canopy over London, what a 
 mass of smoke would then stick to it ! This fuliginous 
 crust now comes down every night on the streets, on our 
 houses, the waters, and is taken into our bodies. On the 
 water it leaves a thin web or pellicle of dust dancing upon 
 the surface of it, as those who bath in the Thames dis- 
 cern, and bring home on their bodies." Evelyn has 
 
4:72 LITERARY CnARACTER. 
 
 detailed ihe gradual destruction it effects on every 
 article of ornament and price ; and " he- heard in France, 
 that those parts lyimg southwest of England, complain 
 of being infected with smoke from our coasts, which 
 injured their vines in flower:" I have myself observed 
 at Paris, that the hooks exposed! to safe ob stalls, however 
 old they might be; retained their freshness, and' were in 
 no instance like our owe, corroded and blackened, which 
 6ur coal-smoke never fails to produce. There was, a pre 
 cla«ation, so far back as Edward the Pii-st, forbidding 
 the tfse' of sea-coal im the suburbs, on a eontpklint of the 
 nobility and gentry, that they could' not go to' Londoil 
 dn account of the noisome smell and' thick air; About 
 1550, HoUingshred foresaw the general use of sea-coal 
 from the neglect of cultivating timber. Coal fires have 
 now been in general use for three centuries. In the 
 country they persevered in using wood and peat. Those 
 who were accustomed to this sweeter smell declared that 
 they always knew a Londoner", bythe smell of his clothes, 
 to have come froia coal-fireSi It must be acknowledged 
 that Our custom of using coal for our fuel has prevailed 
 over good reasons why we ought not to have preferred! 
 it< Bu* man accommodates himself even to an offensive 
 thing whenever his interest predominates. 
 
 Were we to carry on a speculation: of this nature into 
 graver topics, we should have a copious chapter to write 
 of the Opposition to new discoveries. Medical history 
 Swpptiies no unimportant number. On the improvements 
 in anatoiay by MalpigM and bis followers, the senior pro- 
 lessors of the university of Bononia Were inflamed to such 
 a pitch that they attempted to insert an additional clause 
 in the solemn oath taken by the graduates, to the effect 
 that they would not permit the principles and conclu- 
 sions of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, which' had 
 been approved of So many ages, to be overturned by any 
 person. In phlebotomy we have a curious instance. 
 
DOMESTIC NOTELTIES AT FIRST CONDEMNED. 473 
 
 In Spain, to the sixteenth century, they maintained that 
 when the' pain was on the one side they ought to Meed 
 on the other. A great physician insisted on a contraiy 
 practice ; a civil war of opinion divided Spain ; at length 
 they had recourse to courts, of law ; the novelists were 
 condemned ; they appealed to the emperor, Charles the 
 Fifth ; he was on the point of confirming the decree of 
 the eoiirt, when the Duke of Sa^oy died of a pleurisy, 
 having been legitimately bled.. This puzzled the em- 
 peror, who did not venture on a decision. 
 
 The introduction of antimony and the Jesuits' bark also 
 provoked legislative interference ; decrees and ordinances 
 were issued, and a civil war raged among the medical 
 faculty, of which Guy Patin is the copious historian. 
 Vesalius was incessantly persecuted by the public pre- 
 judices against dissection ; Harvey's discovery of the 
 circulation of the blood led to. so protracted a contro- 
 versy, that the great discovery was hardly admitted even 
 in the latter days of the old man ; Lady Wortley Mon^ 
 tague's introduction of the practice of inoculation met 
 the same obstinate resistance as, more recently, that of 
 vaccination startled the people. Tbw& objects of tb& 
 highest importance to mankind, on their first appearance,, 
 are slighted and Gontenmed. Posterity smiles at the' 
 ineptitude of the preceding age, while it becomes familiar 
 with those objects which that age has so eagerly rejected. 
 Time is a tardy patron of true knowledge. 
 
 A nobler theme is connected with the principle we 
 have here but touched on — the gradual chang;es in public 
 opinion — the utter annihilation of false notions, like 
 those of witchcraft, astrology, spectres, and many other 
 superstitions qf no remote date, the hideous progeny of 
 imposture got on ignorance, and audacity on fear. Bub 
 one impostor reigns paramount^ the plausible opposition 
 to novel doctrines, which may be subversive of some 
 ancient ones ; doctrines which probably shall one day be 
 
4:74 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 as generally established as at present they are utterly 
 decried, and which the interests of corporate bodies, 
 oppose with all their cumbrous machinery ; but artificial 
 machinery becomes perplexed in its movements when 
 worn out by the friction of ages. 
 
 DOMESTICITY; OR, A DISSERTATION ON 
 SERVANTS. 
 
 The characteristics of servants have been usually, 
 known by the broad caricatures of the satirists of every 
 age, and chiefly by the most popular — the writers of 
 comedy. According to these exhibitions, we must infer 
 that the vices of the menial are necessarily inherent to 
 his condition, and consequently that this vast multitude 
 in society remain ever in an irrecoverably ungovernable 
 state. We discover only the cunning depredator of the 
 household ; the tip-toe spy, at all corners — all ear, all 
 eye : the parasitical knave — the flatterer of the follies, 
 and even the eager participator of the crimes, of his 
 superior. The morality of servants has not been im- 
 proved by the wonderful revelations of Swift's " Direc- 
 tions," where the irony is too refined, while it plainly 
 inculcates the practice. This celebrated tract, designed, 
 for the instruction of the masters, is more frequently: 
 thumbed in the kitchen, as a manual for the profligate 
 domestic. Servants have acknowledged that some of 
 their base doings have been suggested to them by their 
 renowned satirist. 
 
 Bentham imagined, that were all the methods employed 
 by thieves an'd rogues described and collected together, 
 such a compilation of their artifices and villanies would 
 serve to put us on our guard. The theorist of legisla^ 
 tion seems often to forget the metaphysical state of man. 
 With the vitiated mind, that latent sympathy of evil 
 
DISSERTATION ON SERVANTS. 475 
 
 •which might never have been called forth but by the 
 occasion, has often evinced how too close an inspection 
 of crime may grow into criminality itself. Hence it is, 
 that when some monstrous and unusual crime has been 
 revealed to the public, it rarely passes without a sad 
 repetition. A link in the chain of the intellect is struck, 
 and a crime is perpetrated which else had not occurred. 
 
 Listen to the counsels which one of the livery gives a 
 brother, more stupid but more innocent than himself. I 
 take the passage from that extraordinary Spanish come- 
 dy, in twenty-five acts, the Spanish Baiod. It was no 
 doubt designed to expose the arts and selfishness of the 
 domestic, yet we should regret that the Spanish Bawd 
 was as generally read by servants as Swift's "Direc- 
 tions " : — 
 
 " Serve not your master with this foolish loyalty and 
 ignorant honesty, thinking to find firmness on a false 
 foundation, as most of these masters now-a-days are. 
 Gain friends, which is a during and lasting commodity ; 
 live not on hopes, relying on the vain promises of mas- 
 ters. The masters love more themselves than their serv- 
 ants, nor do they amiss ; and the like love ought servants 
 to bear to themselves. Liberality was lost long agO: — 
 rewards are grown out of date. Every one is now for 
 himself, and makes the best he can of his servant's serv- 
 ice, serving his turn, and therefore they ought to do the 
 same, for they are less in substance. Thy master is one 
 who befools his servants, and wears them out to the very 
 stumps, looking for much service at their hands. Thy 
 master cannot be thy friend, such difierence is there of 
 estate and condition between you two." 
 
 This passage, written two centuries ago, would find an 
 echo of its sentiments in many a modern domestic. These 
 notions are sacred traditions among the livery. We may 
 trace them from Terence and Plautus, as well as Swifb 
 and Mandeville. Our latter great cynic has left a fright- 
 
476 IITEEAET CHARACTEB. 
 
 fill picture of the state of the domestics-, -wken it seems 
 " they had experienced professors among them,^ who 
 could instruct the graduates; in iniquity seven hundred 
 illiberal arts how to cheat, impose upom, and find out the 
 blind side of their masters.'* The footmen, in Mande- 
 ville's day, had entered into, a society together, audi mad© 
 laws to regulate their wages, and not to carry burden^, 
 above two or three pounds weight, and a common fund 
 was provided to maintain any suit at law against any 
 rebellious master. This seems to be a confederacy which 
 is by no means dissolved. 
 
 Lord Chesterfield advises his. son not to allow his upper 
 man to doff his livery, though this valet was to attend 
 his person, when the toilet was a serious avocation re- 
 quiring a more delicate hand and a nicer person than he 
 who was to walk before his chair, or climb behind his 
 coach. This searching genius of philosophy and ks 
 peiites moeurs solemnly warned that if ever this man were 
 to cast off the badge of his order, he never would resume 
 it. About this period the masters were meaaced by a, 
 sort of servile war. The famous faree of High JLife be- 
 low Stairs exposed with great happiness the impudence 
 and the delinquencies of the parti-coloured clans. It 
 roused them into the most barefaced opposition ; and, as 
 ever happens to the few who press uinjust olaJ«s on the. 
 many, in the result worked the reform they so greatly 
 dreaded.* One of the grievances in society was then an 
 
 * The farce was produced in I'ISB, -wlleik it was tlie custom to admit, 
 any servant in livery free to the upper gallery, as they were supposed 
 to be in attendance on tlieir masters. Their foibles and dishonesty 
 being so completely hit off in the play incensed them greatly; and 
 they created mioh an uproar that it was resolved to exciude them in 
 future. In BdinUurgK the opposition to. the play pFQd.Ui09d still. groa.ter 
 scenes of violence, and the lives of some of the performers were threat- 
 ened. It at last became necessary for their masters to stop this out- 
 break on the part of their servants ; and alter the whole system of the , 
 household economy wliioli led to such results.— Ed. 
 
DISSERTATION OST SERVANTS. 477 
 
 anomalous custom, for it was only practi-sed in our country, 
 of a guest being highly taxed in dining with a family whose 
 establishment admitted of a numerous train. Watchful 
 of the departure of the guest, this victim had to pass along 
 a line of domestics, arranged in the hall, each man pre- 
 senting the visitor with some sepaTate article, of hat, 
 glovos, coat, and cane, claiming their " vails." It would 
 not have been safe to refuse even those who, with noth- 
 ing to present, still held out the hand, for their attentions 
 to the diner-out.* 
 
 When a slave was deemed not a person, but a thing 
 marketable and transferable, the single •principle judged 
 sufficient to regulate the mutual conduct of the master 
 and the domestic was, to command and to obey. It 
 seems still the sole stipulation exacted by the haughty 
 from the menial. But this feudal principle, unalleviated 
 by the just .sympathies of domesticity, deprives authority 
 of its grace, and service of its zeal. To be served well, 
 we should be loved a little; the >command of an excellent 
 master is even grateful, for tihe good servant delights to 
 be useful. The slave lepinea, and such is the domestic 
 destitute of any personal attachment for his master. 
 Whoever was mindful of the interests of him whose 
 beneficence is only a sacrifice to his -pomp ? The master 
 dresses and wages highly his pampered train ; but this'is 
 
 * These ^aife, supposed to be the free gratuity of the invited to the 
 servants of the inviter, were ultimately so managed that persons paid 
 servants' by that mode only — levying a kind of black-mail on their 
 friends, which ran through all society. "The wages are nothing," 
 says a noble lady's servant in one of 'Smollet's novels, "but the vails 
 are enormous." The consequence was, that masters and jaistresses 
 hadlittle coiltrol over them ; theyane said in some instances to have 
 paid for their places, as some servants do at inns, where tlie situation 
 was worth having, owing to the large .parties given, and gaming, tlien 
 so prevalent, being well-attended. It was ended by a mutual under- 
 standing all over the ithree kingdoms, after the riots which resulted 
 from the production of the play noted above.— ^Bd. 
 
478 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 the calculated cost of state-liveries, of men measured by 
 a standard, for a Hercules in the Hall, or an Adonis for 
 the drawing-room ; but at those times, when the domestic 
 ceases to bo an object in the public eye, he sinks into an 
 object of sordid economy, or of merciless caprice. His 
 personal feelings are recklessly neglected. He sleepy 
 where there is neither light nor air ; he is driven when 
 he is already exhausted ; he begins the work of midnight, 
 and is confined for hours with men like himself, who fret, 
 repine, and curse. They have their tales to compare 
 together ; their unhallowed secrets to disclose. The mas- 
 ters and the mistresses pass by them in review, and little 
 deem they how oft the malignant glance or the malicious 
 whisper follow their airy steps. To shorten such tedious 
 hours, the servants familiarise themselves with every 
 vicious indulgence, for even the occupation of such do- 
 mestics is little more than a dissolute idleness. ' A cell in 
 Newgate does not always contain more corruptors than a 
 herd of servants congregated in our winter halls. It ia 
 to be lamented that the modes of fashionable life demand 
 the most terrible sacrifi,ces of the health, the happiness, 
 and the morals of servants. Whoever perceives that 
 he is held in no esteem stands degraded in his own 
 thoughts. The heart of the simple throbs with this 
 emotion; but it hardens the villain who would rejoice 
 to avenge himself: it makes the artful only the more 
 cunning; it extorts from the sullen a cold unwilling 
 obedience, and it Stings even the good-tempered into 
 insolence. 
 
 South, as great a wit as a preacher, has separated, by 
 an awful interval, the superior and the domestic. "A 
 servant dwells remote from all knowledge of his lord's 
 purposes ; he lives as a kind of foreigner under the same 
 roof; a domestic, yet a foreigner too." This exhibits a 
 picture of feudal manners. But the progress of society 
 in modern Europe has since passed through a mighty 
 
DISSEBTATION ON SERVANTS. 479 
 
 •evolution. In the visible change of habits, of feelings, 
 of social life, the humble domestic has approximated to, 
 and communicated more frequently even with " his lord." 
 The domestic is now not always a stranger to "his lord's 
 purposes," but often their faithful actor — their confiden- 
 tial counsellor — the mirror in which his lordship contem- 
 plates on his wishes personified. 
 
 This reflection, indeed, would have violated the dignity 
 of the noble friend of Swift, Lord Orrery. His lordship 
 censures the laughter in " Rabelais' easy chair" for having 
 directed such intense attention to aflFairs solely relating to 
 servants. " Let him jest with dignity, and let him be 
 ironical upon useful subjects, leaving poor slaves to eat 
 their porridge, or drink their small beer, in such vessels as 
 they shall think proper." This lordly criticism has drawn 
 down the lightning of Sir Walter Scott : — " The noble 
 lord's feelings of dignity deemed nothing worthy of atten- 
 .tion that was unconnected with the highest orders of 
 society." Such, in truth, was too long the vicious prin- 
 ciple of those monopolists of personal distinction, the 
 mere men of elevated rank. 
 
 Metropolitan servants, trained in depravity, are inca- 
 pacitated to comprehend how far the personal interests 
 of servants are folded up with the interests of the house 
 they inhabit. They are unconscious that they have any 
 share in the welfare of the superior, save in the degree 
 that the prosperity of the master contributes to the base 
 and momentary purposes of the servant. -But in small 
 communities we perceive how the affections of the master 
 and the domestic may take root. Look in an ancient re- 
 tired family, whose servants often have been born under 
 the roof they inhabit, and where the son is serving where 
 the father still serves ; and sometimes call the sacred spot 
 of their cradle and their grave by the proud and endear- 
 ing term of " our house." We discover this in whole 
 countries where luxury has not removed the classes of 
 
480 LITERAET CHARACTER. 
 
 society at too -wide distances from eacli other, to deaden 
 their sympathies. We behold this in agrestic Switzer- 
 land, among its villages and its pastures; in France, 
 among its distant provinces ; in Italy, in some of its de- 
 cayed cities ; and in Germany, where simple manners and 
 strong affections mark the inhabitants of certain localities. 
 Holland long preserved its primitive customs-; and there 
 the love of order promotes subordination, though its free 
 institutions have softened the distinctions in the ranks 
 of life, and there we find a remarkable evidence of domes- 
 ticity. It is not unusual in Holland foi" servants to caU- 
 their masters uncle, their mistresses aunt, and the children 
 jof the family their cousins. These domestics participa- 
 ting in the comforts of the family, become naturalized 
 and domiciliated ; and their extraordinary relatives are 
 often adopted by the heart. An heroic effort of these 
 domestics has been recorded ; it occurred at the burning 
 of the theatre at Amsterdam, where many rushed into the 
 ■flames, and nobly perished in the attempt to save their 
 endeared families. 
 
 It is in limited communities that the domestic virtues 
 are most intense ; all concentrating themselves in their 
 private circles, in such localities there is no public — no 
 public which extorts so many sacrifices from the individ- 
 ual. Insular situations are usually remarkable for the 
 warm attachment and devoted iidelity of the domestic, 
 and the personal regard of families for their servants. 
 This genuine domesticity is strikingly displayed in the 
 island of iRagusa, on the coast of Dalmatia: for there 
 they provide for the happiness of the humble friends 
 of the house. Boys, at an early age, are received into 
 families, educated in writing, reading, and arithmetic. 
 Some only quit their abode, in which they -svere almost 
 born, when tempted by the stirring spirit of maritime 
 enterprise. They form a race of men who are much i 
 sought after for servants ; and the term applied to them 
 
DISSERTATIOIT ON SERTANT3. 481 
 
 of " Men of the Gulf," is a sure recommendation of char 
 acter for unlimited trust and unwearying zeal. 
 
 ' The mode of providing for the future comforts of their 
 maidens is a little incident in the history of benevolence, 
 which we must regret is only practised in such limited 
 communities. Malte-Brun, in his "Annales des Voy- 
 ages," has painted a scene of this nature, which may 
 read like some romance of real life. The girls, after a 
 service of ten years, on one great holiday, an epoch in 
 their lives, receive the ample reward of their good conduct. 
 On that happy day the mistress and all the friends of 
 the family prepare for the maiden a sort of dowry or 
 marriage-portion. Every friend of the house sends some 
 article ; and the mistress notes down the gifts, that she 
 may return the same on a similar occasion. The dona- 
 tions consist of silver, of gowns, of handkerchiefs, and 
 other useful articles for a jotang woman. These tributes 
 of friendship are placed beside a silver basin, which con- 
 tains the annual wages of the servant ; her relatives from 
 the country come, accompanied by music, carrying bas- 
 kets covered with ribbons and loaded with fruits^ amd 
 other rural delicacies. They are received by th« master 
 himself, who invites them to the feast, where the com- 
 pany assemble, and particularly the ladies. All the pres- 
 ents are reviewed. The servant introduced kneels to 
 receive the benediction of her mistress, whose grateful 
 task is then to deliver a solemn enumeration of her good 
 qualities, concluding by announcing to the maiden that, 
 having been brought up in the house, if it be her choice 
 to remain, from henceforward she shall be considered as 
 one of the family. Tears of afiection often fell duriiag 
 this beautiful scene of true domesticity, which tei-minates 
 with a ball for the servants, and another for the supe- 
 riors. The relatives of the maiden return homewards 
 with their joyous musicians ; and, if the maiden prefers 
 her old domestic abode, she receives an increase of wageSj 
 31 
 
482 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 and at a succeeding period of six years another julDilee 
 provides her second good fortune. Let me tell one more 
 story of the influence of this passion of domesticity in the 
 servant ; — its merit equals its novelty. In that inglori- 
 ous attack on Buenos Ayres, where our brave soldiers 
 were disgraced by a recreant general, the negroes, slaves 
 as they were, joined the inhabitants to expel the invar . 
 ders. On this signal occasion the city decreed a publip 
 expi'ession of their gratitude to the negroes, in a sort of 
 triumph, and at the same time awarded the freedom of 
 eighty of their leaders. One of them, having shown 'his 
 claims to the boon, declared, that to obtain his freedom 
 had all his days formed the proud object of his wishes : 
 his claim was indisputable ; yet now, however, to the 
 amazement of the judges, he refused his proffered free- 
 dom ! The reason he alleged was a singular refinement 
 ; of heartfelt sensibility : — " My kind mistress," said the 
 negro, " once wealthy, has fallen into misfortunes in her 
 infirm old age. I work to maintain her, and at intervals 
 of leisure she leans on my arm to take the evening air. 
 I will not be tempted to abandon her, and I renounce the 
 hope of freedom that she may know she possesses a slave 
 who never wUl quit her side." 
 
 Although I have been travelling out of Europe to fur- 
 nish some striking illustrations of the powerful emotion 
 of domesticity, it is not that we are without instances in 
 -the private Mstory of families among ourselves. I have 
 -known more than one where the servant has chosen to 
 . live without wages, rather than quit the master or the 
 mistress in their decayed fortunes; and another where 
 the servant cheerfully worked to support her old lady to 
 her last day^ 
 
 Would we look on a very opposite mode of servitude, 
 turn to the United States. No system of servitude was 
 ever so preposterous. A crude notion of popular free- 
 dom in the equality of ranks abolished the very designa- 
 
DISSERTATIOir ON SERVANTS. 483 
 
 tion of "servant," substituting the fantastic term of 
 " helps." If there be any meaning left in this barbarons 
 neologism, their aid amounts to little ; their engagements 
 are made by the week, and they often quit their domicile 
 without the slightest intimation. 
 
 Let none, in the plenitude of pride and egotism, 
 imagine that they exist independent of the virtues of 
 their domestics. The good conduct of the servant 
 stamps a character on the master. In the sphere of 
 domestic life they must frequently come in contact with 
 them. On this subordinate class, how much the happi- 
 ness and even the welfare of the master may rest ! The 
 gentle offices of servitude began in his cradle, and await 
 him at all seasons and in all spots, in pleasure or in peril. 
 ■ Feelingly observes Sir Walter Scott — " In a free country 
 an individual's happiness is more immediately connected 
 with the personal character of his valet, than with that 
 of the monarch himself." Let the reflection not be 
 deemed extravagant if I venture to add, that the habit- 
 ual obedience of a devoted servant is a more immediate 
 source of personal comfort than even the delightfulness 
 of friendship and the tenderness of relatives — for these 
 are but periodical ; but the unbidden zeal of the domes- 
 tic, intimate with our habits, and patient of our way- 
 wardness, labours for us at all hours. It is those feet 
 which hasten to us in our solitude ; it is those hands 
 which silently administer to our wants. At what period 
 of life are even the great exempt from the gentle offices 
 of servitude ? 
 
 Faithful servants have never been commemorated by 
 more heartfelt affection than by those whose pursuits re- 
 quire a perfect freedom from domestic cares. Persons of 
 sedentary occupations, and undisturbed habits, abstracted 
 from the daily business of life, must yield unlimited trust 
 to the honesty, while they want the hourly attentions 
 and all the cheerful zeal, of the thoughtful domestic. 
 
484 tITERART CHARACTER. 
 
 The mutual affections of the laastfer aiid the servant have 
 oHen beeft exalted into a companionship of feelihgs. 
 
 "When Madame de Ge'nlis heard that Pope had raised 
 a tnbnutneht not only to his father and to Ms Ddother^ but 
 also to the faithful servant who had mirSfed his earliest 
 yeats, she was s6 suddenly sttuck by the fact^ thait She 
 declared that " This monument of gratitude is the mor4 
 remarkable for its singularity, as I know of no dther in- 
 stance," Our churchyards would have afibrded her a 
 Vast number of tomb-stones ejected by gratefiil inastei's 
 to faithful Servants;"* and a closer intimacy With the 
 d^Hiestic privacy of many public characters might have 
 displayed thse same splendid examples. The one which 
 dj>p6ars to have so strongly affected her may be found 
 on the east end Of the outside of the parish church of 
 Twickenham. The stone bears this inscription ;-— 
 
 ib the memory of 
 
 Mabt BeacB, 
 
 *li6 dfed Novetaber 5, it 25, aged is. 
 
 Albxandeb Pope, 
 
 whom she nursed in his infancy, 
 
 and constantly attended for tliirty-eight years, 
 
 JBrScted this stbne 
 
 la gratitude to a fkithful SerVabt. 
 
 tfhe original portrait of Bhenstone was the votive gift 
 of a master to his servant, for, on its back, written by 
 tbe poet*8 own hand, is the foUowiag dedication : — " This 
 pictute belongs to Mary Cutler, given her by her master, 
 William Shenstone, January 1st, 1754, in acknowledgment 
 of her native genius, her magnanimity, her tenderness, and 
 1her :^delity. — W. S." We might refer to many similar 
 evidences of tlie domestic gratitude of such masters to 
 old and attached servants. Some of these tributes may 
 1^)6 familiar to most readers. The solemn author of the 
 
 * SWsa Bur «a6d^ta i*me*arieB pWpetuate this feeHilg, and Bihihit 
 many grateful Epitaphs DK SsRViNTsL 
 
DISSERTATION OU SERVANTS. 4^5 
 
 " Night Thoughts" inscribed an epitaph over the gray? 
 of his man-servant ; the caustic Gifforci ppwe^ forth ai^ 
 efEusion to the memory of a female eervaot, fraught with 
 a melancholy tenderness which his muse rarejy indulged. 
 The most pathetic, we had nearly said, and had sai4 
 justly, the most sublime, development of this devotion 
 of a master to bis servant, is a letter addree?e4 by that 
 powerful genius Michael Augelo to hjs friend Vasari, oa 
 the death of Urbino, an old and beloved seryant,* Pub- 
 lished only in the voluminous collection of the letters pf 
 Painters, by Bottari, it seems to have escaped general 
 notice. We venture to translate it in despair : ft)j? w# 
 feel that we must weaken it? masculine yet tender elo- 
 quence. 
 
 MICHAEL ANGELO TO VASAEL 
 
 " Mt deae George, — I can but write ill, yet shall not 
 your letter remain without my saying something. You 
 know how Urbino has died. Great was the grace of God 
 when he bestowed on me this man, though now heavy 
 be the grievance ai;id infinite the grief, The grace was 
 that when he lived he kept me living ; and in dying he 
 Jias taught me to die, not in sorrow and vdth regret, but 
 with a fervent desire of death. Twenty and six yeafs 
 had he served me, and I found him a most rare and faith- 
 ^1 man ; and now that I had made him rich, and ex- 
 pected to lean on him as the st^ff and the repose of my 
 old age, he is taken from me, and no other hope remain? 
 than that of seeing him again in Paradise. A sign of 
 
 *It ig delightful to note the warm affection dispj^iyed hy the great 
 Boulptor toward his old servant on his death-bed. The man who 
 would beard prineas and the pope liimself, vhen he felt It neges^ajy tp 
 assert his independent character as an arligt, and through life fviQS^^ 
 a somewhat hard exterior, was soft as » cdtild in afiectioqatg attgntioii 
 to his dying domestic, anticipating all his wants b7 a pergongil attend- 
 ance at his bedside. This was no light service cm the part of MiPh^el 
 Angelo, who was himself at the time eighty-tsro years of 8.gp.— i-Bp, 
 
4:86 LITERARY CHARACTER. 
 
 God was this happy death to him ; yet, even more than 
 this death, were his regrets increased to leave me in this 
 world the wretch of many anxieties, since the hetter half 
 of myself has departed with him, and nothing is left for 
 me than this loneliness of life." 
 
 Even the throne has not been . too far removed from 
 this sphere of humble humanity, for we discover in Sti 
 George's Chapel a mural monument erected by order 
 of one of our late sovereigns as the memorial of a female 
 servant of a favourite daughter. The inscription is a 
 tribute of domestic affection in a royal bosom, where an 
 attached servant became a cherished inmate. 
 
 King George III. 
 
 Caused to be interred near this place the body of >> 
 
 Mary GAscoiaKE, 
 
 Servant to the Princess Amelia ; 
 
 and this stone 
 
 to be inscribed ia testimony of his grateful sense 
 
 of the faithful services and attaohment 
 
 of an amiable young woman to 
 
 his beloved Daughter. 
 
 This deep emotion for the tender offices of servitude is 
 not peculiar to the refinement of our manners, or to 
 modem Europe ; it is not the charity of Christianity 
 alone which has hallowed this sensibility, and confessed 
 this equality of affection, which the domestic may par- 
 ticipate : monulnental inscriptions, raised by grateful 
 masters to the merits of their slaves, have been preserved 
 in the great collections of Grsevius and Gruter.* 
 
 * There are several instances of Roman heads of houses who con- 
 secrate "to themselves and their servants " the sepulchres tliey erect 
 in their own lifetime, as if in deatli they had no desire to be divided 
 from those who had served them faithfully. An instance of affection- 
 ate regard to the memory of a deceased servant occurs in the collec- 
 tion at Nismes; it is an inscription by one Sextus Arius Varois, to 
 Bermes, " his best servant " (servo optimo). Fabretti has preserved 
 an inscription which records the death of- a child, T. Alfacius iScanti- 
 
LBTTEBS m THE TBElSrAOULAR IDIOM. 487 
 
 PRINTED LETTERS IN THE VERNACULAR 
 miOM. 
 
 Pbinted Lettbes, without any attention to the selec- 
 tion, is so great a literary evil, that it has excited my curi- 
 osity to detect the first modern who obtruded such formless 
 things on public attention. I conjectured that, whoever 
 he might be, he would be distinguished for his egotism 
 and his knavery. My hypothetical criticism turned out to 
 be correct. Nothing less than the audacity of the nnblush- . 
 ing Piero Aretino could have adventured on this pro- 
 ject ; he claims the honour, and the critics do not deny it, 
 of being the first who published Italian letters. Aretino 
 had the hardihood to dedicate one volume of his letters to 
 the King of England, another to the Duke of Florence ; a 
 third to Hercules of Este, a relative of Pope Julius Third 
 — evidently insinuating that his lettera were worthy to 
 be read by the royal and the noble. 
 
 Among these letters there is one addressed to Mary, 
 Queen of England, on her resuscitation of the ancient 
 faith, which offers a very extraordinary catalogue of the 
 ritual and ceremonies of the Romish church. It is in- 
 deed impossible to translate into Protestant English the 
 multiplied nomenclature of offices which involve humaa 
 life in never-ceasing service. As I know not where we 
 can find so clear a perspective of this amazing contri- 
 vance to fetter with religious ceremonies the freedom of 
 the human mind, I present the reader with an accurate 
 translation of it : — 
 
 anius, by one Alfacius Severus, hia master, by which it appears he 
 waa the child of an old servant, who was honoured by bearibg the 
 prenomen of the master, and who is also styled la the epitapi " hia 
 sweetest freedman" (libertp duloissimp). — Ed. 
 
488 LITERART CHARACTER. 
 
 " Pietro Aretino to the Queen of England. 
 
 " The voices of Psalms, the sound of Canticles, the 
 breath of Epistles and the Spirit of Gospels, had need 
 unloose the language of my words in congratulating 
 your superhuman Majesty on having not only restored I 
 conscience to the minds and hearts of Englishmen and ' 
 taken deceitful heresy away from them, but on bi-inging 
 it to pass, when it was least hoped for, that charity and 
 faith were again born and raised up in them ; on which 
 sudden conversion triumphs our sovereign Pontiff Julius, 
 the College, and the whole of the clergy, so that it seems 
 in Rome as if the shades of the old Caesars with visible 
 effect showed it in their very statues ; meanwhile the 
 pure mind of his most blessed Holiness canonizes you, 
 and m.arks you in the catalogue among the Catharines 
 and Margarets, and dedicates you," &c. -■ 
 
 " The stupor of so stupendous a miracle is not the 
 stupefaction of stupid wonder; and all proceeds from 
 your being in the grace of God in every deed, whose 
 incomprehensible goodness is pleased with seeing you, 
 in holiness of life and innocence of heart, cause to be 
 restored in those proud countries, solemnity to Easters, 
 abstinence to Lents, sobriety to Fridays, parsimony to 
 Saturdays, fulfilment to vows, fasts to vigils, observances 
 to seasons, chrism to creatures, unction to the dying, 
 festivals to saints, images to churches, masses to altars, 
 lights to lamps, organs to quires, benedictions to olives, 
 robings to sacristies, and decencies to baptisms ; and 
 that nothing may be wanting (thanks to your pious and 
 most entire nature), possession has been regained to 
 offices, of hours ; to ceremonies, of incense ; to reliques, 
 of shrines ; to the confessed, of absolutions ; to priests, of 
 habits; to preachers, of pulpits ; to ecclesiastics, of pre- 
 eminences ; to scriptures, of interpreters ; to hosts, of 
 communions ; to the poor, of alms ; to the wretched,- of 
 
XETTBRS IN THE TEENACULAR IDIOM. 489 
 
 hospitals ; to virgins, of monasteries ; to fathers, of con- 
 vents ; to the clergy, of orders ; to the defunct, of obse- 
 quies ; to tierces, noons, vespers, complins, ave-maries, 
 and matins, the privileges of daily and nightly bells." 
 
 The fortunate temerity of Aretino gave birth to sub- 
 sequent publications by more skilful writers. Nicolo 
 Franco closely followed, who had at first been the aman- 
 uensis of Aretino, then his rival, and concluded his liter- 
 ary adventures by being hanged at Rome; a circum- 
 stance which at the time must have occasioned regret 
 that Franco had not, in this respect also, been an imita- 
 tor of his original, a man equally feared, flattered, and 
 despised. 
 
 The greatest personages and the most esteemed writers 
 of that age were perhaps pleased to have discovered a 
 new and easy path to fame ; and since it was ascertained 
 that a man might become celebrated lay writings never 
 intended for the press, and which it was never imagined 
 could confer fame on the writers, volumes succeeded 
 volumes, and some authors are scarcely known to pos- 
 terity but as letter-writers. We have the too-elaborate 
 epistles of Berabo, secretary to Leo X., and the more 
 elegant correspondence of Arnibal Caro ; a work which, 
 though posthumous, and published by an affectionate 
 nephew, and therefore too undisceming a publish^, is a 
 model of familiar letters. 
 
 These collections, being found agreeable to the taste 
 of their readers, novelty was courted by joomposing let- 
 ters more expressly adapted to public curiosity. The 
 subjects were now diversified by critical and political 
 topics, till at length they descended to one more level 
 with the faculties, and more grateful to the passions of 
 the populace of readers — Love! Many grave person- 
 ages had already, without being sensible of the ridicu- 
 lous, languished through tedious odes and starch sonnets. 
 Doni, a bold literary projector, who invented a literary 
 
490 LITERAET CHARACTER. 
 
 reyiew both of printed and manuscript workSj with not 
 inferior ingenuity, published his love-letters ; and with the 
 felicity of an Italian diminutive, he fondly entitled them 
 " Pistolette Amorose del Doni," 1552, 8vo. These Pis- 
 tole were designed to he little epistles, or billets-doux 
 but Doni was one of those fertile authors who have too 
 little time of their own to compose short works. Doni 
 was too facetious to be sentimental, and his quill was not 
 plucked from the wing of Love. He was followed by a 
 graver pedant, who threw a heavy offering on the alta^i 
 of the Graces ; Parabosco, who in six books of " Letters 
 Amorose," 1565, 8vo, was too phlegmatic to sigh over his 
 inkstand. 
 
 Denina mentions Lewis Pasqualigo of Venice as an 
 improver of these amatory epistles, by introducing a 
 deeper interest and a more complicate narrative. Par- 
 tial to the Italian literature, Denina considers this a/uthor 
 as having given birth to those novels in the form of let- 
 ters, with which modern Europe has been inundated; 
 and he refers the curious in literary researches, for the 
 precursors of these epistolary novels, to the work? 
 of those Italian wits who flourished in the sixteenth 
 century. 
 
 " The "Worlds " of Doni, and the numerous whimsical 
 works of Ortensio Landi, and the " Circe " of Gelli/ of 
 which we have more than one English translation, which, 
 under their fantastic inventions, cover the most profound 
 philosophical views, have been considered the precursors 
 of the finer genius of " The Persian Letters," that fertile' 
 mother of a numerous progeny, of D'Argens and others. 
 
 The Italians are justly proud of some valuable collec- 
 tions of letters, which seem peculiar to themselves, and 
 which may be considered as the works of artists. They 
 have a collection of " Lettere di Tredici Uomini Illustri," 
 which appeared in 1571; another more curious, relating 
 to princes — " Lettere de' Principi le quali o si scrivono 
 
LETTERS m THE VERNAOULAB IDIOM. 491 
 
 cla Principi a Principi, o ragionano di Prinoipi ;" Venezia, 
 1581, in 3 vols, quarto. 
 
 But a treasure of this kind, peculiarly interesting to 
 the artist, has appeared in more recent times, in seven 
 quarto volumes, consisting of the original letters of the 
 great painters, from the golden age of Leo X., gradually 
 collected by Bottari, who published them in separate 
 volumes. They abound in the most interesting facts rela- 
 tive to the arts, and display the characteristic traits of 
 their lively writers. Every artist will turn over with 
 delight and , curiosity these genuine effusions ; chronicles 
 of the days and the nights of their vivacious brothers. 
 
 It is a little remarkable that he who claims to be the 
 first satirist in the English language, claims also, more 
 justly perhaps, the honour of being the first author who 
 published familiar letters. In the dedication of his 
 Epistles to Prince Henry, the son of James the First, 
 Bishop Hall claims the honour of introducing " this new 
 fashion of discourse by epistles, new to our language, 
 usual to others ; and as novelty is never without plea of 
 use, more free, more familiar." Of these epistles, in six 
 decades, many were written during his travels. "We have 
 a collection of Donne's letters abounding with his pecu- 
 liar points, at least witty, if not natural. 
 
 As we became a literary nation, familiar letters served 
 as a vehicle for the fresh ■feelings of our first authors.- 
 Howell, whose Epistolse bears his name, takes a wider 
 circumference in " Familiar Letters, domestic and foreign, 
 historical, political, and philosophical, upon emergent oc- 
 casions." The "emergent occasions" the lively writer 
 found in his long confinement in the Fleet — that English 
 Parnassus ! Howell is a wit, who, in writing his own 
 history, has written that of his times; he is one of the 
 few whose genius, striking in the heat of the moment 
 only current coin, produces finished medals for the cabi- 
 net. His letters are still published. The taste which 
 
492 UTERAET CHARACTER. 
 
 liad now arisen for ooUectmg letters, induced Sir ToWe 
 Mathews, in 1660, to form a volume, of which many, if 
 not all, are genuine productions of their different wri- 
 ters. 
 
 The dissipated elegance of Charles IT. inspired freedom 
 in letter-writing. The royal emigrant had caught the 
 tone of Voiture. We have some few letters of the wits 
 of this court, but that school of writers, having sinned 
 in gross materialism, the reaction produced another of a 
 more spiritual nature, in a romantic strain of the most 
 refined sentiment. Volumes succeeded volumes from 
 pastoral and heroic minde. Katherine Philips, in the 
 masquerade-dress of " The Matchless Orinda," addressed 
 Sir Charles Cottrd, her grave " Poliarchus ;" while Mrs. 
 Behn, in her loose dress, assuming the nymph-like form of 
 " Astraea," pursued a gentleman, concealed in a domino, 
 under the name of " Lycidas." « 
 
 Before our letters reached to nature and truth, they 
 were strained by one more effort after novelty ; a new 
 species appeared, " Prom the Dead to the Livimg," by 
 Mrs. Rowe : they obtained celebrity. She was the first 
 who, to gratify the public taste, adventured beyond the 
 Styx ; the caprice of public favour has returned them to 
 the place whence they came. 
 
 The letters of Pope were unquestionably written for 
 the public eye. Partly accident, and partly persevering 
 ingenuity, extracted from the family cheats the letters of 
 Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who long remained the 
 model of letter-writing. The letters of Hughes and 
 Shenstoue, of Gray, Cowper, Walpole, and others, self- 
 painters, whose indelible colours have given an imperish- 
 able charm to these fragments of the human mind, may 
 close our subject ; printed familiar letters now enter into 
 the history of our literature. 
 
AN INQUIRY 
 
 nft?0 THE 
 
 LlTElElAllY AND POLITICAL CHARACTER OF 
 JAMES THE FIRST; 
 
 mCLUDING A SKETCH OF filS AGE. 
 
" The whole reign of James I. has been represented by a late cele- 
 brated pen (Burnet) to have been a continued course of mean practices ; 
 and others, wlio have professedly given an account of it, have filled 
 their worlcs with Ubel and invective, instead of history. Botjt King 
 .Tames and his ministers have met with a treatment from posterity 
 highly unworthy of thom, and those who have so liberally bestowed 
 their censures were entirely ignorant of the true springs and causes of 
 the actions they have undertaken to represent." — Sawyer's Preface to 
 " Winwood's Memorials." 
 
 " D y auroit un excellent livre i faire sur les injustices, les OUBLiai 
 et les OALOMNIBS mSTOEIQUEa" — MATlAMlil DB Genlis. 
 
ADVEETISEMENT. 
 
 The present inquiry originates in an affair of literary 
 conscience. Many years ago I set off in the world witli 
 the popular notions of the character of James the First ; 
 but in the course of study, and with a more enlarged 
 comprehension of the age, I was frequently struck by the 
 contrast of his real with his apparent character ; and I 
 thought I had developed those hidden and involved 
 causes which have so long influenced modern writers in 
 ridiculing and vilifying this monarch. 
 
 This historical trifle is, therefore, neither a hasty deci- 
 sion, nor a designed inquiry. ; the results gradually arose 
 through successive periods of time, and, were it worth 
 the while, the history of my thoughts, in my own pub- 
 lications, might be arranged in a sort of chronological 
 conviction.* 
 
 It would be a cowardly silence to shrink from encoun- 
 tering all that popular prejudice and party feeling may 
 oppose ; this were incompatible with that constant search 
 after truth which we may at least expect from the retired 
 student. 
 
 I had originally limited this inquiry to the literary 
 character of the monarch ; but there was a secret con- 
 nexion between that and his political conduct ; and that 
 again led me to examine the manners and temper of the 
 times, with the effects which a peace of more than twenty 
 years operated on the nation. I hope that the freshness 
 of the materials, often drawn from contemporary writings 
 
 * I have de8"ribe(i the progress of my opinions in " Curiosities of Wteraturc," 
 vol. i., p. 46T, laac edition. 
 
496 ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 which have never heen published, may in some respect 
 gratify curiosity. Of the political character of James the 
 First opposite tempers will form opposite opinions ; the 
 friends of peace and humanity will consider that the 
 greatest happiness of the people is that of possessing a 
 philosopher on the throne ; let profounder inquirers here- 
 after discover why those princes are suspected of being 
 but weak men, who are the true fathers of their people ; 
 let them too inform us, whether we are to ascribe to 
 James the First, as well as to Marcus Antoninus, the 
 disorders of their reign, or place them to the ingratitude 
 and wantonness of mankind. 
 
M INQUIRY 
 
 LITERARY AND POLITICAL CHARACTER OF 
 JAMES THE FIRST; 
 
 INOLUDIIirG A SKETCH OP HIS AGE. 
 
 If sometimes the learned entertain false opinions and 
 traditionary prejudices, as -well as the people, they how- 
 ever preserve among themselves a paramount love of 
 truth, and the means to remove eiTors, which have es- 
 caped their scrutiny. The occasion of such errors may 
 be complicate, but, usually, it is the arts and passions of 
 the few which find an indolent acquiescence among the 
 many, and firm adherents among those who so eagerly 
 consent to what they do not dislike to hear. 
 
 A remarkable instance of this appears in the character 
 of James the First, which lies buried under a heap of 
 ridicule and obloquy ; yet James the First was a literary 
 monarch at one of the great eras of English literature, 
 and his contemporaries were far from suspecting that his 
 talents were inconsiderable, even among those who had 
 their reasons not to like him. The degradation which 
 his literaiy character has suffered has been inflicted by 
 more recent liands ; and it may startle the last echoer of 
 Pope's " Pedant-reign " to hear that more wit and wisdom 
 have been recorded of James the First than of any one 
 of our sovereigns. 
 
 32 
 
493 CHARACTER OF JAMBS THE FIRST. 
 
 An " Author-Sovereign," as Lord Shaftesbury, in his 
 anomalous but emphatic style, terms this class of writers, 
 is placed between a double eminence of honours, and 
 must incur the double perils ; he will receive no favour 
 from his brothers, the Faineants, as a whole race of 
 ciphers in succession on the throne of France were de- 
 nominated, .and who find it much more easy to despise 
 than to acquire ; while his other brothers, the republicans 
 of literature, want a heart to admire the man, ■v^^io. h^s 
 resisted the perpetual seductions of a court-life for the 
 silent labours of his closet. Yet if Alphonsus of Arragon 
 be still a name endeared to us for his love of litei-ature, 
 and for that elegant testimony of hiS devotion to study 
 expressed by the device on his banner of an open booh, 
 how much more ought we to be indulgent to the memory 
 of a sovereign who has written one still worthy of being 
 opened ? • 
 
 We must separate the literary from the political, char' 
 aoter of this monarch, and the qualities of his mind and 
 temper from the ungracious and neglected manners of 
 his personal one. And if we do not take a more femiUar 
 view of the events, the parties, and the genius of the 
 times, the views and conduct of James the First, will 
 still remain imperfectly comprehended. In the reign of' 
 a prince who was no military character, we must busy 
 •ourselves at home; the events he regulated may be nu- 
 merous and even interesting, although not those which 
 make so much noise and show in the popular page of ha?- 
 tory, and escape us in its general views. The want of 
 this sort of knowledge has proved to be one groat source ! 
 of the false judgments passed on this monarch. Surely 
 it is not philosophical to decide of another a^e by the 
 changes and the feelings through which our own has 
 passed. There is a* chronology of human opinioils 
 which, not observingj an indiscreet philosopher' may 
 commit an anachronism in reasoning. 
 
FIRST ASSAILANTS OF JAMES THJE FIRST. 
 
 When the Stuarts liecanie the objects of popular in- 
 dignation, a peculiar race of libels was eagerly dragged" 
 into light, assuming the ittipbsing form of history; many 
 of these state-libels did not even pass through the press, 
 and nlay occasionally bS discovered in their MS. statb. 
 Yet these publications cast no shade on the talents of 
 James the First. His literary attainments were yet un- 
 disputed ; they were echoing in the ear of the writers, 
 and many proofs of his sagacity were still lively in their 
 recollections. 
 
 THE FIRST MODERN ASSAILANTS OF THE 
 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 Bttetstet, the ardent champion of a party so deeply con- 
 cerned to oppose as well the persons as the principles of 
 the Stuarts, levelled the father of the race ; wfe read with 
 delight pages which warrh and 'liurfy us on, niinglirig 
 truths with rumours, and known with suggested events, 
 with all the spirit of secret' history. But the character 
 off James I. was to pasS throttgh the lengthened inquisi- 
 torial tortures of the sullen sectarianism of Harris.* It 
 
 * The historical worts of* Dr. William Harris hdve been recently 
 republished la a collected form, and they may noW be codSidWed aa 
 entering into our historical stores. 
 
 Harris is a curious researclier ; buf wbat appear^ more striking in 
 his historical character, is the impartiality witli which he quoted 
 authorities which malce against his own opinions and statemehtisj' 
 Yet is Harris a writer likely to impose on many readers. He ad-' 
 nounoes iii his title-pages that his works are " after the manner of Mr. 
 Bayle." This is but a literary impositioti, fbi' Harris is perhaps thd 
 meanest writer in our language both for style and t'WldsOjJliical thinlc-' 
 iiig. The Extraordinary impaiTiiality he displays' in his faitbftil quota- 
 tibns from writers bh oppbsite sides is only thb more likely to deceive' 
 US; for by that unalterable party feeling, which never fbrsakfe^ him; 
 the facts against him he studiously weakehs by doubts, surmises; and' 
 suggestions; a character sinks to the level of his notiofis' by a siiigia' 
 
500 CHAEAOTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 was branded hj the fierce, remorseless republican, Cath- 
 arine Macaulay, and flouted by the light, sparkling 
 Whig, Horace Walpole.* A senseless cry of pedantry 
 
 stroke ; and from the arguments adverse to his purpose, he wrests the 
 most violent inferences. All party writers must submit to practise 
 such, mean and disingenuous arts If they affect to disguise themselves 
 under a cover of impartiality. Bayle, intent on collecting facts, was 
 indifferent to their results ; but Harris is more intent on the deductions 
 than the facts. The truth is, Harris wrote to please his patron, the 
 republican Hollis, who supplied him with books, and every frieodly 
 aid. " It is possible for an ingenious man to be of a party without 
 being porfcaZ," says Rushworth; an airy clench on the lips of a sober 
 matter-of-fact man looks suspicious, and betrays the weak pang of a 
 half-conscience . 
 
 * Hctrace Walpole's character of James I., in his "Royal Authors," 
 Is as remarkable as his character of Sir Philip Sidney ; he might have 
 written both without any acquaintance with the works he has so 
 mahciously criticised. In his account of Sidney he had silently passed 
 over the "Defence of Poeiry;" and in his second edition he makes 
 this insolent avowal, that "he had forgotten it ; a proof that I at least 
 did not think it sufficient foundation for so higt a character as he ac- 
 quired. "^ Every reader of taste knows the falseness of the criticism, 
 and how heartless the polished cynicism that could dare it. I repeat, 
 what I have elsewhere said, that Horace Walpole had something in 
 his composition more predominant than his wit, a cold, unfeeling dis- 
 position, which contemned all literary men, at the moment his heart 
 secretly panted to partake of their fame. 
 
 Nothing can be more imposing than his volatile and caustic criti- 
 cisms on the works of James I. ; yet it appears to me that he had 
 never opened that foho volume he so poignantly ridicules. For he 
 doubts whether these two pieces, "The Prince's Cabala" and "The 
 Duty of a King in his Royal OfBce," were genuine productions of 
 James I. The truth is, they are both. nothing mon'e than extracts 
 Iprinted- with thpse separate titles, drawn .from the King's "Basilicpp 
 Doron.", He had probably neither read the extracts nor the original. 
 Thus singularity of opinion, vivacity of ridicule, and polished epi- 
 grams in prose, were the means by which this noble writer startled 
 the world by his paradoxes, and at length lived to be mortified at a 
 ■reputation which he sported with and lost. I refer Jjia reader to 
 those extracts from his MS. letters which, are in "Calamities of Au- 
 thors," where he has made his literary confessions, and performs his 
 act of penance. " ... 
 
PEDAXTKY OF JAMES THE HfiST. 501 
 
 had been raised against him by the eloquent invective of 
 Bolingbroke, from whom doubtless Pope echoed it in 
 verse which has outlived his lordship's prose : — 
 
 Oh, cried the goddess, for some pedant reign I 
 Some gentle James to bless the land again ; 
 To sticlt the doctor's chair into the throne, 
 Give law to words, or war with words alone, 
 Senates and courts with Greek and Latin rule. 
 And turn the council to a grammar-school I . 
 
 Dunciad, book iv. ver. 1V5. 
 
 THE PEDANTRY OF JAMES THE FIRST, 
 
 Few of my readers, I suspect, but have long been per- 
 suaded that James I. was a mere college pedant, and 
 that all his works, whatever they may be, are monstrous 
 pedantic labours. Yet this monarch of all things de- 
 tested pedantry, either as it shows itself in the mere 
 form of Greek and Latin, or in ostentatious book-learn- 
 ing, or in the affectation of words of remote signification-: 
 these are the only points of view in which I have been 
 taught to consider the meaning of the term pedantry, 
 which is very indefinite, and always a relative one. 
 
 The age of James I. was a controversial age, of un- 
 settled opinions and ^contested principles; an age, in 
 which authority was considered as Stronger than opiri- 
 ion ; but the vigour of that age of genius was infused 
 into their writings, and those citers, who thus perpet- 
 ually crowded their margins, were profound and original 
 thinkers. When the learning of a preceding age becomes 
 less recondite, and those principles general which were 
 at first peculiar, are the ungrateful heirs of all this 
 knowledge to reproach the fathers of their literature 
 with pedantry? Lord Bolingbroke has p^ointedly said 
 of James L that " his pedantry was tod much even for 
 
502 CHAEACTBR OF JAMBS THE FIRST. 
 
 the ^.ge ia whicjj ^le lived." His lordsliip knew little 
 ftf tbat glorious age when the fquncjers of our literature 
 flourished. It had fce^n oyerrqloiided by the Fr^Rqh 
 court of Charles II., a race of unprincipled wits, and the 
 revolution-court of William, heated by a new faction, 
 too impatient to discuss those principles of government 
 which they ha,d esta|b.lislied. It was easy to ridicule 
 what they did not always understand, and very rarely 
 met with. But men of far higher genius t%an this mon- 
 arch, Selden, Usher, and Milton, must first be condemned 
 before this odium of pedantry can attach itself to the 
 plain and unostentatious writings of James I., who, it is 
 remarkable, has not scattered in them those oratorical 
 periods, and elaborate''fancie3, which he indulged in his 
 speeches and proclamations. These loud accusers of the 
 pedantry of Jg,me8 were little aware that the king has 
 expressed himself with energy and distinctness on this 
 very topic. His majesty cautions Prince Henry agains^, 
 the use of any " corrupt leide, as hook-language, ^nd pen^ 
 and-iaikhoxn termes, and, least of all, nignard and effemi- 
 nate ones." One passage may be given entire as comr 
 pletely refuting a. charge so general, yet so unfounded. 
 " I would also advise you to write in " your own langv^ge, 
 for there is nothing left to he said in Greek and Latine " 
 already ; and, ynewe (enough) of poore schollers would 
 watch you in these languages ; and besides that it best 
 becometh a King, to purifie and make famous his owne 
 tongue ; therein he may goe before all his subjects, as it 
 setteth him well to doe in all honest and lawful things." 
 No scholar of a pedantic ta,ste could have dared so com^ 
 plete an emancipation from ancient, yet not obsolete pre- 
 judices, at a time when many of our own great authors 
 yet imagined there was no fame for an Englishman 
 unless he neglected his maternal language for the artir 
 ficial labour of the idiom of ancient Rome. Bacon had 
 even his own domestic Essays translated into Latin 5 and 
 
HIS POLEMICAL STUDIES. 503 
 
 the king found a courtier-bishop to perform the Bame 
 task for his majesty's writings. There was something 
 prescient in this view of the national language, by the 
 king, who contemplated in it those latent powers which 
 had not yet burst into existence. It is evident that the 
 line of Pope is false which describes the king as intend- 
 ing to rule " senates and courts " by " turning the coun- 
 cil to a grammar-school." 
 
 HIS POLEMICAL STUDIES. 
 
 This censure of the pedantry oi' James is also con- 
 nected with those studies of polemical divinity, for which 
 the king has incurred much I'idicule from one party, who 
 were not his contemporaries ; and such Vehement invec- 
 tive from another, who were ; who, to their utter dis- 
 may, discovered their monarch descending into theii: 
 theological gymnasium to encounter them with their 
 Own weapons. 
 
 The affairs of religion atid politics in the reign of 
 James L, as in the preceding one of Elizabeth,* were iden- i 
 tified together ; nor yet have the same causes in Europe 
 ceased to act, however changed «r modified. The gov- 
 ernment of James was imperfectly established while his 
 subjects were wrestling with two great factions to ob- 
 tain the predominance. The Catholics were disputing 
 his title to the crown, which they aimed to carry into 
 the family of Spain, and had even fixed on Arabella 
 Stuart, to marry her to a Prince of Parma; and the 
 
 * I have more largely entered into the history of ths party who at- 
 tempted to subvert the government in the reign of Elizabeth, and who 
 published' lib eir works under the assuifled name of Martin Mar-prelatei 
 than had hitherto been done. In our domestic annals tliat event and 
 tliose personages are of some importance and curiosity ; but were im- 
 perfectly known to the popular writers of our history. — See "Quar- 
 rels of Authors," p. 296, et scj! 
 
604 CHARACTER OP JAMES TUB FIRST. 
 
 Puritans ■would have abolished even sovereignty itself; 
 these parties indeed were not able to take the field, but 
 all felt equally powerful with the pen. Hence an age of 
 doctrines. "When a religious body has grown into pow'- 
 er, it changes itself into a political one ; the chiefs are 
 flattered by their strength and stimulated by their am 
 bition; but a powerful body in the State cannot remain 
 stationary, and a divided empire it disdains. Religious 
 controversies have therefore been usually coverings to 
 mask the political designs of the heads of parties. 
 
 We smile at James the First threatening the States- 
 general by the English Ambassador about Vorstius, a 
 Dutch professor, who had espoused the doctrines of Ar- 
 minius, and had also vented some metaphysical notions 
 of his own respecting the occult nature of the Divinity. 
 He was the head of the Remonstrants, who were at open 
 war with the party called the Oontra-Remonstriants, 
 The ostensible subjects were religious doctrines, but the 
 concealed one was a struggle between Pensionary Bar- 
 nevelt, aided by the French interest, and the Prince of 
 Orange, supported by the English ; even to our own days 
 the same opposite interests existed, and betrayed the 
 Republic, although religious doctrines had ceased to be 
 the pretext.* 
 
 * Pensionary Barnevelt, in his seventy-second year, was at length 
 brought to the block. Diodati, a divine of Geneva, made a miserable 
 pun on the occasion ; he said that " the Oanons of the Synod of Dort 
 had taken off the head of the advocate of Holland." This pun, says 
 Brandt in his curious " History of the Reformation," is very injuilous 
 to the Synod, since it intimates that the Church loVes blood. It never 
 entered into the mind of theSe divines that Barnevelt fell, not by the 
 Synod, but by the Orange and English party prevailing againSt the 
 French. Lord Hardwicke, a statesman and a man of letters, deeply 
 conversant with secret and public history, is a more able judge than 
 the ecclesiastical historian or the Swiss divine, who could see nothing 
 in the Synod of Dort but wliat appeared in it. It is in Lord Hard- 
 wicke's preface to Sir Dudley Carleton's "Letters" that his lordship 
 has made this important discovery. 
 
HIS POLEMICAL STUDIES. 505 
 
 "What w^s passing between the Dutch Prince and the 
 Dutch Pensionary, was much like what was taking place 
 between the King of England and his own subjects. 
 James I. had to touch with a balancing hand the Catho- 
 lics and the Nonconformists,* — to play them one against 
 another ; but there was a distinct end in their views. 
 " James I.," says Burnet, " continued always writing and 
 talking against Popeiy, but acting for it." The King 
 and the bishops were probably more tolerant to mon- 
 archists and prelatists, than to republicans and presbyters. 
 TV^hen James got nothing but gunpowder and Jesuits 
 from Rome, he was willing enough to banish, or suppress, 
 but the Catholic families were ancient and numerous; 
 and the most determined spirits which ever subverted a 
 government were Catholic.f Yet what could the King 
 
 * James did all he oould to -weaken the Catlvolio party by diiiidiiig 
 them in opinion. When Dr. Reynolds, the, head of the Nonconform- 
 iata, complained to the king of the printing and dispersing of Popish 
 pamphlets, the king answered that this was done by a warrant from 
 the Court, to nourish the schism between the Seculars and Jesuits, 
 ■which was of great service. "Dsotor," added the king, "you are a 
 better clergyman than statesman." — Neale's " History of the Puritans," 
 vol. i, p. 416, 4to. 
 
 •j- The character and demeanour of the celebrated G-ny or Guido 
 Pawkes, who appeared first before the council under the assumed 
 name of Johnson, I find in a MS. letter of the times, which contains 
 some characteristic touches not hitherto published. , This letter is from 
 Sir Edward Hoby to Sir Thomas Bdmondes, our ambassador at the 
 court of Brussels — dated 19th Nov, 1605. "One Johnson was fpund 
 in tlie vault where the Gunpower Plot was discovere(}. He was asked 
 if he was sorry ? He answered that, he was only sorry it had not 
 taken place. He was threatened that he should die a worse death 
 than he that killed the Prince of Orange ; he .a,nswered, that he could 
 bear it as well. When Johnson was, brought to the king's i presence, 
 the.king asked. him how he could conspire so hideous a treason against, 
 his children and, so many innocent souls who had never ofiended him ? 
 He answered, that dangerous diseases required a desperate remedy; 
 and he told some of the Scots that bis intent was to have blown them, 
 back again into Scotland!" — Mordacious Guy Fawkesl . ,,- i 
 
50G CHAEACTER OF JAMES THE MEST. 
 
 expect from the party of the Puritans, and their " con- 
 ceited parity," as he called it, should he once throw him- 
 self into theii- hands, but the fate his son received from 
 them? 
 
 In the early stage of the Reformation, the Catholic 
 still entered into the same church with the Reformed ; 
 this common union was broken by the impolitioal impa- 
 tience of the court of Rome, who, jealous of the tranquil- 
 lity of Elizabeth, hoped to weaken her government by 
 disunion ; * but the Reformed were already separating 
 among themselves by a new race, who, fancying that 
 their religion was still too Catholic, were for reforming 
 the Reformation. These had most extravagant fancies, 
 and were for modelling the government according to each 
 particular man's notion. Were we to bend to the for- 
 eign despotism of the Roman Tiara, or that of the repub- 
 licaa rabble of the Presbytery of Geneva ? • 
 
 POLEMICAL STUDIES WERE POLITICAL. 
 
 It was in these times that James I., a learned prince, 
 applied to polemical studies; properly understood, these , 
 were in fact political ones. Lord Bolingbroke says, "He 
 aft'icted more learning than became a king, which he, 
 bruacliud on every occasion in such a manner as would 
 
 * Sir Edward Coke, attorney-general, in the trial of Garnet tilt8 
 Jesuit, says, "There were no Recusants in England — all came to 
 church howsoever Popishly inclined, till the Bull of Pius V. excommu- 
 nicated and deposed Elizabeth. On this the Papists refused to join in 
 the public service. — "State Trials," Tol:i,, p. 242. 
 
 The Pope imagined, by false impressions he had deceived, that the 
 Catholic party was strong enough to prevail against Elizabeth. After" 
 wards, when he found his error, a dispensation was granted by him- 
 self and his successor, that all Catholics might show outward obedience 
 to Elizabeth till a happier opportunity. Such are Caiihulic politics and 
 Catholic faith I 
 
THE HAMPTON-COUKT CONFERENCE. 507 
 
 have mislbecorae a sclioolmaster." Would the politician 
 then require a half-learned king, or a king withoijit any 
 learning at all ? Our eloquent sophist appears not to 
 have recollected that polemical studies had long with us 
 heen considered as royal ones ; and that from a slender 
 volunie of the sort our sovereigns still derive the regal 
 distinction of " Defenders pf ■ the Faith." The pacific 
 government of James I. required that the king himself 
 should be a master of these controversies to be enabled 
 to. balance the cojiiflioting parties ; and none but a learned 
 king could have e^c&rtesd the industry or attained to the 
 sMlJ. 
 
 THE HAMPTON-COURT CONFERENCE. 
 
 In the famons conference at Hampton Court, which the 
 King held with the heads of the Nonconformists, we see 
 his majesty conversing sometimes with great learning and 
 sense, but oftener more with the earnestness of a man, 
 than some have imagined comported with the dignity of 
 a crowned head. The truth is, James, like a true student, 
 indulged, even to his dress, an utter carelessness of 
 parade, and there was in his character a constitutional 
 warmth of heart and a jocundity of temper -which did 
 not always adapt it to state-occasions ; he threw out his 
 feelings, and sometimes his jests. James, who had 
 passed his youth in a royal bondage, felt that these 
 Nonconformists, while they were debating small points, 
 were reserving for here9.fler their great pnes ; were 
 cloiajsing their republicanism by their theology, and, like 
 all other politicians, that their ostensible were not their 
 real motives.* Harris and Neal, the organs of the 
 
 • la political hisrtory we usually find that the heads of a party are 
 much wiser thaa the party themselves, so that, whatever they iutenii 
 
508 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 N'onconformists, inveigh against James ; even Hume, 
 "with the philosophy of the eighteenth century, has 
 pronounced that the king was censurable " for entering 
 zealously into these frivolous disputes of theology." 
 Lord Bolingbroke declares that the king held this con- 
 ference " in haste to show his parts." Thus a man of 
 genius substitutes suggestion and assei-tion for accuracy 
 of knowledge. In the present instance, it was an attempt 
 of the Puritans to try the king on his arrival in England ; 
 they presented a petition for a conference, called " The 
 Millenary Petition," * from a thousand persons supposed' 
 to have signed it ; the king would not refuse it ; but so 
 far from being " in haste to show his parts," that when 
 he discovered their pretended grievances were so futile, 
 " he complained that he had been troubled with such 
 
 to acquire, their first demands are small; but the honest squlswho 
 are only stirred by their own innocent zeal, are sure to complain that 
 their business Is done negligently. Should the party at tirst succeed, 
 then the bolder spirit, which they have disguised or suppressed 
 through policy, is left to itself; it starts unbridled and at full gaUpp^ 
 AH this occurred in the case of the Puritans. We find that some of the- 
 rigid N'onconformists did confess in a pamphlet, " The Christian's 
 modest offer of the Silenced Ministers," 1606, that those who were 
 appointed to speak for them at Hampton Court were not of their, 
 nominaiim, or judgment; they insisted that these delegates should, 
 declare at once against the whole church establishment, &o., and model, 
 the government to each particular man's notions I But tliese delegates 
 prudently refused to acquaint the king with the conflicting opinions of 
 their constituents. — Lamdowne MSS. 1056, 51. 
 
 This confession of the Nonconformists is also acknowledged by their 
 historian Neale, vol. ii., p. 41 9, 4to edit. 
 
 * The petition is given at length in CfUier's " Bccles. Hist.," vol. ii. 
 p. 672. At this time also the Lay Catholics of England printed at 
 Douay, "A Petition Apologetical," to James I. Their language is 
 remarkable: they complained they were excluded "that supreme 
 court of parliament first founded by ai-d for Oatholike men, was 
 furnished with Catholike prelates, peeres, and personages ; and so 
 continued till the times of Edward VI. a childe, and Queen Elizabeth 
 a, woman." — Dodd's " Church History." 
 
THE HAMPTOIT-COtTRT CONFEREKCE. 509 
 
 importunities, when some more private course might 
 have been taken for their satisfaction." 
 
 The narrative of this once celebrated conference, 
 notwithstanding the absurdity of the topics, becomes in 
 the hands of the entertaining Fuller a picturesque and 
 dramatic composition, where the dialogue and the 
 manners of the speakers are after the life. 
 
 In the coarse of this conference we obtain a familiar in- 
 tercourse with the king ; we may admire the capacity of 
 the monarch whose genius was versatile with the subjects ; 
 sliding from theme to theme with the ease which only 
 mature studies could obtain ; entering into the graver 
 parts of these discussions ; discovering a ready knowl- 
 edge of biblical learning, which would sometimes throw 
 itself out with his natural humour, in apt and familiar 
 illustrations, throughout indulging his own personal 
 feelings with an unparalleled na'iveti. 
 
 The king opened the conference with dignity ; he said 
 " he was happier than his predecessors, who had to alter 
 what they found established, but he only to confirm 
 what was well settled." One of the party made a 
 notable discovery, that the surplice was a kind of 
 garment used, by the priests of Isis. The king observed 
 that he had no notion of this antiquity, since he had 
 always heard from them that it was " a rag of 
 popery." "Dr. Reynolds," said the king, with an 
 air of pleasantry, " they used to wear hose and shoes in 
 times of popery ; have you therefore a min^ to go bare- 
 foot ?" Reynolds objected to the words used in matri- 
 mony, " with my body I thee worship." The king said 
 the phrase was an usual English term, as a gentleman of 
 worship, <fcc., and turning to the doctor, smiling, said, 
 " Many a man speaks of Robin Hood, who never shot 
 in his bow ; if you had a good wife yourself, you would 
 think all the honour and worship you could do to 
 her were well bestowed." Reynolds was not satisfied 
 
510 CHARACTER OF JAME& THE FIRST. 
 
 on the 37th article, declaring that " the Bishop of 
 Rome hath no authority in this land," and desired it 
 should be added, "nor ought to have any." In Bar- 
 ' low's narrative we find that on this his majesty heartily 
 laughed — a laugh easily caught up hy the lords; hut 
 the king nevertheless condescended to reply sensihly 
 to the weak objection. 
 
 " What speak you of the pope's authority here ? Ha- 
 hemus jure quod hahemus ; and therefore inasmuch as it 
 is said he hath not, it is plain enough that he ought not 
 to have." It was on this occasion that some " pleasant 
 discourse passed," in which " a Puritan " was defined to 
 be a " Protestant frightened out of his wits." The kir^g 
 is more particularly vivacious when he alludes'to the oc- 
 currences of his own reign, or suspects the Puritans of 
 republican notions. On one occasion, to cut the gordian- 
 knot, the king royally decided — " I will not ai'gtfe that 
 point with you, but answer as kings in parliament, i« 
 Roy s^avisera." 
 
 When they hinted at a Scottish Presbytery the king 
 was somewhat stirred, yet what is'-admirable in him (says 
 Bai-low) without a show of paSsioii. The king had lived' 
 among the republican saints, and had been, as- be said, 
 " A king without stat^, without honour, withoint ord^; 
 where- beardless boys would brave u's tooilirface; and, 
 like the Saviour of the world, though he lived atnong 
 them, he was not of them." On this occasion, althottgh 
 .the king may not have "shown his passion," he broke 
 out, however, with a nmire efixision, remarkable for paint- 
 ing after the home-life a republican government. It must 
 have struck Hume forcibly, for he has preserved part of 
 it in the body of his history. Hume only consulted Ful- 
 ler. I give the copious explosion from BarloW : — 
 
 " If you aim at a Scottish Presbytery, it agreeth aS 
 well with monarchy as God and the devil. Then Jack^ 
 and Tom, Will, and Dick, shall meet, and at their pleSft" 
 
THE HAMPTOSr-COrrRT CONFERENCE. 511 
 
 ure censure me and my council, and all our proceedings ; 
 then Will shall stand up and say, It must be thus ; then 
 Dick shall reply, Nay, marry, hut we will have it thus. 
 And therefore, here I must once more i-eiterate my former 
 speech, Is Roy s'amsera. Stay, I pray you, for one seven 
 years before you demand that of me, and if then you find 
 me pursy and fat, I may hearken to you ; for let that 
 government once be up, I am sure I shall be kept in 
 breath ; then shall we all of us have work enough : but, 
 Dr. Reynolds, till you find that I grow lazy, let that 
 alone." 
 
 The king added, 
 
 "J will tell you a tale : — Knox flattered the queen'- 
 regent of Scotland, that she was supreme head of all the 
 church, if she suppressed the popish prelates. But how 
 long, trow ye, did this continue ? Even so longj tillj by 
 her authority, the popish bishops were repressed, and- he 
 himself, and his adherents, were brought in and well 
 settled. Then, lo ! they began to make small account of 
 her authority, and took the cause into their own hands." 
 
 T^his was a pointed political tale, appropriately told in 
 the person of a monarch. 
 
 The king was never deficient in the force and quickness 
 of his arguments. Even Neale, the great historian of thfe 
 Puritans, complaining that Dean Barlow has cut off some 
 of the king's speeches, is reluctantly compelled to tax 
 himself with a high commendation of the monarch, who, 
 he acknowledges, on one of the days of this conference, 
 spoke against the coiTUptions of the church, and the 
 practices of the prelates, insomuch that Dr. Andrews, 
 then dea,n of the chapel, said that his majesty did that 
 day wonderfully play the Pui-itan.* The king, indeed, 
 
 * The bishops of James I. were, as Fuller calls one of them, "potent 
 courtiers," and too worldly-minded men. Bancroft was a man of Vehe* 
 ment zeal, but of the most grasping avarice, as appears by an epigram- 
 matio epitaph on his death in Arthur Wilson-^ 
 
512 CHARACTEE OF JAMES' THE FIRST. 
 
 was seriously inclined to an union of parties. More than 
 once he silenced the angry tongue of Bancroft, and tem- 
 pered the zeal of others ; and even commended when he 
 could Dr. Reynolds^ the chief of the Puritans ; the king 
 consented to the only two important articles that side 
 suggested ; a new catechism adapted to the people — 
 " Let the weak be informed and the wilful be punished," 
 said the king; and that new translation of the Bible 
 which forms our present version. " But," added the 
 king, " it must be without marginal notes, for the 
 Geneva Bible is the worst tor them, full of seditious con- 
 ceits ; Asa is censured for only deposing his mother for' 
 idolatry, and not killing her." Thus early the dark spirit 
 of Machiavel had lighted on that of the ruthless Calvin. 
 The grievances of our first dissenters were futile — their 
 innovations interminable; and we discover the king's ; 
 notions, at the close of a proclamation, issued after this 
 
 " Here lies his grace, in cold earth clad, 
 Who died with want of what he had." 
 
 We find a characteristic trait of this Bishop of London in this confer- 
 ence. Wlien BUesmere, Lord Chancellor, observed that "livings' 
 rather want learned men, than learned men livings, many in the uni- 
 versities pining for want of places. I wish, therefore, some may have 
 simgh coats (one living), before others have doublets (pluralities), and 
 this metliod I have observed in bestowing the Iting's benefices." Ban- 
 croft replied, " I commend your memorable care that way ; but a 
 doublet is necessary in cold weather." Thus an avaricious bishop could 
 turn off, with a miserable jest, the open avowal of his love of plurali- 
 ties. Another, Neile, Bishop of Lincoln, when any one preached who 
 was remarkable for his piety, desirous of withdrawing the king's at- 
 tention from truths he did not wish to have his majesty reminded of, 
 would in the sermon-time entertain the king with a merry tale, which 
 the king would laugh at, and tfeU those near him, that he could not 
 hear the preacher for the old — bishop ; ' prefixing an epithet explicit 
 of the (jliaracter of these merry tales. Kennet has preserved for us 
 the "rank relation," as he calls it; not, he adds, but " we have had 
 divers hammerings and conflicts within us to leave it out."^ — Kennet's 
 "Hiatnrv of TCnclnnd." ii. '729. 
 
THE HAMPTON-COURT CONTERENCE. 513 
 
 conference : " Such is the desultory levity of some peo- 
 ple, that they are always languishing after change and 
 novelty, insomuch that were they humoured in their in- 
 constancy, they would expose the public management, 
 and make the administration ridiculous." Such is the 
 vigorous style of James the First in his proclamations ; 
 and such is the political truth, which will not die away 
 with the conference at Hampton Court. 
 
 These studies of polemical divinity, like those of the 
 ancient scholastics, were not to be obtained without a 
 robust intellectual exercise. James instructed his soil 
 Charles,* who excelled in them; and to those studies 
 
 * That the clergy were somewhat jealous of their sovereign's inter- 
 ference in these matters may be traced. When James charged the 
 chaplains, who were to wait on the prince in Spain, to decline, as far 
 as possible, religious disputes, he added, that " should any happen, 
 my son is able to moderate in them." The king, observing one of the 
 divines smile, grew warm, vehemently affirming, " I tell ye, Charles 
 shall manage a point in controversy with the best studied divine of 
 ye all." What the king said was afterwards confirmed on an extra- 
 ordinary occasion, in the conference Charles I. held with Alexander 
 Henderson, the old champion of the kirk. Deprived of books, which 
 might furnish the sword and pistol of controversy, and without a 
 chaplain to stand by him as a second, Charles I. fought the theological 
 duel ; and the old man, cast down, retired with such a sense of the 
 learning and honour of the king, in maintaining the order of episco- 
 pacy in England, that his death, which soon followed, is attributed to 
 the deep vexation of this discomfiture. The veteran, who had suc- 
 ceeded in subverting the "hierarchy in Scotland, would not be apt to 
 die of a fit of conversion ; but vexation might be apoplectic in an old 
 and sturdy disputant. The king's controversy was published; and 
 nearly all the writers agree he carried the day. Yet some divines 
 appear more jealous than grateful ; Bishop Kennet, touched by the 
 esprit da corps, honestly tells us, that "some thought the king had been 
 better able to protect the Church, if he had not diiputed for it." This 
 discovers all the ardour possible for the establishment, and we are to 
 infer that an English sovereign is only to fight for his churchmen. 
 But there is a nobler office for a sovereign to perform in ecclesiastical 
 history — to promote the learned and, the excollfint, and repress the 
 dissolute and the intolerant. 
 33 
 
514r CHAEAOTBR OE JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 Whitelocke attributes that aptitude of Charles I. which 
 made him so skilful a summerrup of arguments, and 
 endowed him with so clear a perception in giving his 
 decisions. 
 
 THE WORKS OF JAMES THE PERST. ^ 
 
 We now turn to the writings of James the First. He 
 composed a treatise on demoniacs and witches ; those 
 dramatic parsonages in courts of law. James and his 
 council never suspected that those ancient foes to man- 
 kind could be dismissed by a simple Nolle prosequi. "A 
 Commentary on the Revelations," which was a favourite 
 speculation then, and on which greater geniuses have 
 written since his day. "A Counterblast to Tobacco!" 
 the title more ludicrous than the design.* His majesty 
 
 * IS'ot long before James composed his treatise on " Dasmonotegie," 
 the learned' 'Wierus had published an elaborate work on the subject. 
 " De prcesU^iis Bcmnonvm et wcantcUionibus et Veneficiis,''^ &c., 1568i He 
 advanced one step in philosophy by discovBring that many of the sup' 
 posed oases of inoiantation originated in the imagination of these sor- 
 cerers — ^but he advanced no fartlier, for he acknowledges the real dia- 
 bolical presence. The physician who pretended to cure the diseaa?, 
 was himself irrecoverably infected. Tet even this single step of 
 Wierus was strenuously resisted by the learned Bodin, who, in his 
 iamusing volume of '■ Demonomanie des Sorciers," 1 593, refutes Wierus. 
 These are the leading authors of the times ; who were followed by a 
 crowd. Thus James I. neither wanted authorities to quote nor great 
 minds to sanction his "Dsemonologie," first publislied in 1597. To tire 
 honour of England, a single individual, Reginald Scot, with a genius 
 -far adva,noed beyond his age, denied the very existence of those 
 witches and demons, in the curious volume of hisr " Discovery of 
 Witchcraft," 1584. His books were burnedl and the author was him- 
 self not quite out of danger; and Voetins, says Bayle, complains that 
 when the work was translated into Dutch, it raised np a number of 
 libertines who laughed at all the operations and the apparitions of 
 devils. Oasaubon and GlanvU, who wrote so mrach later, treat Scot 
 with profound contempt, assuring us his reasonings are childish, and 
 his philosophy absurd I Such was the reward of a man of genius com- 
 
THE WORKS 01" JAMES THE FIRST. gl§ 
 
 terrified " the tobacconists," as the patriarchs of smoHng- 
 clubs were called, and who were selling their very lands 
 and houses in an epidemical madness for " a stuikiqg 
 weed," by discovering that " they were making a sooty 
 kitchen in their inward parts." * And the king gained a 
 point with the great majority of his. subjects, when he 
 demonstrated to their satisfaction that the pope was antii- 
 clirist. Ridiculous as these topics are to^ us, the works 
 themselves were formed on what modern philosaphers 
 affect to term the principle of utility ; a principle which, 
 with them indeed, includes everything they approve of, 
 and nothing they dislike. 
 
 It was a prompt honesty of intention to benefi,t his 
 people, which seems to have been the urgent motive that 
 induced this monarch to become an author, more thaji 
 any Eterary ambition ; for he writes on no prepared- or 
 permanent topic, and even published anonymously, and 
 as he once wrote " post-haste," what he composed or 
 designed for practical and immediate use ; and even in 
 
 bating With popular prejudices I Eyen so lq,te as 168T, these popular 
 superstitions were confirmed by the narrations and the philosophy of 
 Glanril, Dr. More, &o. The subject enters into the "Commentaries 
 on the Laws of England." An edict of Louis XIV. and a s6s.tute by 
 George II. made an.epd qf.the whole Diailene. Had James I. adopted 
 the system of Reginald Soot, the king had' probably bpen branded a? 
 an atheist king! 
 
 * Harris, with systematic ingenuity against James I., afier abusing 
 this tract as a wretched perfprmanee, thougfh himself probably had 
 written a meaner one^-quotos the curious information the king givep 
 of the enormous abuse to which the .practice of smoking was carried, 
 expressing his astbnishmebt at it. Yet, that James may not escape 
 bitter censure, he abuses the kmg for levying a heavy tax on it to pre- 
 vent this ruinous consumption^ aad his siUy policy in discouraging such 
 a branch of our revenues, and an article so valuable to our plantations, 
 &c. As if Jaipes I. could possibly inpur censure for the discoveries of 
 two centuries after, of the nature of this plant ! James saw great 
 families ruined by the epidemic madness, and sacrificed the revenues 
 which his crown might derive from it, to assist its suppression. This 
 was patriotism in the monarch. 
 
516 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 that admirable treatise on the duties of a sovereign, 
 which he addressed to Prince Henry, a great portion is 
 directed to the exigencies of the times, the parties, and 
 the circumstances of his own court. Of the works now 
 more particularly noticed, their interest has ceased with 
 the melancholy follies which at length have passed 
 away ; although the philosophical inquirer will not 
 choose to drop this chapter in the history of mankind. 
 But one fact in favour of our royal author is testified by 
 the honest Fuller and the cynical Osborne. On the 
 king's arrival in England, having discovered the numer- 
 ous ipipostures and illusions which he had often referrec|. 
 to as authorities, he grew suspicious of the whole system 
 of " Dsenionologie," and at lenirLh recanted it entirely, 
 ^ith the same conscientious zeal J ames had written the 
 book, the king condemned it ; and the sovereign separa- 
 ted himself from the author, in the cause of truth ; but 
 the clergy and the parliament persisted in making the 
 imaginary crime felony by the statute, and it is only "a 
 recent act of parliament which has forbidden the appear- 
 ance of the possessed and the spae-wife. 
 
 But this apology for having written these treatises 
 need not rest on this fact, however honourably it appeals 
 to our candour. Let us place it on higher ground, and 
 tell those who asperse this monarch for his credulity and 
 intellectual weakness, that they themselves, had they 
 lived in the reign of James I., had probably tfritten oh 
 the same topics, and felt as uneasy at the rumour of a 
 witch being a resident in their neighbourhood ! 
 
 POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS OF THE AGE. 
 
 This and the succeeding age were the times of omens 
 and meteors, prognostics and providences — of " i&K-f^ 
 
POPULAE SUPERSTITIONS OF THE AGE. 517 
 
 tality," or the superstition of fortunate and unfortunate 
 days, and the combined powers of astrology and magic. 
 It was only at the close of the century of James I. that 
 Bayle wrote a treatise on comets, to prove that they had 
 no influence in the cabinets of princes ; this was, how- 
 ever, done with all the precaution imaginable. The 
 greatest minds were then sinking under such popular 
 superstitions : and whoever has read much of the private 
 history of this age will have smiled at their ludicrous 
 terrors and bewildered reasonings. The most ordinary- 
 events were attributed to an interposition of Providence. 
 In the unpublished memoirs of that learned antiquary, 
 Sir Symonds D'Ewes, such frequently occur. When a 
 comet appeared, and D'Ewes, for exercise at college, had 
 been ringing the great bell, and entangled himself in the 
 rope, which had nearly strangled him, he resolves not to 
 ring while the comet is in the heavens. When a fire 
 happened at the Six Clerks' Office, of whom his father 
 was one, he inquires into the most prominent sins of the 
 six clerks : these were the love of the world, and doing 
 business on Sundays : and it seems they thought so 
 themselves; for after the fire the office-door was fast 
 closed on the Sabbath. When the Thames had an 
 unusual ebb and flow, it was observed, that it had never 
 happened in their recollection, but just before the rising 
 of the Earl of Essex in Elizabeth's reign, — and Sir 
 Symonds became uneasy at the political aspect of afiairs.. 
 AIL the historians of these times are very particular in 
 marking the bearded beams of blazing stars ; and the 
 first public event that occurs is always connected with 
 the radiant course. Arthur Wilson describes one which 
 preceded the death of the simple queen of James I. It . 
 was generally imagined that " this great light in the 
 heaven was sent as a flambeaux to her funeral ;" but the 
 historian discovers, while " this blaze was burning, the 
 fire of war broke out in Bohemia." It was found difficult 
 
518 CHARAGTIR OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 to decide between the two opinions ; and Rushworth, 
 who wrote long afterwards, oareftilly chronicles both. 
 
 The truth is, the greatest geniuses of the age of Jarmea 
 I, were as deeply concerned in these investigations as 
 his Majesty. Had the great Yerulam emancipated him- 
 self from all the dreams of his age ? He speaks indeed 
 cautiously of witchcraft, but does not deny its occult 
 agency ; and of astrology be is rather for the improve- 
 ment than the rejection^ The bold spirit of Rawleigh 
 contended with the supej'stitioHS of the times ; bat how 
 feeble is the contest where we fear to strike ! Even 
 Rawleigh is prodigal of his praise to James for the king's 
 chapter on magic. The great mind of Rawleigh per-i 
 Ceived how much men are formed and changed by educct- 
 tion/ but, were this principle admitted to its extent, 
 the stars would lose their influence ! lo pleading for 
 the free agency of man, he would escape from the «perni- 
 cious tendency of predestination, or the astral influence^ 
 which yet he iillows. To extricate himself from the 
 dilemma, he invents an analogical reasoning of a royal 
 power of dispensing with the laws in extreme cases ; so 
 that, though he does not deny " the binding of thestarsj"- 
 he declares they are controllable by the will of the 
 Creator. In this manner, fettered by prevalent opinions, 
 he satisfies the superstitions of an astrological age, and 
 the penetration of his own genius. At a much later 
 period Dr. Henry More, a writer of genius, confirmed 
 the ghost and demon creed, by a number of facts, as 
 marvellously pleasant as any his own poetical fancy oould 
 have invented. Other great authors have not less dis- 
 tinguished themselves. When has there appeai-ed a 
 single genius who at once could free himself of the tra^ 
 ditional prejudices of his contemporaries — nay, of hi? 
 ©wn party ? Genius, in its advancement beyond the 
 intelligence of its own age, is but progressive ; it is fanci- 
 fiilly said to soar, but it only climbs. Yet the minds of 
 
HIS HASITS THOSE OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 519 
 
 some authors of thjs age are often discovered to be supe- 
 rior to their work ; because the mind is impelled by its 
 own inherent powers, but the work usually originates 
 in the age. James L once acutely observed, how " the 
 author may be wise, but the work foolish." 
 
 Thus minds of a higher rank than our royal author had 
 not yet cleared themselves out of these clouds of i)opular 
 prejudices. We now proceed to more decisive results of 
 the superior capacity of this much ill-used monareh. 
 
 THE HABITS OF JAMES THE FIRST THOSE 
 OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 The habits of life of this monarch were those of a man 
 of letters. His first studies were soothed by none of their 
 enticements. If James loved literature, it was far itself; 
 for Buchanan did not tinge the rim of the vase with 
 honey; and the bitterness was tasted not only in the 
 draught, but also in the rod. lii some princes, the harsh 
 discipline James passed through has raised a strong aver- 
 sion against literature. The Dauphin, for whose use was 
 formed the well-known edition of the classics, looked on 
 the volumes with no eye of love. To free himself of his 
 tutor, Huet, he eagerly consented to an early marriage. 
 " Now we shall see if Mr. Huet shaill any more keep me 
 to ancient geography !" exclaimed the Dauphin, rejoic- 
 ing in the first act of despotism. This ingenuous sally, it 
 is said, too deeply affected that learned man for many 
 years afterwards. Huet's zealous gentleness (for how 
 could Huet be too rigid ?) wanted the art which Bu-i 
 chanan disdained to practise. But, in the case of the 
 prince of Scotland, a constitutional timidity combining 
 with an ardour for Study, and therefore a veneration for 
 his tutor, produced a more remarkable 'effect. Such was 
 the terror which 'the remembrance of this illustrious but 
 
520 - CHAEACTER OF JAMES THE FIEST. 
 
 inexorable republican left on the imagination of his royal 
 pupil, that even so late as when James was seated on 
 the English throne, once the appearance of his frowning 
 tutor in a dream greatly agitated the king, who in vain 
 attempted to pacify him in this portentous vision. This 
 extraordinary fact may he found in a manuscript letter . 
 of that day.* 
 
 James, even by the confession of his bitter satirist, 
 Francis Osborne, " dedicated rainy weather to his 
 standish, and fair to his hounds." His life had the 
 uniformity of a student's ; but the regulated life of a 
 learned monarch must have weighed . down the gay and 
 dissipated with the deadliest monotony. Hence one of 
 these courtiers declared that, if he were to awake after a 
 sleep of seven years' continuance, he would undertake to 
 
 * The learned Mede wrote the present letter soon after another, 
 ■which had not been acknowledged, to his friend Sir M. Stxiteyille ; and 
 the writer is uneasy lest the political secrets of the day might bring 
 the parties into trouble. It seems he was desirous tliat letter should 
 he read and then burnt. 
 
 ^' March 31, 1622. 
 
 " I hope my letter miscarried not ; if it did I am in a sweet picklo. 
 I desired to hear from you of the receipt and extinction of it. Tliough 
 there is no danger in my letters whilst report is so rife, yet wlien it is 
 forgotten they will not be so safe ; but your danger is as great as mine — ■ 
 
 "Mr. Downham was with me, now come fiom London. He told me 
 that it was three years ago since those verses were delivered to the 
 king in a dream, by his Master Buchanan, who seemed to check him 
 severely, as heused to do ; and Ma Majesty, in liis dream, seemfed' desir- 
 ous to pacify him, but he, turning away with a frowrting courdenance, 
 would utter those, verses, which his Majesty, perfectly remembering, 
 repeated the next day, and many took notice of them. Now, by occa- 
 sion of the late soreness in his arm, and the doubtfulness what it 
 would prove ; especially having, by mischance, fallen into the fire with, 
 that arm, the remembrance of the verses began to trouble him." 
 
 It appears that these verses were of a threatening nature, sitice, in a 
 melancholy fit, they ivere recalled to recollection afier an interva;! of 
 three years ; the .ierses are lost to us, with the letter which contained 
 them. 
 
HIS HABrrS THOSE OF A MAN OP LETTERS. 521 
 
 enumerate the whole of his Majesty's occupations, 
 and every dish that had been placed on the table during 
 the interval. But this courtier was not aware that 
 the monotony which the king occasioned him was not 
 so much in the king himself as in his own volatile 
 spirit. 
 
 The table of James I. was a trial of wits, says a more 
 learned courtier, who often partook of these prolonged 
 conversations ; those genial and convivial conferences 
 were the recreations of the king, and the means often of 
 advancing those whose talents had then an opportunity 
 of discovering themselves. A life so constant in its 
 pursuits was to have been expected from the temper of 
 him who, at the view of the Bodleian library, exclaimed, 
 " Were I not a king, I would be an university man ; and 
 if it were so that I must be a prisoner, I would have 
 no other prison than this library, and be chained together 
 with all these goodly authors."* 
 
 Study, indeed, became one of the businesses, of life with 
 our contemplative monarch ; and so zealous was James 
 to form his future successor, that he even seriously 
 engaged in the education of both his sons. James I. 
 offers the singular spectacle of a father who was at once 
 a preceptor and a monarch : it was in this spirit the king 
 composed his " Basilicon Doron ; or, His Majesty's Instruc- 
 tions to his dearest Son Henry the Prince," a work of 
 which something more than the intention is great ; aiid 
 he directed the studies of the unfoitunate Charles. That 
 both these princes were no common pupils may be fairly 
 attributed to the king himself. Never did the character 
 of a young prince shoot out with nobler promises than 
 Henry ; an enthusiast for literature and arms, that prince 
 
 * In this well-knowa exclamation of James I., a witty allusion has 
 been probably overlooked. The king had in his mind the then preva- 
 lent custom of securing books by fastening them to the shelves, by 
 chains long enough to reach to the reading-desks under them. 
 
522 CHAEACTBR OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 early showed a great and commanding spirit. Cliarlea 
 was a man of fine taste : he had talents and virtues, 
 errors and misfortunes ; but he was not without a spirit 
 equal to the days of his trial. 
 
 FACILITY AND COPIOUSlSrESS OF HIS COM- 
 POSITION. 
 
 The mind of James I. had at all times the fulness of a 
 student's, delighting in the facility and oo|piousnes8 of 
 composition. The king wrote in one week one hundred 
 folio pages of a monitory address to the European sov- 
 ereigns ; and, in as short a time, his apology, sent to the 
 pope and cardinals. These he delivered to the bishops, 
 merely as notes for their use ; but they were declared to 
 form of themselves a complete answer. " Qua felicitate 
 they were done, let others judge ; but Qua celeritafe, I can 
 tell," says the courtly bishop who collected the king's 
 works, and who is here quoted, not for the compliment 
 he would infer, but for the fact he states. The week's 
 labour of his majesty provoked from Cardinal Perron 
 about one thousand pages in folio, and replies and 
 rejoinders from the learned in Europe.* 
 
 * Mr. Lodge, in his " Illustrations of British History," praises and 
 abuses James I. for the very same treatises. Mr. Lodge, dropping the 
 Sober character of the antiquary for tlie smarter one of the critic, tella 
 us, " James had the good fortune to gain the • two points he 
 principally aimed at in the publication of these duU treatises — the 
 reputation of an acute disputant, and the honour of having Cardinal 
 Bellarmin for an antagonist." Did Mr. Lodge ever read these " dull 
 treatises ?" I declare I never have ; but I believe these treatises are 
 not dull, from the inference he draws from them ; for how any writer 
 can gain the reputation of " an acute disputant " by writing " dull 
 treatises," Mr. Lodge only can explaini It is in this manner, and by 
 imphilosophieal critics, that the literary reputation of Jam.s h;is been, 
 flourished down by modern pens. It was sure gamo to attack 
 James 1. 1 
 
HIS ELOQUENCE. 523 
 
 SIS ELOQUENCE. 
 
 The eloquence of James is another feature in the liter- 
 ary character of this monarch. Amid the sycophancy of 
 the court of a learned sovereign some truths will mani- 
 fest themselves, Bishop Williams, in his funeral eulogy 
 of James I., has praised with warmth the eloquence of 
 the departed monarch, whom he intimately knew ; and 
 this was an acquisition of James's, so manifest to all, that 
 the bishop made eloquence essential to the dignity of a 
 monarch; observing, that "it was the want of it that 
 made Moses, in a manner, refuse all government, though 
 offered by God." * He would not have hazarded so pecu- 
 liar an eulogium, had not the monarch been distinguished 
 by that talent. 
 
 Hume first observe^ of James I., ^hat "the speaker of 
 the House of Commons is usually an eminent man ; yet 
 the harangue of his Majesty will always be found much su- 
 perior to that of the speaker in every parliament during 
 
 * This funeral sermon, by laying such a stress on the dloqiience of 
 James I., it is said, occasioned the disgrace of the zealous bishop; per- 
 haps, a;lso, by the arts of tlie new courtiers practising on the feelings 
 of the young monarch. It appears that Charles betrayed frequent 
 symptoms of impatience. 
 
 This aUusioa to the stammermg ot Moses was most unlucky; for Charles 
 had this defect ia his delivery, which he laboured &\\ his life to correct. 
 In the first speech from the thfbne, he allndes to it : " Now, beoanse 
 / am Vnfit for much peaking, I meam to bring up the fashion of my pre- 
 decessors, to have my 'lord-keeper speak for me in most things." And 
 he dosed, a speech to the Scottish parliament by saying, that "he does 
 not offer to endear himself by words, whioh indeed is net my way." 
 This, however, proved to be One of those little circumstances which 
 produce a more important result than is suspected. By this substitu- 
 tion of a lord*eeper instead of the sbvereign, he failed in ezciting the 
 personal affections of his parliament. Even the most gracious speech 
 from tlie lips of a lord-keeper is but formally delivered, and coldly 
 received ; and Charios had not yet learned that there are no deputies 
 for our feelings. 
 
524 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 this reign." His numerous proclamations are evidently 
 ■wrought by his own hand, and display the pristine vigour 
 of the state of our age of genius. That the state-papers 
 ■were usually composed by himself, a passage in the Life 
 of the Lord-keeper Williams testifies ; and when Sir 
 Edward Conway, who had been bred a soldier, and was 
 even illiterate, became a viscount, and a royal secretary, 
 by the appointment of Buckingham, the king, who in fact 
 wanted no secretary, would often be merry over his im- 
 perfect sci'awls in writing, and his hacking of sentences 
 in reading, often breaking out in laughter, exclaiming, 
 " Stenny has provided me with a secretary who can neither 
 ■write nor read, and a groom of my bedchamber who can- 
 not truss my points," — this latter person having but one 
 hand ! It is evident, since Lord Conway, the most inef- 
 ficient secretary ever king had — and I have myself seen 
 his scrawls — remained many years in ofiice, that James L 
 required no secretary, and transacted his affairs with his 
 own mind and hand. These habits of business and of study- 
 prove that James indulged much less those of indolence, 
 for which he is so gratuitously accused. 
 
 HIS WIT. 
 
 Amid all the ridicule and contempt in which the intel- 
 lectual capacity of James I. is involved, this college- 
 pedant, who is imagined to have given in to every 
 species Of false wit, and never to have reached beyond 
 quibbles, puns, conceits, and quo-libets, — -was in truth a 
 great wit ; quick in retort, and happy in illustration ; and 
 often delivering opinions with a sententious force. More 
 wit and wisdom from his lips have descended to us than 
 from any other of our sovereigns. One of the malicious 
 writers of his secret history. Sir Anthony Weldon, not 
 only informs us that he was jvitty, but describes the man^ 
 
SPECIMENS OP HIS HtJMOUE, ETC. C25 
 
 ner : " He was very witty, and had as many witty jests 
 as any man living : at which he would not smile himself, 
 but deliver them in a grave and serious manner." Thus 
 the king was not only witty, but a dextrous wit : nor is 
 he one of those who are recorded as having only said one 
 good thing in their lives ; for his vein Was not apt to 
 dry. 
 
 His conversations, like those of most literary men, he 
 loved to prolong at table. We find them described by 
 one who had partaken of them : 
 
 " The reading of some books before him was very 
 frequent, while he was at his repast ; and otherwise he 
 collected knowledge by variety of questions, which he 
 carved out to the capacity of different persons. Me- 
 thought his hunting humour was not off, while the 
 learned stood about him at his board ; he was ever in 
 chase after some disputable doubts, which he would wind 
 and turn about with the most stabbing objections that 
 ever I heard ; and was as pleasant and fellow-like, in all 
 these discourses, as with his huntsman in the field. Those 
 who were ripe and weighty in their answei-s were ever 
 designed for some place of credit or profit." * 
 
 SPECIMENS OP HIS HUMOUR, AND OBSERVA- 
 TIONS ON HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 The relies, of witticisms and observations on human 
 life, on state affau'S, in literature and hjstpry, are scat- 
 tered among contemporary writers, and some are even 
 traditional,; I regret that I have not preserved many 
 which oceurypd in the course of reading. It has hap- 
 pened, however, that a man of genius has preserved for 
 
 * Hacket's curious " Life of the Lord-keeper 'Williams," p. 38, Part 
 11. 
 
52 G COrARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 posterity some memorials of the wit^ the learning, and 
 the sense of the monarch.* 
 
 In giving some loose specimens of the wit and capacity 
 of a man, if they are too few, it may be imagined that 
 they are so from their rarity ; and if too many, the page 
 swells into a mere collection. But truth is not over-nice 
 to obtain her ptirpose, and even the common labours she 
 inspires are associated with her pleasures. 
 
 Early in life James I. had displayed the talent of apt 
 allusion, and his classical wit on the Spaniards; that "He 
 expected no other favour from them than the courtesy of 
 Polyphemus to Ulysses — to be the last devoured," de« 
 lighted Elizabeth, and has even entered into our history. 
 Arthur Wilson, at the close of his " Life of James I.," 
 has preserved one of his apothegms, while he censm?ea 
 him for not making timely use of it ! " Let that prince, 
 who would beware of conspiracies, be rather jealous of 
 such whom his extraordinary favours have advanced, 
 
 * In the Harl. MSS. T582, Art. 3, one entitled " Crumms fallen from 
 King James's Table ; or his Table-Tslk, taken by Sir Thomas Overbury. 
 The original being in hia own h^ndwritipg." This MS. has been, per- 
 haps, imperfectly printed in the "Prince's Cabala, or Mysteries of 
 State," 1715. This Collection of Sir Tiiomas Overbury was shortened 
 by his unhappy fate, since he perished early in the reign, — Another 
 Harl. MS. contains things " as they were at supdrje times spoke? by 
 James I." I have drawn others from the Harl. MSS. 6395. We have 
 also printed, " Wittie Observations^ gathered in King James's Ordinary 
 Discourse," 1643; "King James, his Apothegmes or Table-Talk as they 
 were by him delivered oooasionally, and by the publisher, his quondam 
 servant, carefully received, by B. A„ gent. 4°. in eight leaves, 16i3." 
 The collector was Ben". Agar, who had gathered theiji.ip hia youth; 
 "Witty Apothegmes, delivered at several times by King James, King 
 Charles, the Marquis of Worcester," &o., 1658. 
 
 The collection of Apothegms formed by Lord Bacon offers many 
 instances of the king's wit and sense. See Lord Bacon's Apothegm^ 
 new and old; they are numbered to 275 in the edition 1819. Basil 
 Montague, in his edition, has separated what he distioguiahea as the 
 spurious ones. 
 
SPECIMENS OF HIS HUMOUR, ETC. 52T 
 
 than of those whom his displeasure have discontented, 
 These want means to execute their pleasures, but thost 
 have means at pleasure to execute their desires." — ^Wil-- 
 son himself ably develops this important state-observa- 
 tion, by adding, that " Ambition to rule is more vehement 
 than malice to revenge." A pointed reflection, which 
 rivals a maxim of Rochefoucault. 
 
 The king observed that, " Very wise men and very 
 fools do little harm ; it is the mediocrity of wisdom that 
 troubleth all the world." — He described, by a lively image, 
 the differences which rise in argument : " Men, in argu- 
 ing, are often carried by the force of words farther asun- 
 der than their question was at first ; like two, ships going 
 out of the same haven, their landing is many times whole 
 countries distant." 
 
 One of the great national grievances, as it appeared 
 both to the government and the people, in James's reign, 
 was the perpetual growth of the metropolis, ; and the na- 
 tion, like an hypochondriac, was ludicrously terrified that 
 their head was too monstrous for their body, and drew 
 all the moisture of life from the remoter parts. It is 
 amusing to observe the endless and vain precautions em- 
 ployed to stop all new buildings, and to force persons out 
 of town to reside at their country mansions. Proclama- 
 tions warned and exhorted, but the very interference of 
 prohibition rendered the crowded town more delightful. 
 One of its attendant calamities was the pi'evalent one of 
 that day, the plague ; and one of those state libels, which 
 were early suppressed, or never printed, entitled, " Ba- 
 laam's Ass," has this passage : " In this' deluge of new 
 buildings, we shall be all poisoned with breathing in one 
 another's faces ; and your Majesty has most truly said, 
 England will shortly be London, and London, England." 
 It was the popular wish, that country gentlemen should 
 reside more on their estates, and it was on this occasion 
 that the king made that admirable allusion, which has been 
 
528 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 in our days repeated in the House of Commons : " Gen- 
 tlemen resident on their estates were like ships in port — 
 their value and magnitude were felt and acknowledged ; 
 but, when at a distance, as their size seemed insignificatlt, 
 so their worth and importance were not duly estimated." 
 The king abounded with similar observations ; for he 
 drew from life more than even from books. 
 
 James is reproached for being deficient in political saga- 
 city ; notwithstanding that he somewhat prided himself 
 on what he denominated " king's-craft'" This is the fate 
 of a pacific and domestic prince ! 
 
 " A king," said James, " ought to be a preserver of his 
 people, as well of their fortunes as lives, and not a de- 
 stroyer of his subjects. Were I to make such a war as 
 the King of France doth, with such tyranny on his 
 own subjects — with Protestants on one side, and his soldiers 
 drawn to slaughter on the other, — I would put myself in 
 a monastery all my days after, and repent me that I had 
 brought my subjects to such misery." 
 
 That James was an adept in his " king's-craft," by which 
 term he meant the science of politics, but which has been 
 so often misinterpreted in an ill sense, even the confession 
 of such a writer as Sir Antliony Weldon testifies; who 
 acknowledges that " no prince living knew how to make 
 use of men better than King James." He certainly fore- 
 saw the spirit of the Commons, and predicted to the prince 
 and Buckingham, events which occurred after his death! 
 When Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, whom James consid- 
 ered a useful servant, Buckingham sacrificed, as it would 
 appear, to the clamours of a party, James said, "You 
 are making a rod for your own back ;" and when Prince 
 Charles was encouraging the frequent petitions of the 
 Commons, James told him, "You will live to have your 
 bellyful of petitions." The following anecdote may serve 
 to prove his political sagacity : — When the Emperor of 
 Germany, instigated by the Pope and his own state-in- 
 
SPECIMEN-S OF HIS HtTMOUK, ETC. 629 
 
 terests, projected a ci'usade against the Turks, he solicited 
 from Jarues the aid of three thousand Englishmen ; the 
 wise and pacific monarch, in return, advised the emperor's 
 ambassador to apply to France and Spain, as being more 
 nearly concerned in this project : but the ambassador very 
 ingeniously argued, that, James being a more remote 
 prince, would more effectually alarm the Turks, from a 
 notion of a general armament of the Christian princes 
 against them. James got rid of the importunate ambassa- 
 dor by observing, that " three thousand Englishmen 
 would do no more hurt to the Turks than fleas to their 
 Bkins : great attempts may do good by a destruction, but 
 little ones only stir up anger to hurt themselves." 
 
 His vein of familiar humour flowed at all times, and his 
 facetiousness was sometimes indulged at the cost of his 
 royalty. In those unhappy differences between him and 
 his parliament, one day mounting his horse, which, though 
 usually sober and quiet, began to bound and prance, — • 
 " Sirrah !" exclaimed the king, who seemed to fancy that 
 his favourite prerogative was somewhat resisted on this 
 occasion, " if you be not quiet, I'll send you to the five 
 hundred kings in the lower house : they'll quickly tame 
 you." When one of the Lumleys was pushing on his 
 lineal ascent beyond the patience of the hearers, the king 
 to cut short the tedious descendant of the Lumleys, cries 
 out, " Stop mon ! thou needst no more : now I learn that 
 Adam's surname was Lumley !" When Colonel Gray, a 
 military adventurer of that day, just returned from Ger- 
 many, seemed vain of his accoutrements, on which he had 
 spent his all,— the king, staring at this buckled, belted, 
 Bworded, and pistolled, but ruined, martinet, observed, 
 that ♦' this town was so well fortified, that, were it victual- 
 led, it might be impregnable." 
 34 
 
530 CHARACTER OF JAMBS THE FIRST. 
 
 EViPE]SrCES OF HIS «A(^ACITY IN THE DIS. 
 COVERT OF TRUTH. 
 
 Possessing the talent of eloquence, the quickness of wit, 
 an,d the diversified knowledge which produced his " T.^ 
 ^le-talk," we find also m^ny evidences of his sagacity in 
 the discovery of truth, with that patient zeal so honoura- 
 ble to a monarch. When the shipwrights,, jealoijs of 
 Pett, our great naval architect, formed a party against 
 Mm, the king would judge with his own eyes. Having 
 examined the materials depreciated by Pett's accusers, he 
 declared that " the cross^grain was in the men, not in the 
 timber." The king, on historical evidence, and by what 
 he said in his own works, claims the honour of discover- 
 ing the gunpowder plot, by the sagacity and reflection 
 with which he solved the enigmatical and ungrammatical 
 letter sent on that oqpasioij. The train of his thoughts 
 has even been preserved to us ; and although a loose pas» 
 sage, in a private letter of the Earl of Salisbury, contj-a- 
 dicted by another passg,ge in the same lett^er, would indi', 
 jStite that the earl was the man ; yet e\en Mrs. Macaulay 
 acknowledges the propriety of attributing the discovery 
 to the king's sagacity. Several proofs of his zeal and re- 
 , Section in the detection of imposture might be adduce^ J 
 and the reader may, perhaps, be amused at these. 
 ^ Therp existeda conspiracy against the Countess of E-xe- 
 tpr by Lady Jj^ke, and her daughter, Lady Ross. Tlj^ey 
 hfid contrived to forge a letter in the Countess's name, J4 
 which she confessed all the heavy crimes, they accu,se4 hf r 
 of, which were incest, witchcraft, &c. ;* and to confirm 
 its authenticity, as the king was curious respecting the 
 place, the time, and the occasion, when the letter was 
 written, their maid swore it was at the countess's house 
 at Wimbledon, and that she had written it at the window, 
 
 * Camden's "Annals of James I., Kennet II, 652." 
 
SAGACITY IN THE DISCOVERT 0-i" TRUTH. 5-3! 
 
 near the upper end of the great chamber ; and that she 
 (the maid) was hid beneath the ta<pestry, where she heard 
 the countess read over the letter after writing. The king 
 appeared satisfied with this new testimony ; but, unex- 
 pectedly, he visited the great chamber "at Wimbledon, 
 observed the distance of the window, placed himself be- 
 hind the hangings, and made the lords in their turn : not 
 one could distinctly hear the voice of a person placed at 
 the window. The king further observed, that the tapes- 
 try was two feet short of the ground, and that any one 
 standing behind it must inevitably be discovered. " Oaths 
 cannot confound my sight," exclaimed the king. Having 
 also effectuated other discoveries with a confession of one 
 of the parties, and Sir Thomas Lake being a faithful servant 
 of James, as he had been of Elizabeth, the king, who 
 valued him, desired he would not stand the trial with his 
 wife and daughter; but the old man pleaded that he was a 
 husband and a father, and must fall with them. " It is a 
 fall !" said the king ; " your wife is the serpent ; your 
 daughter is Eve ; and you, poor man, are Adam !"* 
 
 The sullen Osborne reluctantly says, " I must confess 
 he was the promptest man living in detecting an impos- 
 ture." There was a singular impostor in his reign, of 
 whom no one denies the king the merit of detecting the 
 deception— so far was James I. from being credulous, as 
 he is generally supposed to have been. IRidiculous as the 
 affair may appear to us, it had perfectly succeeded with 
 the learned fellows of New College, Oxford, and after- 
 wards with heads as deep • and it required some exertion 
 of the king's philosophical reasoning to pronounce on the 
 deception. 
 
 One Haddock, who was desirous of becoming a preach- 
 
 * The «uit cost Sir Thomas I,ake 30,OO0Z. ; the flnea io the atar-ahajt}- 
 hejc were always heavy in all r^ig;ns, .Harris refers to this cause as an 
 evidence of the tyrannic conductor James I., as if the king was always 
 influenced by personal dislike I but he does not give the story. 
 
633 CHARACTER OF JAMBS THE EIRST. 
 
 er, but had a stuttering and slowness of utterance, which 
 he could not get rid of, took to the study of physic ; but 
 recollecting that, when at Winchester, his schoolfellows 
 had told him that he spoke fluently in his sleep, he tried, 
 affecting to be a,sleep, to form a discourse on physio. 
 Finding that he succeeded, he continued the practice : he 
 then tried divinity, and spoke a good sermon. Having 
 prepared one for the purpose, he sat up in his bed and de- 
 livered it so loudly that it attracted attention in the next 
 , chamber. It was soon reported that Haddock preached 
 in his sleep ; and nothing was heard but inquiries after 
 the sleeping preacher, who soon found it his interest to 
 keep up the delusion. He was now considered as a man 
 truly inspired ;. and he did not in his own mind rate his 
 talents at less worth than the first vacant bishopric. He 
 ■was brought to court, where the greatest personages 
 anxiously sat up through the night by his bedside. They 
 tried all the maliciousness of Puck to pinch and to stir him.; 
 he was without hearing or feeling ; but they never de- 
 parted without an orderly text and sermon ; at the close 
 of which, groaning and stretching himself, he pretended 
 to awake, declaring he was unconcious of what had pass- 
 ed. " The king," says "Wilson, no flatterer of James, 
 ;" privately handled him so like a chirurgeon, that he found 
 out the sore." The king was present at one of these ser- 
 mons, and forbade them ; and his reasonings, on this oc- 
 casion, brought the sleeping preacher on Ms knees. Thie 
 king observed, that things studied in the day-time may 
 be dreamed of in the night, but always irregularly, with- 
 out order; not, as these sermons were, good and learned!: 
 as particularly the one preached before his Majesty in his 
 sleep — which he first treated physically, then theological- 
 ly ; " and I observed," said the king, " that he always 
 preaches best when he has the most crowded" audience." 
 "Were he, allowed to proceed, all slander and treason 
 might pass under colour of being asleep," added the king, 
 
BASILICON DOROISr. 533 
 
 who, notwithstanding his pretended inspiration, awoke 
 the sleeping preacher for ever afterwards. 
 
 BASILICON DOROlSr, 
 
 That treatise of James I, entitled " Basilicon Doron ; 
 or, His Majesty's Instructions to his dearest Son Henry the 
 Prince," was composed by the king in Scotland, in the 
 freshness of his studious days ; a work, addressed to a 
 prince by a monarch which, in some respects, could only 
 have come from the hands of such a workman. The morality 
 and the politics often retain their curiosity and their 
 value. Our royal author has drawn his principles of 
 government from the classical volumes of antiquity ; for 
 then politicians quoted Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. 
 His waters had, indeed, flowed over those beds of ore ;* 
 but the growth and vigour of the work comes from the 
 mind of the king himself: he writes for the Prince of 
 of Scotland, and about the Scottish people. On its first 
 appearance Camden has recorded the strong sensation it 
 excited : it was not only admired, but it entered into and 
 won the hearts of men. Harris, forced to acknowledge, 
 in his mean style and with his frigid temper, that " this 
 book contains some tolerable things," omits not to hint 
 that " it might not be his own :" but the claims of James 
 I. are evident from the peculiarity of the style ; the 
 period at wbich it was composed ; and by those particular 
 passages stamped with all the individuality of the king 
 himself. The style is remarkable for its profuse sprink- 
 ling of Scottish and French words, where the Doric plain- 
 ness of the one, and the intelligent expression of the otheir, 
 
 • James, early in life, was a fine scholar, and a lover of the ancient 
 historians, as appears from an accidental expression of Buchanan's, 
 in his dedication to James of his "Baptistes;" referring to Sallust, he 
 adds, apudTuvn Salusiium. 
 
534 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 offel' Curious instances of the infliiience of manners over 
 language ; the diction of the royal author is a striking; 
 evidence of the intermixture of the two nations, and of a 
 court which had marked its divided interests by its own 
 chequered language.. 
 
 This royal manual still interests a philosophical mind ; 
 like one of those antique and- curious pictures we soitie- 
 fimes discover in a cabinet, — studied for the costuni« ; yet 
 where the touches of nature are true, although the 
 colouring is brown arid faded ; but there is a force, and 
 sometimes even a charm, in the ancient simplicity, to 
 which even the delicacy of taste may return, not without 
 ■J)leasure. The king tells his son : — 
 
 " Sith all people are naturally inclined to follow their 
 pi"ince's example, in your own person make your wordes 
 and deedes to fight together ; and let your own life be a 
 law-book and a mirror to your people, that therein they 
 may read the practice of their own lawes, and see by your 
 linage what life they should lead. 
 
 " But vnto one faulte is all the common people of this 
 Kingdome' subject, as well burgh as land; ■vvhich is, to 
 judge and speak rashly of their prince, setting the 
 commonweale vpon foure props, as wee call it; euer 
 ir-earying of the present estate, and desirous of nouelties." 
 The remedy the king suggests, " besides the execution of 
 laws that are to be vsed against vnreuerent speakers^" 
 is so to rule, as that "the subjects may not only live in 
 Buretie and wealth, but be stirred up to open their 
 mouthes in your iust praise." 
 
 JAMES THE FIRST'S IDEA OF A TYRAlfT 
 AND A KING. 
 
 The royal author distinguishes a king from a tyrant on 
 their first entrance into the government • — 
 
HIS IDEA OF A TYRANT AND A KING. 535 
 
 "A tyfant will entef like a saint, till he find himself 
 fast under foot, and then will euffe* his unruly aifections 
 to burst forth." He advises the prince to act contrary 
 to Nero, who, at firstj ",with his tender;hearted wish, 
 vellem riescire literas^'' appeared to lament that he was to 
 e"xecute the laws. He, on the contrary, would have the 
 prince eswly show "the' severitie of justice, which will 
 settle the country, and make them know that ye can 
 Strike : this would be blit for a time. If otherwise yd 
 kyth (show) your clemeticie at the first the offences would 
 soon come to such hea*pes,. and the contempt of you grow 
 so great, that whefl ye would fall to punish, the number 
 to be punished would exceed the innocent ; and ye 
 would, against your nature, be compelled then to wracke 
 manie, whom the chastisement of few in the beginning 
 might have preserved. In this my o^^n dear-bought 
 experience may serve you for a different lesson. For, I 
 confess, where I thought (by being gracious at the 
 beginning) to gain all men's heart to a loving and Willing! 
 obedience, I by the contrarie found the disorder of the 
 eountrie, and the loss of my thanks, to be all my reward." 
 
 James, in the course of the work, often instmcts the 
 prince by his own errors and misfortunes ; and certainly 
 one of these was an excess of the kinder impulses in 
 , glinting fawoiirs ; there was nothing' selfish iii his happi- 
 ness ; Jaiftes seemed to wish that every one around him 
 should participate in the fiilness of his own enjoyment. 
 His band was always open to scatter about him honours' 
 arid wealth, and not always on linworthy favourites, but 
 often on learned men whose talents he knew well tO' 
 appreciate. There was a warmth in the king's temper 
 ■^thich once he himself well d"eseiibed ; he' did not like 
 those who pnde themselves on theit tepid dispositions 
 " I lore not one that will never be angry, for as he that 
 is ivithout sorrow is without gladness, so he that is with- 
 out anger is without love. Give me the heart of a man, 
 
536 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 and out of that all his actions shall be acceptable." The 
 king thus addresses the prince : — 
 
 On the Choice of Servants and Associates. 
 
 "Be not moved with importunities; for the which 
 cause, as also ^or augmenting your Maiestie, be not so 
 facile of access-giving at all times, as I have been." — ^In 
 his minority, the choice of his servants had been made by 
 others, " recommending servants unto me, more for serv- 
 ing, in eifect, their friends that put them in, than their 
 maister that admitted them, and used them well, at the 
 first rebellion raised against me. Chuse you your own 
 servantes for your own vse, and not for the vse of others ; 
 and, since ye must be communis parens to all your peo- 
 ple,, chuse indiffereatlie out of all quarters; not respect- 
 ing other men's appetites, but their own qualities. Fof as 
 you must command all, so reason would ye should be 
 served of all. — Be a daily watchman over your own 
 servants, that they obey your laws precisely : for how 
 can your laws be kept in the country, if they be broken 
 at your eare ! — Bee homelie or strange with them, as ye 
 think their behaviour deserveth and their nature may 
 bear ill. — Employ every njan as ye think him qualified, 
 but use not one in all things, lest he wax proud, and be 
 envied by his fellows. — ^As for the other sort of your 
 companie and servants, they ought to be of perfect age, 
 see they be of a good fame ; otherwise what can the 
 people think but that ye have chosen a companion unto 
 r you according to your own humour, and so have pre- 
 ferred those men for the love of their vices and crimes, 
 that ye knew them to be guiltie of. For the people, that 
 see you not within, cannot judge of you but according to 
 the outward appearance of your actions and company, 
 whicb only is subject to their sight." 
 
THE RETOLTJTIONISTS OF THAT AGE. 53Y 
 
 TIIEREVOLUTIONISTS OF THAT AGE. 
 
 James I. has painted, with vivid touches, the Anti- 
 Monarchists, or revolutionists, of his time. 
 
 He describes " their imagined democracie, where they 
 fed themselves with the hope to become tribuni plebi ; 
 and so, in a popular government, by leading the people by 
 the nose, to bear the sway of all the rule. — Every faction," 
 he adds, "always joined them. I was ofttimes calum- 
 niated in their poular sermons, not for any evill or vice in 
 me,* but because I was a king, which they thought the 
 highest evill ; and, because they were ashamed to pro- 
 fesse this quarrel, they were busie to look narrowly in 
 all my actions, pretending to distinguish the lawfulness 
 of the, office from the vice of the person ; yet some of 
 them would snapper out well grossly with the trewth of 
 their intentions, informing the people that all kings and 
 princes were naturally enemies to the liberties of the 
 Church ; whereby the ignorant were emboldened (as 
 bayar,ds),f to cry the learned and modest out of it-, but 
 their parity is the mother of confusion, and enemie to 
 vnitie, which is the mother of order." And it is not 
 without eloquence his Majesty describes these factious 
 Anti-Monarchists, as " Men, whom no deserts can oblige, 
 neither oaths nor promises bind ; breathing nothing but 
 sedition and calumnies, aspiring without measure, railing 
 without reason, and making their own imaginations the 
 square of their conscience. I protest, before the great 
 
 * The conduct of Jamea I. in Scotland haa even extorted praise from 
 one of his bitterest oiiluniniators ; for Mrs. MacauUiy has said—" Hia 
 condpqt, whqn King. of Scotland, was in many points unexception^ 
 able." 
 
 \ An old French word, expressing, " A man that gapes or gazes 
 earnestly at a thing; a fly-catcher; a greedy and unmannerly ' be- 
 holder. " — OOTGBAYE. 
 
538 CHASACTEB Of JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 God, and, since I am here as vpon my testament, it is no 
 place for me to lie in, that ye aibiall never fifid with any 
 Hie-land, or Border theeves, greater ingratitud^,, and 
 more lies and vile perjuries : ye may keep them for try. 
 ing your patience, as Socrates did an' evUI wife." 
 
 OF THE NOBILITY OF SCOTLAND. 
 
 The king makes three gfeat divisions of tfee Scottish 
 people : the chu'rch, the nobility, and the burghers. 
 
 Of the nobility, the king counsel's the prince to clieck. 
 
 " A fectless arrogant conceit of their greatiless and 
 power, drinking in with their very nomish^milk. Teach 
 your nobilitie to keep your lawes, as precisely as the mean- 
 est ; fear not their orping, or being discontented, as long 
 as ye rule well : for their pretended i-eformat?on of 
 princes taketh never effect, but where evil government 
 proceedeth. Acquaint yourself so with all the honest 
 men of your barone and gentlemen, giving access so open 
 and affable, to make their own suites to you themselves) 
 and not to employ the great lordes, their intercessoUrs ; 
 so shaill ye bring to a measure their monstrous baefces'. 
 And for their barbarous fetdes (feuds), put the laws to 
 due execution made by mee there-anent ; beginning ever 
 rathest at hini tha;t yee love best, and is oblished vnto you> 
 to mak« him an example to the riest. Make all yoilr reform 
 mations to begin at your elbow, and so by degrees to 
 the extremities of the land." 
 
 Hei would not, however, that the prince should highly 
 contemn the nobility : " Remember, howe that error 
 brake the king, my grandfather's heart. Consider that 
 vertue foUbwetli oftest rtoble blood : the niore frequently 
 that your court can be garnished with them, as peers and 
 fathers of your land, thinke it the more your honour." 
 
 He impresses on the mind of the prince ever to em- 
 
OF COLONISING.— OF MJEECHANTS. g>39 
 
 brace the quarrel of the poor and the sufferer, and to 
 remember the honourable title given to his g;randfather,, 
 in being called " The poor man's long." 
 
 OF COLONISING. 
 
 James I. had a project of improving the state of those 
 that dwelt in the isles, " who are so utterly barbarous," 
 by intermixing some of the senii-civilised Highlanders, 
 sSnd planting colonies among them of inland subjects. 
 
 "I have already made laws against the over-lords, and 
 the chief of their clannes, and it would be no diificultie 
 to danton them ; so rooting out, or transporting the bar- 
 barous and stubborn sort, and planting civilised in their 
 rooms." 
 
 This was as wise a schelne as any modern philosopher 
 tfould have suggested, and, with the conduct he subse- 
 quently pursued in Ireland, may be referred to as spled- 
 did proofs of the Hngly duties so zealously performed by 
 this monarch. 
 
 OF MERCHANTS. 
 
 Ofi merchants, as this king understood the commercial 
 character, he had, no honourable notion. 
 
 He says, " They think the whole commonwealth, or- 
 dained for raising them up, and accounting it their law- 
 ful gain to enrich themselves upon the losses of the rest 
 of the people." 
 
 We are not to censure James I. for his principles of 
 political economy, which then had not assumed the dig- 
 nity of a science ; his rude and simple ideas convey popu- 
 lar truths. 
 
540 CKABACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 REGULATIONS FOR THE PRINCE'S MANNERS 
 AND HABITS. 
 
 The last portion of the " Basilicon Doron " is devoted 
 to domestic regulations for the prince, respecting his 
 manners and habits ; which the king calls " the indifi'erent 
 actions of a man." 
 
 " A king is set as one on a stage, whose smallest 
 actions and gestures all the people gazinglie do behold ; 
 and, however just in the discharge of his office, yet, if his 
 behaviour be light or dissolute, in indifferent actions, the 
 people, who see but the outward part, conceive pre-occu- 
 pied conceits of the king's inward intention, which, 
 although with time, the trier of truth, will evanish by 
 the evidence of the contrarie effect yet interim patitur 
 Justus, and pre-judged conceits will, in* the meantime, 
 breed contempt, the mother of rebellion and disorder.! 
 Besides," the king adds, "the indifferent actions and 
 behaviour of a man have a certain holding and depend- 
 ence upon vertue or vice, according as they are used or 
 ruled." 
 
 The prince is not to keep regular hours. 
 
 " That any time in the four and twentie hours may be 
 alike to you ; thereby your diet may be accommodated 
 to your affairs, and not your affairs to your diet." 
 
 The prince is to eat in public,- " to shew that he loves 
 not to haunt companie, which is one of the marks of a 
 tyrant, and that he delights not to eat privatelie, ashamed 
 of his gluttonie." As a curious instance of the manners 
 of the times, the king advises the prince " to use mostly 
 to eat of reasonablie-grosse and common-meats ; not only 
 for making your bodie strong for travel, as that ye may 
 be the hartlier received by. your meane subiects in their 
 houses, when their cheere may suffice you, which other- 
 
THE PRINCE'S MASTNEES AND HABITS. 541 
 
 ■waies would be imputed to you for pride, and breed cold- 
 ness and disdain in them." 
 
 I have noticed his counsel against the pedantry or other 
 affectations of style in speaking. 
 
 JHe adds, "Let it be plaine, natural, comelie, cleane, 
 sEort, and sententious." 
 
 In his gestures "he is neither to look sillily, like a 
 stupid pedant ; nor unsettledly, with an uncouth morguej 
 like a new-come-over cavalier ; not over sparing in your 
 courtesies, for that will be imputed to incivilitie and ar- 
 rogance ; nor yet over prodigal in jowking or nodding at 
 every step, for that forme of being popular becometh bet- 
 ter aspiring Absaloms than lawful kings ; forming ever 
 your gesture according to your present action; looking 
 gravely, and with a majestic, when ye sit upon judgment, 
 or give audience to embassadors ; homely, when ye are 
 in private with your own servants ; merrily, when ye are 
 at any pastime, or merry discourse ; and let your counte- 
 nance smell of courage and magnanimity when at- the 
 warres. And remember (I say again) to be plaine and 
 sensible in your language ; for besides, it is the- tongue's 
 office to be the messenger of the mind ; it may be thought 
 a point of imbecilitie of spirit in a king to speak obscurely, 
 much more untrewely, as if he stood in awe of any in 
 uttering his thoughts." 
 
 Should the prince incline to be an author, the king adds — 
 " If your engine (genius) spur you to write any workes, 
 either in • prose or verse, I cannot but allow you to prac- 
 tise it ; but take no longsome works in hande, for distraci- 
 ing you from your calling." 
 
 He reminds the prince with dignity and truth, 
 "Your writes (writings) will remain as the true pic- 
 ture of your minde, to all posterities ; if yee would write , 
 warthelie, chuse Subjects worthie of you." His critical; 
 conception of the nature of poetry is its best, definition. 
 "If ye write in verse, remember that it is not the 
 
542 CHAEACTEE OF JAMBS THE FIEST. 
 
 principal part of a poem to rime right, and flow well with 
 many prettie wordes; but the chief commendation of a 
 poem is, that when the verse shall bee talien sundry in 
 prose, it shall be found so ritch in quick inventions and 
 poetick floures, and in fair and pertinent comparisons, 
 as it shall retain the lustre of a poem although in prose." 
 
 The king prpoeeds, touching many curious points ,con- 
 cerning the prince's bodily exercises and " house-pas- 
 times." A genuine picture of the customs and manners 
 of the age : our royal author had the eye of aij observer, 
 and the thoughtfulness of a sage. 
 
 The king closes with the hope that the prince's " natural 
 inclination will have a happie simpathie with these pre- 
 cepts ; picking the wise man's scjhoolmaister, which is the 
 example of others, to be your tea^ciher ; and not that over-' 
 J,ate repentance by your own experience, which is the 
 schoolmaister of fools," 
 
 Thus have I opened the book, and I believe, the heart 
 of James I. The volume remains a perpetual witness to 
 posterity of the intellectual capacity and the noble disposi- 
 tion of the royal author. 
 
 But this monarch has been unfairly reproached both 
 by the political and religious ; as far as these aspersi ma _ 
 connect themselves with his character, they enter into our 
 inquiry. 
 
 His speeches and his writings are perpetually quoted 
 by democratic writers, with the furious zeal of those who' 
 are doing the work of a party ; they never separate the 
 character of James from his speculative principles 
 of government ; and, such is the odium they have raised 
 against him, that this .sovereign has received the execra- 
 tion, or the ridicule, even of those who do not belong 
 to their party. James maintained certain abstract doc-' 
 trines of the times, and had written on " The Prerogar 
 tivfi Royal," and " The Trew Laws of Free Monarchies," 
 as he had on witches and devils. All this verbal despot- 
 
THE KING'S IDEA OF EOYAL PBBROGATIYE. 543 
 
 ism is artfully converted into so many acts of de&potism 
 itself; and thus they contrive their dramatic exhibition 
 of a blustering tyrant, in the person of a father of his peo- 
 ple, who exercised his power without an atom of brutal 
 despotism adhering to it. 
 
 THE KING'S IDEA OP THE ROYAL PRE- 
 ROGATIVE. 
 
 When' James asserted that a king is above the laws, he 
 did not understand this in the popular sense ; nor was 
 he the inventor or the reviver of similar doctrines. In 
 all his mysterious flights on the nature of "The Pre- 
 rogative Royal," James only maintained what Elizabeth 
 and all the Tudors had, as jealously, but more energetic- 
 ally exercised.* Elizabeth left to her successor the 
 royal prerogative strained to its highest pitch, with no 
 means to support a throne which in the succeeding reign 
 was found to be baseless. The king employed the style 
 of absolute power, and, as Harris says, " entertained no- 
 tions of his prerogative amazingly great, and bordering 
 on iinpiety." It never occurred to his calumniators, who 
 are always writing, without throwing themselves back 
 into the age of their inquiries, that all the political rever- 
 ies, the abstract notions, and the metaphysical fancies of 
 James I. arose from his studious desire of being an 
 
 * In Sir Symund D'Ewes's "Journals of the Parliament," and in 
 Townshend's " Historical Collections," we trace in some degree Eliza- 
 beth's arbitrary power concealed in her prerogative, which she always 
 considered as the dissolving charm in t he magical circle of our consti- 
 tution. But I possess two letters of the French ambassador to Charles 
 IX., written from our. court in her reign; who, by means of his secret 
 intercourse with .those.about her person, datails a curious narrative 
 of a royal intei;vi9w, granted to some deputies of the parliament, at 
 that moment refractory, strongly depicting the exalted notions this 
 great sovereign entertained of the prerogative, and which she asserted 
 in stamping her foot. 
 
544: CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 English sovereign, according to the English constitution 
 ■ — for from thence he derived those very ideas. 
 
 THE LAWYERS' IDEA OF THE ROYAL 
 PREROGATIVE. 
 
 The truth is, that lawyers, in their anxiety to define, or 
 to defend the shadowy limits of the royal prerogative, 
 had contrived some strange and clumsy fictions to de- 
 scribe its powers ; their flatteries of the imaginary being, 
 whom they called the sovereign, are more monstrous than 
 all the harmless abstractions of James I. 
 
 They describe an English sovereign as a mysterious 
 being, invested with absolute perfection, and a fabulous 
 immortality, whose person was inviolable by its sacred- 
 ness. A king of England is not subject to death, since 
 the sovereign is a corporation, expressed by the awful 
 plural the ouk and the we. His majesty is always of 
 full age, though in infancy ; and so unlike mortality, the 
 king can do no wrong. Such his ubiquity, that he acts 
 at the same moment in different places ; and such the 
 force of his testimony, that whatever the sovereign de- 
 clare? to have passed in his presence, becomes instantly 
 a perpetual record ; he serves for his own witness, by 
 the simple subscription of Teste me ipso ; and he is so 
 absolute in power, beyond the laws, that he quashes them 
 by his negative voice.* Such was the origin of tlie theo- 
 retical prerogative of an ideal sovereign which James I. 
 
 * Such are the descriptions of the British sovereign, to be found in 
 Cowell's curioiia book, entitled "The Interpreter." 'The reader may 
 further trace the modern genius of Blackstone, with an awful reverence, 
 dignifying the venerable nonsense — and the commentator on Black- 
 stone sometimes labouring to explain the explanations of his master ; 
 so obscure, so abstract, and so delicate is the phantom which our an- 
 cient lawyers conjured up, and which the moderns cannot lay. 
 
LAWYERS' IDEA OP EOYAIi PREROGATITB. 545 
 
 had formed : it was a mere curious abstraction of the 
 schools in the spirit of the age, which was perpetually 
 referring to the mysteries of state and the secrets of 
 empires, and not a principle he was practising to the det- 
 riment of the subject. 
 
 James I. while he held for his first principle that a sover- 
 eign is only accountable to God for the sins of his govern- 
 ment, an harmless and even a noble principle in a reli- 
 gious prince, at various times acknowledged that " a king 
 is ordained for procuring the prosperity pf his people." 
 In his speech, 1603, he says, 
 
 " If you be rich I cannot be poor ; if you be happy I 
 cannot but be fortunate. My worldly felicity consists in 
 your prosperity. And that I am a servant is most true, 
 as I am a head and governour of all the people in my 
 dominions. If we take the people as one body, then as 
 the head is ordained for the body and not the body for 
 the head, so must a righteous king know himself to be 
 ordained for his people, and not his people for him." 
 
 The truth is always concealed by those writers who 
 are cloaking their antipathy against monarchy, in their 
 declamations against the writings of James I. Authors, 
 who are so often influenced by the opinions of their age, 
 have the melancholy privilege of perpetuating them, and 
 of being cited as authorities for those very opinions, 
 however erroneous. 
 
 At this time the true principles of popular liberty, 
 hidden in the constitution, were yet obscure and con- 
 tested ; involved in contradiction, in assertion and recan- 
 tation ; * and they have be6n established as much by the 
 
 * CoweU, equally learned and honest, involved blmself in eontradiet- 
 ory positions, and was alike prosecuted by the King and the Commons, 
 on opposite principles. The overbearing Coke seems to have aimed at 
 his life, which the lenity of James saved. His work is a testimony of 
 the unsettled principles of liberty at that time ; CoweU was compelled 
 to appeal to one part of his book to save himself from the other. 
 35 
 
546 CHARACTEE OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 blood as hj the ink of our patriots. Some noble spirits 
 in the Commons were then struggling tp fix the vacilla- 
 ting principles of our government ; but often their pri- 
 vate passions vrere infused into their public feelings; 
 James, who was apt to imagine that these individuals 
 were instigated by a personal enmity in aiming at his 
 mysterious prerogative, and at the same time found their 
 rivals with equal weight opposing the novel opinions, 
 retreated still farther into the depths and arcana of the 
 constitution. Modern writers have viewed the political 
 fancies of this monarch through optical instruments not 
 invented in his days. 
 
 When Sir Edward Coke declared that the king's royal 
 prerogative being unlimited and undefined, " was a great 
 overgrown monster ;" and, on one occasion, when Coke 
 said before the king, that "his Majesty was defended by 
 the laws," — James, in anger, told him he spoke foolishly, 
 arid he said lie was riot defended by the laws, but by God 
 (alluding to his " divine right ") ; and sharply reprima,nd- 
 ed him for having spoken irreverently of Sir Thomas 
 Crompton, a civilian ; asserting, that Crompton was as 
 good a man as Coke. The fact is, there then existed a 
 rivalry between the civil and the common lawyers. Coke 
 declared that the common law of England was in immi- 
 nent danger of being perverted ; that law which he has 
 enthusiastically described as the perfection of all sense 
 and experience. Coke was strenuously opposed by Lord 
 Bacon and by the civilians, and was at length committed 
 to the Tower (according to a MS. letter of the day, for 
 the cause is obscure in our history), " charged with speak- 
 ing so in parliament as tended to stir up the subjects' 
 hearts against their sovereign."* Yet in all this we 
 
 * The following anecdotes of Lord Chief Justice Coke have not heen 
 published. They are extracts from manuscript letters of the times': 
 on that occasion, at first, the patriot did not oonduot himself with tlia 
 firmness of a great spirit. 
 
lAWTEES' IDEA OF EOYAL PREROGATITE. 547 
 
 must not regard James as the despot he is represented : 
 he acted as Eli«abeth would hare acted, for the sacred- 
 ness of his own person, and the integrity of the constitu- 
 
 Nov. 19, 1616. 
 "The thunderbolt hath fallen on the Lord Coke,-which hath overthrown 
 him from the very roots. The supersedeas was carried to him by Sir 
 George Coppin, who, at the presenting of it, received it with dejection 
 and tears. Tremor et successw non cadunt in fortem et constantim. I 
 send you a distich on the Lord Cok« — 
 
 Jus condere Coous potuit, sed oondere jure 
 Non potuit ; potuit condere jura cods." 
 
 It happened that the name of Coke, or rather Cook, admitted of 
 being punned on, both in Latin and in English ; for he was lodged in 
 the Tower, in a room than had once been a kitchen, and as soon as he 
 arrived, one had written on the door, which he read at his entrance-^ 
 
 " This room has long wanted a Cook." 
 
 "The Prince interceding lately for Ediward Coke, his Majesty an- 
 swered, ' He knew no such man.' When the Prince interceded by tlie 
 name of Mr. Coke, his Majesty stQl answered, ' He knew none of that 
 name neither ; but he knew there was one Captain Coke, the leader ,of 
 the faction in parliament.' " 
 
 In another lefter. Coke appears with greater dignity. When Lord 
 Arundel was sent by the king to Coke, a prisoner in the Tower, to in- 
 form him that his Majesty would allow him to consult with eight of the 
 best learned in the law to advise liim for his cause. Coke thanked the 
 king, but he. knew himself to be accounted to have as much skill in 
 the law as any man in England, and therefore needed no such help, 
 nor feared to be judged by the law. He knew his Majesty might easily 
 find, in such a one as he, whereby to take away his head ; but for this 
 I:e feared not what could be said. 
 
 " I have heard you affirm," said Lord Arundel, '■ that by law, he 
 that should go about to withdraw the subjects' hearts from their king 
 was a traitor." Sir Edward answered, " That he held him an arch- 
 traitor." 
 
 James I. said Of Coke, " That he had so many shifts that, throw Mm 
 where yon wOuld, he still fell upon his legs." 
 
 This affair ended with putting Sir Edward Coke on his knees before 
 the council-table, with an Order to retire to a private life, to correct his 
 book of Reports, and occasionally to consult the king himself. This 
 part of Coke's history is fully Opened in Mr. Alexander Chalmers's 
 " Biographical Dictionary.'' 
 
■64:8 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 tion. In the same manuscript letter I find that, when at 
 Theobalds, the king, with his usual opennass, was discours- 
 ing how he designed to govern ; and as he would some- 
 times, like the wits of all nations and times, compress an 
 argument into a play on words, — ^the king said, " I will 
 govern according to the good of the commonweal, hut 
 not according to the commorMeill/" 
 
 THE KING'S ELEVATED CONCEPTION OF 
 THE KINGLY CHARACTER. 
 
 But what were the real thoughts and feelings of this pre- 
 sumed despot concerning the duties of a sovereign ? His 
 Platonic conceptions inspired the most exalted feelings ; 
 but his gentle nature never led to one act of unfeeling 
 despotism. His sceptre was wreathed with the rose^ of 
 his fancy : the iron of arbitrary power only struck into the 
 heart in the succeeding reign. James only menaced with 
 an abstract notion ; or, in anger, with his own hand would 
 tear out a protestation from the journals of the Commons : 
 and, when he considered a man as past forgiveness, he con- 
 demned him to a slight imprisonment ; or removed him 
 to a distant employment ; or, if an author, like Coke and 
 Cowell, sent him into retirement to correct his works. 
 
 In a great court of judicature, when the interference of 
 ■the royal authority was ardently solicited, the magnani- 
 mous monarch replied : — 
 
 " Kings ruled by their laws, as God did by the laws of 
 nature ; and ought as rarely to put in use their suprenie 
 authority as God does his power of working miracles." 
 
 Notwithstanding his abstract principles, his knowledge 
 and reflection showed him that there is a crisis in 'mon- 
 archies and a period in empires ; and in discririiinatirig 
 between a king and a tyrant, he tells the prince — 
 
 " A tyranne's miserable and infamous life armeth in end 
 
COSrCEPTION OP THE KINGIiT CHAEACTEK. 649 
 
 his own subjects to iDecome his barreaux ; and although 
 this rebellion be ever unlawful on their part, yet is the 
 , world so wearied of him, that his fall is little meaned 
 (minded) by the rest of his subiects, and smiled at by his 
 neighbours." 
 
 And he desires that the prince, his son, should so per- 
 form his royal duties, that, " In case ye fall in the high- 
 way, yet it should be with the honourable report and 
 just regret of all honest men." In the dedicatory sonnet 
 to Prince Henry of the " Basilicon Doron," in verses not 
 without elevation, James admonishes the prince to 
 
 Represse the proud, maintaining aye the right; 
 
 "Walk alwraya so, as ever in his sight, 
 
 "Who guards the godly, plaguing the prophaue. 
 
 The poems of James I. are the versifications of a man 
 of learning and meditation. Such an one could not fail 
 of producing lines which reflect the mind of their author. 
 I find in a MS. these couplets, which condense an im- 
 pressive thought on a favourite subject : — 
 
 Crownes have their oorapasse, length of dales their date, 
 Triumphs their tombes, Policitie her fate ; 
 Of more than earth, can earth make none partaker ; 
 But knowledge makes the king most like his Maker.* 
 
 These are among the elevated conceptions the king had 
 formed of the character of a sovereign, and the feeling 
 was ever present in his mind. James has preserved an 
 anecdote of Henry VIII., in commenting on it, which 
 serves our purpose : — 
 
 " It was strange," said James I., " to look into the life 
 of Henry VIII., how like an epicure he lived ! Henry 
 once asked, whether he might be saved ? He was an- 
 swered, ' That he had no cause to fear, having lived so 
 mighty a king.' ' But oh !' said he,' I have lived too like a 
 
 *"Harl. MSS.," 6824. 
 
550 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 king.' He should ratTier have said, not like a king — for 
 the office of a king is to do justice and equity ; but he only 
 served his sensuality, like a beast." 
 
 Henry VH. was the favourite character of James I. ; 
 and it was to gratify the king that Lord Bacon -wrote the 
 life of this wise and prudent monarch. It is remarkable 
 of James I., that he never mentioned the name of Eliza- 
 beth without some expressive epithet of reverence ; such 
 as, "The late queen of famous memory ;"• a circumstance' 
 not common among kings, who do not like to remind the ' 
 world of the reputation of a great predecessor. But it 
 suited the generous temper of that man to extol the' 
 greatness he admired, whose philosophic toleration was 
 often known to have pardoned the libel on himself for the 
 redeeming virtue of its epigram. In his forgiving temper, 
 James I. would call such eflFusions " the superfluities of 
 idle brains." 
 
 "THE BOOK OF SPORTS." 
 
 But while the mild government of this monarch has been ] 
 covered with the political odium of arbitrary power, he 
 has also incurred a religious one, from his design of i-en- 
 dering the Sabbath a day for the poor alike of devotion, 
 and enjoyment, hitherto practised in England, as it is still 
 throughout Europe. Plays were performed on Sundays, 
 at court, in Elizabeth's i-eign ; and yet, " the Protestants 
 of Elizabeth" was the usual expressive phrase to mark 
 those who did most honour to the reformed. The king, 
 returning from Scotland, found the people in Lancashire 
 discontented, from the unusual deprivation of their popu- 
 lar recreations on Sundays and holidays, after the church 
 service. " With our own ears we heard the general com- 
 plaint of our people." The Catholic priests were busily 
 insinuating among the lower orders that the reformed 
 religion, was a sullen deprivation of all mirth and social 
 
"THE BOOK OF SPORTS." 651 
 
 amusements, and thus " turning the people's hearts." But 
 while they were denied what the king terms lawful rec- 
 reations,"* they had substituted more vicious ones : ale^ 
 houses were more frequented — drunkenness more generae- 
 — tale-mongery and sedition, the vices of sedentary idle- 
 ness, prevailed — while a fanatical gloom was spreading 
 over the country. 
 
 The king, whose gaiety of temper instantly sympa- 
 thised . with the multitude, and perhaps alarmed at this 
 new shape which puritanism was assuming, published what 
 is caljl,ed "The Book of Sports," and which soon obtained 
 the contemptuous term of " The Dancing Book." 
 
 On this subject our recent principles have goVterned our 
 decisions : with our habits formed, and our notions final- 
 ly adjusted, this singular state-paper has been reprobated 
 by piety,; whose zeal, however, is not sufficiently histori- 
 cal It was one of the state maxims of this philosophic 
 monarch, in his advice to his son, 
 
 " To allure the common people to a common amitie 
 among themselves; and that certain dales in the yeere 
 should be appointed for delighting the people with public 
 spectacles of all honest games and exercise of arms; 
 making playes and lawful games in Male, and good 
 «heare at Christmas; as also for convening of neighr 
 boursj for entertaining friendship and heartliness, by hon- 
 est feasting and merriness ; so that thesabbothes be kept 
 holie, and no unlawful pastime be used. This form of 
 contenting the people's minds hath been used in all well- 
 governed republics." 
 
 James, therefore, was shocked at the sudden melancholy 
 among the people. In Europe, even among the reformecl 
 themselves, the Sabbath, after church-service,, was a 
 
 * These are ennmerated to consist of dandng, arehary,' leaping 
 vaulting, May-games, .TVhitsun-aloa, Morris-dances, and tlie setting up 
 of May -poles, and other manly sports. 
 
562 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 festival-day; and the wise monaroh could discover no 
 reason why, in his kingdom, it should prove a day of 
 penance and self-denial : but when once this unlucky 
 "Book of Sports" was thrown among the nation, they 
 discovered, to their own astonishment, that everything 
 concerning the nature of the Sabbath was uncertain. 
 
 THE SABBATARIAN COKTROVERSY. 
 
 And, because they knew nothing, they wrote much. The 
 controversy was carried to an extremity in the succeeding 
 reign. The proper hour of the Sabbath was not agreed 
 on : Was it to commence on the Saturday-eve ? Others 
 thought that time, having a circular motion, the point we 
 begin at was not important, provided the due portion be 
 completed. Another declared, in his " Sunday no Sab- 
 bath," that it was merely an ecclesiastical day which may' '; 
 be changed at pleasure ; as they were about doing it, in 
 the Church of Geneva, to Thursday, — probably from 
 their antipathy to the Catholic Sunday, as the early Chris- 
 tians had anciently changed it from the Jewish Saturday. { 
 This had taken place, had the Thursday voters not formed ' 
 the minority. Another asserted, that Sunday was a work- 
 ing day, and that Saturday was the perpetual Sabtath.* 
 Some deemed the very name of Sunday profaned the 
 Christian mouth, as allusive to the Saxon idolatry of 
 that day being dedicated to the Sun; and hence they 
 sanctified it with the " Lord's-day." Others were stren- 
 uous advocates for closely copying the austerity of the 
 Jewish Sabbath, in all the rigour of tl)e Levitical law; 
 forbidding meat to be dressed, houses Swept, fire's kindled, 
 &c.,— the day of rest was to be a day of mortification. 
 But this spread an alann, that " the old rotten ceremonial 
 
 ♦Collier's " Ecolesvastioal History," vol. 11., p. 15S. 
 
THE SABBATARIAN CONTROTEEST. 553 
 
 law of the Jews, which had been buried in the grave of 
 Jesus," was about to be revived. And so prone is man 
 to the reaction of opinion, that, from observing the Sab- 
 bath with a Judaic austerity, some were for rejecting 
 " Lord's-days " altogether; asserting, they needed not 
 any ; because, in their elevated holiness, all days to them 
 were Lord's-days.* A popular preacher at the Temple, 
 who was disposed to keep alive a cheerful spirit among 
 the people, yet desirous that the sacred day should not 
 pass like any other, moderated between the parties. He 
 declared it was to be observed with strictness only by 
 "persons of quality ."f 
 ; One of the chief causes of the civil war is ,traced to 
 
 ♦Fuller's "Chnroli History," book xi., p. 149. One of the most 
 curious books of this class is Heylin's "History of the Sabbath," a 
 ■work abounding with uncommon researches; it was written in favour 
 of Charles's declaration for reviving lawful sports on Sundays. Warton, 
 in the ^rsi edition of Milton's "Juvenile Poems,'! observed in a note on 
 the Lady's speech, in Comus, verse 177, that "it is owing to the Puri- 
 tans ever since Cromwell's time t\\a,t JSwidrnf hsia been made in England 
 a day of gravity and severity : and many a staunch observer of the rites 
 of the Church o^ England little Suspects that he is conforming to the 
 Caimnism of an English Sunday." It is probable this gave unjust of- 
 fence to grave heads unfurnished with their own national history, for 
 in the second ediUtm Warton cancelled tlie note. Truth is thus violated. 
 The Puritans, disgusted with the levities and excesses of the age of 
 James and Charles, as is usual on these points, vehemently threw 
 themselves into an opposite direction ; but they perhaps advanced too 
 far in coaverting the Sabbath-day into a suUein and gloomy reserve of 
 Pharisaical austerity. Adam Smith, and Paley, in his " Moral and Po- 
 litical Philosophy," vol. ii., p. 73, have taken more enlightened views on 
 this subject. 
 
 f "Let servants," he says, ''whose hands are ever working, whilst 
 their eyes, are w;aking; let sjich.who all the foregoing week had, their 
 checks moistened^ with sweat, and, their hands hardened with labour, 
 let such have some recreation on the Lord's-day indulged to |iiem; 
 whilst 'persons of quiiHty, who may be said to keep Sabbath all the 
 week long— rl mean, who rest from hard labour — are concerned in con- 
 science to observe the Lord's-day with the greater abstinence from rec- 
 reations." 
 
554: CHAEACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 the revival of this " Book of Sports." Thus it happened 
 that ftom the circumstance of our good-tempered monarch 
 discovering the populace in Lancashire discontented, 
 being debarred from their rustic sports— ^and, exhorting 
 them, out of his bonhomie and " fatherly love, which he 
 owed to them all " (as he said), to recover their cheerful 
 habits — he was innocently involving the country in divin- 
 ity and in civil war. James I. would have started with 
 horror at the " Book of Sports,"' could he have presciently 
 contemplated the archbishop, and the sovereign who , 
 persisted to revive it, dragged to the block. What invisi- 
 ble thread suspend together the most remote events ! 
 
 The parliament's armies usually chose Sundays for 
 their battles, that the profanation of the day might be 
 expiated by a field-sacrifice, and that the Sabbath- 
 breakers should receive a signal punishment. The 
 opinions of the nature of the Sabbath were, even in the 
 succeeding reign, so opposite and novel, that plays were 
 performed before Charles on Sundays. James I., who 
 knew nothing of such opinions, has been unjustly aspersed 
 by those who live in more settled time^ when such 
 matters have been more wisely established than ever they 
 were discussed.* 
 
 * It is remarkable of James I. that he never pressed for the ' 
 performance of any of his proclamations ; and hia facile dispoaitioivi ' 
 made him more tolerant than appears in our history. At this very 
 time, the conduct pf a lord mayor of London has beSn preserved by 
 Wilson, as a proof of tlie city magistrate's piety, and, it may be added, 
 of his wisdom. It is here adduced as an evldeiioe of the king's usual ' 
 conduct: — 
 
 Tlie king's carriages, removing to Theobalds on the Sabbath, 
 occasioned a great clatter and noise in the lime of divine service. The , 
 lord-mayor commanded them to be stopped, and the officers of the 
 carriages, returningto the king, made violent complaints. The king;, 
 in a rage, swore he thought there had been no more kings in England 
 than himself; and sent a warrant to the lord-mayor to 16t them pass, 
 which he obeyed, oteeifying. — " While it was in my power, I did my 
 duty; but that being taken away by a higher power, it is my duty to 
 
MOTIVES OS THE ZINGHS AVERSION TO TVAR. 555 
 
 MOTIVES OF THE KING'S AVERSION TO 
 WAR 
 
 The king's aversion to war has "been attributed to his 
 pusillanimity — as if personal was the same thing as 
 political courage, and as if a king placed himself in a 
 field of battle by a proclamation for war. The idle tale 
 that James trembled at the mere view of a naked sword, 
 w'hich is produced as an instance of the effects of 
 sympathy over the infant in t^ie womb from his mother's 
 terror at the assassination of Rizzio, is probably not 
 true, yet it serves the purpose of iaconsiderate writers to 
 indicate his excessive pusillanimity ; but there is another 
 idle tale of an opposite nature which is certainly true : — 
 In passing from Berwick into his new kingdom, the king, 
 with his own hand, " shot out of a cannon so fayre and 
 with so great judgment" as convinced the cannoniers of 
 the king's skill " in great artillery," as Stowe records. It 
 is probable, after all, that James I. was not deficient in 
 personal courage, although this is not of consequence in 
 his literary and political character. Several instances are 
 recorded of his intrepidity. But the absurd charge of 
 his pusillanimity and his pedantry has been carried so far, 
 as to suppose that it affected hi's character as a sovereign. 
 The warm and hasty Burnet says at once of James I. : — 
 "He was despised by all abroad as a pedant without 
 true judgment, courage, or steadiness." This " pedant," 
 however, had " the true judgment and steadiness" to ob- 
 tain his favourite purpose, which was the preservation of a 
 continued peace. If James I. was sometimes despised by 
 foreign powers, it was because an insular king, who will 
 not consume the blood and treasure of his people (and 
 
 obey.'' The good sense of the lord-mayor so highly gratified James, 
 that the king oomplimenced him, and thanked him for it. Of such 
 gentleness was the arbitrary power of James composed I 
 
556 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 James had neither to spare), may he little regarded on 
 the Continent ; the Machiavels of foreign cabinets will 
 look with contempt on the domestic blessings a British 
 sovereign would scatter among his subjects ; his presence 
 with the foreigners is only felt m his armies ; and they 
 seek to allure him to fight their battles, and to involve 
 him in their interests. 
 
 James looked with a cold eye on the military adven- 
 turer : he said, " No man gains by war but he that hath 
 not wherewith to live in peace." But there was also a 
 secret motive, which made the king a lover of peace, and 
 which he once thiis confidentially opened : — 
 
 " A king of England had no reason but to seek always 
 to decline a war ; for though the sword was indeed in his 
 hand, the purse was in the people's. One could not go 
 without the other. Suppose a supply were levied to begin 
 the fray, what certainty could he have that he should not 
 want sufficient to make an honourable end ? If he called' 
 for subsidies, and did not obtain, he must retreat inglo-* 
 riously. He must beg an alms, with such conditions as 
 would break the heart of majesty, through capitulations 
 that some members would make, who desire to improve the 
 reputation of their wisdom, hy retrenching the dignity of 
 the crown in popular declcfmations, and thus he must buy 
 the soldier's pay, or fear the danger of a mutiny."* 
 
 JAMES ACKNOWLEDGES HTS DEPENDENCE 
 ON THE COMMONS.— THEIR CONDUCT. 
 
 Thus James I., perpetually accused of exercising 
 arbitrary power, confesses a humiliating dependence on 
 the Commons ; and, on the whole, at a time when 
 prerogative and privilege were alike indefinite and 
 
 * Hacket's "Life of Lord-Keeper "WUIiams," p. 80. The whole is 
 
 distiiiguislied by italics, as the king's own words, 
 
DBPEKDENCB OST THE OOMMOITS. 657 
 
 obscure, the king received from them hard and rigorous 
 usage. A king of peace claimed the indulgence, if not 
 the gratitude, of the people ; and the sovereign who was 
 zealous to correct the ahuses of his government, was not 
 distinguished by the Commons from him who insolently 
 would perpetuate them. 
 
 When the Commons were not in good humour with 
 Elizabeth, or James, they contrived three methods of 
 inactivity, running the time to waste — nihil agendo, or 
 aliud agendo, or maU agendo; doing nothing, doing 
 something else, or doing evilly.* In one of these irksome 
 moments, waiting for subsidies, Elizabeth anxiously 
 inquired of the Speaker, " What had passed in the 
 Lower House ?" He replied, " If it please your 
 Majesty — seven weeks." On one of thcase , occasions, 
 when the queen broke into a passion when they urged 
 her to a settlement of the succession, one of the deputies 
 of the Commons informed her Majesty, that "the 
 Commons would never speak about a subsidy, or any 
 other matter whatever; and that hitherto nothing but 
 the most trivial discussions had passed in parliament : 
 which was, therefore, a great assembly rendered entirely 
 useless, — and all were desirous of returning home."f 
 
 But the more easy and open nature of James I. 
 endured greater hardships : with the habit of studious 
 men, the king had an utter carelessness of money and a 
 generosity of temper, which Hacket, in his Life of the 
 Lord-Keeper Williams, has described. " The king was 
 wont to give like a king, and for the most part to keep 
 one act of liberality warm with the covering of another." 
 He seemed to have had no distinct notions of total 
 amounts ; he was once so shocked at the sight of the 
 
 * I find this desoriptidn in a MS. letter of the timea. 
 f From a MS. letter of the French ambassador, La Mothe Fenelon, 
 to Charles IX., then at the court of London, in my possession. 
 
558 CHAEAOTER OF JAMES THE FIEST. 
 
 money he had granted away, lying in heaps on a table, 
 that he instantly reduced it to half the sum. It appears 
 that Parliament never granted even the ordinary supplies 
 they had given to his predecessors ; his chief revenue was 
 drawn from the customs ; yet his dehts, of which I find 
 an account in the Parliamentary History, after a reign of 
 twenty-one years, did not amount to 200,000i* This 
 monarch could not have been so wasteful of his 
 revemies as it is presumed. James I. was always gener- 
 ous, and left scarcely any debts. He must have lived 
 amidst many self-deprivations ; nor was this difficult to 
 practise for this king, for he was a philosopher, indifferent 
 to the common and imaginary wants of the vulgar of 
 royalty. Whenever he threw himself into the arras of 
 his Parliament, they left him without a feeling of his 
 distress. In one of his speeches he says— 
 
 " In the last Parliament I laid open the true thoughts 
 of my heart ; but I may say, with our Saviour, ' I haye 
 piped to you, and you have not danced ; I have mourned, 
 and you have not lamented.' I have reigned eighteen 
 years, in which time you have had peace, and I have re- 
 ceived far less supply than hath been given td any king 
 since the Conquest." 
 
 Thus James, denied the relief he claimed, was forced 
 on wretched expedients, selling patents for monopolies, 
 craving benevolences, or free gifts, and such expedients ; 
 the monopolies had been usual in Elizabeth's reign ; yet 
 all our historians agree, that his subjects were never 
 grievously oppressed by such occasional levies ; this was 
 even the confession of the contemporaries of this mon- 
 arch. They were every day becoming wealthier by 
 those acts of peace they despised the monarch for main- 
 taining. "The kingdom, since his reign began, was 
 luxuriant in gold and silver, far above the scant of our 
 
 * "Parliamentary Hi3tory,'' vol. v., p. 147. 
 
DEPEISTDENCB ON THE COMMONS. 559 
 
 fathers who lived hefore us," are the -words of a contem- 
 porary.* All flourished about the king, except the Mng 
 himself James I. discovered how light and hollow was 
 his hoasted " prerogative-royal," which, by its power of 
 dissolving the Parliament, could only keep silent those 
 who had already refused their aid. 
 
 A'wit of the day described the Parliaments of James 
 by this ludicrous distich : 
 
 Many faults complained of, few things amended, 
 A subsidy granted, the Parliament ended. 
 
 But this was rarely the fact. Sometimes they address- 
 ed James I. by what the king called a " stinging peti- 
 tion ;" or, when the ministers, passing over in silence the 
 motion of the Commons, pressed for supplies, the heads 
 of a party replied, that to grant them were to put an 
 end to Parliament. But they practised expedients and 
 contrivances, which comported as little with the dignity 
 of an English senate, as with the majesty of the sover- 
 eign. 
 
 At a late hour, when not a third part of the house re- 
 mained, and those who required a fuller house, amid 
 darkness and confusion, were neither seen nor heard, 
 they made a protest, — of which the king approved as 
 little of the aflibiguous matter, as the surreptitious means ; 
 and it was then, that, with his own hand, he tore the leaf 
 out of the journal.! In the sessions of 1614 the king 
 was still moi-e indignant at their proceedings. He and 
 the Scotch had been vilified by their invectives; and 
 they were menaced by two lawyers, with a "Sicilian 
 vespers, or a Parisian matins." They aimed to reduce 
 the king to beggary, by calling in question a third part 
 of his revenue, contesting his prerogative in levying his 
 customs. On this occasion I find that, publicly in the 
 
 * Haoket's "Life of Lord-Keepsr Williams." 
 f " Bushworth," vol. i., p. 54. 
 
560 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 Banqueting-house at Whitehall, the king tore all their bills 
 before their faces ; and, as not a single act was passed, 
 in the phrase of the day this was called an addle Parlia- 
 ment.* Such unhappy proceedings indicated the fatal 
 divisions of the succeeding reign. A meeting of a difi'er- 
 ent complexion once occurred in 1621, late in James's 
 reign. The monopolies were then abolished. The king 
 and the prince shed reciprocal tears in the house; and 
 the prince wept when he brought an affectionate message 
 of thanks fi'om the Commons. The lettei'-writer says, 
 " It is a day worthy to be kept holiday ; some say it shall, 
 but I believe them not." It never was ; for even this par- 
 liament broke up with the cries of " some tribunitial ora- 
 tors," as James designated the pure and the impure demo- 
 cratic spirits. Smollett remarks in his margin, that the 
 king endeavoured to cajole the Commons. Had he 
 known of the royal tears, he had still heightened, the 
 phrase. Hard fate of kings ! Should ever their tears 
 attest the warmth of honest feelings, they must be thrown 
 out of the pale of humanity : for Francis Osborne, tliat 
 cynical republican, declares, " that there are as few abom- 
 inable princes as tolerable kings; because jsrinces must 
 court the public favour before they attain supreme pow- 
 er, and then change their nature ! " Such is the egotism 
 of republicanism ! 
 
 SCANDALOUS CHEOOTCLES. 
 
 The character of James I. has always been taken from 
 certain scandalous chronicles, whose origin requires detec- 
 tion. It is this mud which has darkened and' disturbed 
 the clear stream of history. The reigns of Elizabeth and 
 James teemed with libels in church and state from oppo- 
 site parties : the idleness of the pacific court of James I. 
 
 * From a MS. of the times. 
 
SCANDALOUS CHRONICLES. 561 
 
 hatched a viperous brood of a less hardy, but perhaps of 
 a more malignant nature, than the Martin Mar-prelates 
 of the preceding reign. Those boldly at once wrote trea- 
 son, and, in some respects, honestly dared the rope which 
 could only silence Penry and his party ; but these only 
 reached to scandalum magnatum, and the puny wretches 
 could only have crept into a pillory. In the times of the 
 Commonwealth, when all things were agreeable which 
 vilified our kings, these secret histories we're dragged from 
 1 their lurking holes; The writers are meagre Suetoniuses 
 and Procopiuses ; a set of self-elected spies in the court ; 
 gossipers, lounging in the same circle ; eaves-droppers ; 
 pryers into corners ; buzzers of reports ; and punctual 
 scribes of what the French (so skilful in the profession) 
 technically term les on dit ; that is, things that might 
 never have happened, although they are recorded : regis- 
 tered for posterity iu many a scandalous chronicle, they 
 have been mistaken for histories ; and include so man y 
 truths and falsehoods, that it becomes unsafe for the his- 
 torian either to credit or to disbelieve them.* 
 
 * Most of these I works were meanly printed, and were usually found 
 in a state of filth and rags, and would have perished in their own 
 merited neglect, had tliey not been recently splendidly reprinted by Sir 
 Walter Scott. Thus the garbage has been cleanly laid on a fashionable 
 epergne, apd found quite to the taste of certain lovers of authentic 
 history I Sir Anthony Weldon, clerk of the iting's kitchen, in his 
 " Court of King James " has been reproached for gaining much of his 
 scandalous chronicle from the purlieus of tiie court. For this work 
 and some similar ones, especially " The None-Such Charles," in which 
 it would appear that he had procured materials from the State Paper 
 Office, and for other zealous services to the Parliament, they voted 
 him a grant of 500i " The Five Years of King James," which passes 
 under the name of Sir Fulk Greville, t^e dignified friend of the roman- 
 tic Sir Philip Sidney, and is frequently referred to by grave writers, 
 is certainly a Presbyterian's third day's hash — for there are parts 
 copied from Arthur "Wilson's " History of James I," who was him- 
 8elf the pensioner of a disappointed courtier ; yet this writer never 
 attacks the personal character of the king, though charged with hav- 
 3S 
 
563 CHASACTER OF JAMES THE PIRST. 
 
 Such was the race generated in this court of peace and 
 indolence ! And Hacket, in his " Life of the Lord-Keeper 
 Williams," without disguising the fact, tells us that the 
 Lord-Keeper " spared not for cost to purchase the most 
 certain intelligence, by his fee'd pensioners, of ev&ry 
 hour's ocffiM-rences at court / and was wont to say that 
 no man could he a statesman without a great deal of 
 money." 
 
 We catch many glimpses of these times in another 
 branch of the same family. When news-books, as the 
 first newspapers were called, did not yet exist to appease 
 the hungering curiosity of the country, a voluminous 
 correspondence was carried on between residents in the 
 
 ing scraped up many tales maliciously false. Osborne is a misanthropi- 
 cal politician, who cuts with the most corroding pen that ever rot- 
 tened a man's name. James was very negligent in dress; graceful 
 appearances did not come, into his studies. Weldon tells us bow 
 the king was trussed on norseback, and fixed there like a pedlar's pact 
 or a lump of inanimate matter; the truth is, the king had always an 
 infirmity in his legs. Further, we are told that this ridiculous roon^ 
 arch allowed his hat to femain just as it chanced to be placed on his 
 head. Osborne once saw this unlucky king " in a green hunting-dress, 
 with a feather in his cap, and a horn, instead of a sword, by his side ; 
 how suitable to his age, calling, or person, I leave others to judge from 
 his piotHres:" and this he bitterly calls " learing him dressed for po&- 
 terityl" This is the style which passes for history with some readers. 
 Hume observes that "hunting," which was James's- sole recreation, 
 necessary for his health, as a sedentary scholar, " is the cheapest a 
 king can indulge ;" and, indeed, the empty coffers of this monarch 
 afforded no other. , 
 
 These pseudo-histories are alluded to by Arthur 'Wilson as "mon- 
 strous satires against the king's own person, that haunted both court 
 and country," when, in the wantonness of the times, " every little 
 miscarriage, exuberantly branched, so that evil report did often perch 
 on them." Fuller has designated these suspicious scribes as " a gener- 
 ation of the people who, like moths, have lurked under the carpets of 
 the council-table, and even \&e fleas, have leaped into the pillows of 
 the prince's bed-chamber; and, to enhance the reputation of their 
 knowledge, thence derived that of all things which were, or were not, 
 ever done or thought of." — Chiia-eh Eiutory, book z., p. 87. 
 
SCAHTDALOTTS CHRONICLES. 563 
 
 metropolis and their country friends : these "letters chiefly 
 remain in their MS. state.* Great men then employed a 
 scribe who had a talent this way, and sometimes a confi- 
 dential friend, to convey to them the secret history of 
 the times ; and, on the whole, they are composed by a 
 better sort of writers ; for," as they had no other design 
 than to inform their friends of the true state of passing 
 events, they were eager to correct, by subsequent ac- 
 counts the lies of the day they sometitnea sent down. 
 They have preserved some fugitive events useful ill histor- 
 
 ■ ical researches, but their pens are garrulous ; and it re- 
 quires some experience to discover the character of the 
 writers, to be enabled to adopt their opinions and their 
 statements. • Little things were, however, great matters 
 to these diumalists ; much time was spent in learning 
 
 , of those, at court, who had quarrelled, or were on the 
 point ; wh(5 were seen to have bit their HpS, and looked 
 downcast ; who was budding, and whose full-blown flower 
 W'as drooping : then we have the sudden reconcilement 
 a.nd the anticipated fallings out, with a deal of the pour- 
 quoi of the poui'quoi.\ 
 
 * Mr. Lodge's " lUusti^tionB of British History" is an eBivHBot and 
 elegant work of the mmuUa MatoriccB ; as are the more recent volume* 
 of Sir Henry Ellis's -vialuable colleetions. 
 
 •(■ Some specimens of this sort of correspondence of the idleness of the 
 times may amuse. The learned Mede, to his friend Sir Martin Stute- 
 viUe, chronicles a fracas : — " I am told of a great falling out between 
 my Lord Treasurer and my Lord Digby, insomuch that tkey came to 
 pedlar's blood and traitor's blood. It was about some money which my 
 Lord Digby should have had, which my Lord Treasurer tliought too 
 much for the charge of his employment, and said himself could go in 
 as good a fashion for half the sum. But my Lord Digby replies that 
 he could not peddle so well as his lordship." 
 
 A lively genius sports with a fanciful pen in conveying the same 
 kind of intelligence, and so nice in the shades of curiosity, that he can 
 describe a quarrel before it takes place. 
 
 "You know the primum rnobile of our court (Buckingham), by whose 
 motion all the other spheres must move, or else stand still : tie bright 
 
56i CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 Such was this race of gossipers in the environs of a 
 court, where, steeped in a supine lethargy of peace, cor- 
 rupting or corrupted, erery man stood for himself 
 through a reckless scene of expedients and of compro- 
 mises. 
 
 A PICTURE OF THE AGE FROM A MS. OF THE 
 TIME. 
 
 A LOKG reign of peace, which had produced wealth in 
 that age, engendered the extremes of luxury and want. 
 Money traders practised the art of decoying the gallant 
 youths of the day into their nets, and transfoi-ming, in a 
 certain time, the estates of the country gentlemen into 
 skins of parchment, 
 
 Tlie wax continuing hard, the acres melting. » 
 
 MASSINa&B. 
 
 Projectors and monopolists who had obtained patents 
 for licensing all the inns and alehouses — for being the 
 sole vendors of manufactured articles, such as gold lace, 
 tobacco-pipes, starch, soap, &c., were grinding and 
 cheating the people to an extent which was not at first 
 
 Bun of our firmament, at whose splendour or glooming all 9ur mary- 
 golda of the court open or shut. There are in higher spheres as great 
 as he, but none so glorious. But the king is in progress, and we are 
 far from court. Now to hear certainties. It is told me that my Lord 
 of Pembroke and my Lord of Rochester are so far out, as it ,ia almost 
 come to a quarrel; I know not how true this is, hut Sir Thomas Over- 
 bury and my Lord of Pembroke have been long jarring, and therefore 
 the other is litely." 
 
 Among the numerous MS. letters of this kind, I have often ob- 
 served the writer uneasy at the scandal he has seasoned his letter 
 with, and concluding earnestly that his letter, after perusal, should be 
 thrown to the flames. A wish Which appears to have been rarely com- 
 plied with I and this may serve as a hint to some to restrain their 
 tattling pens, if they regard their own peace ; for, on most occasions of 
 this nature, the letters are rather preserved with peculiar care. 
 
A PICTtJBB OF THE AGE. 665 
 
 understood, although the practice had existed in the 
 former reign. The gentry, whose family pride would 
 vie with these nouveaux riches, exhausted themselves in 
 rival profusion ; all crowded to " upstart London," de- 
 serting their country mansions, which were now left to 
 the care of "a poor alms-woman, or a bed-rid beadsman." 
 
 In that day, this abandonment of the ancient country 
 hospitality for the metropolis, and this breaking-up of 
 old family establishments, crowded London with new and 
 distinct races of idlers, or, as they would now be called, 
 unproductive members of society. From a contempo- 
 rary manuscript, one of those spirited remonstrances ad- 
 dressed to the king, which it was probably thought not 
 prudent to publish, I shall draw some extracts, as a for- 
 cible picture of the manners of the age.* Masters of 
 ancient families, to maintain a mere exterior of magnifi- 
 cence in dress and equipage in the metropolis, were 
 really at the same time hiding themselves in penury : 
 they thrust themselves into lodgings, and "five or six 
 knights, or justices of peace," with all their retinue, be- 
 came the inmates of a shopkeeper; yet these gentlemen 
 had once "kept the rusty chimneys of two or three 
 houses smoking, and had been the feeders of twenty or 
 forty serving-men : a single page, with a guarded coat, 
 served their turn now. 
 
 " Every one strives to be a Diogenes in his house and 
 an emperor in the streets ; not oaring if they sleep in a 
 tub, so they may be hurried in a coach ; giving that 
 allowance to horses and mares that formerly maintained 
 houses full of men ; pinching many a belly to paint a 
 few backs, and burying all the treasures of the kingdom 
 into a few citizens' coffers. 
 
 * The MS. is entitled " Balaam's Ass, or a True Disooverie touehing 
 the Murmurs and Feared Discontents of the Times, directed to King 
 James.''— Lansdowne Collection, 209. The writer, throughout, speaks 
 of the king with the highest respect. 
 
566 CHARACTER OF JAMBS THE FIRST. 
 
 " There are now," the writer adds^ " twenty thousand 
 masterless men turned off, who know not this night 
 where to lodge, where to eat to-morrow, and ready to 
 undertake any desperate course." 
 
 Yet there was still a more turbulent and dangerous, 
 race of idlers, in 
 
 " A number of younger brothers, of ancient hpuses, 
 who, nursed up in fulness, pampered in their minority, 
 and left in charge to their elder brothers, who were to 
 be fathers to them, followed them in despair to London, 
 where these untimely-born youths are left so bare, that 
 their whole life's allowance was consumed in one year." 
 
 The same manuscript exhibits a full and spirited pici, 
 ture of manners in this long period of peace. 
 
 " The gentry are like owls, all feathers and no flesh ; 
 all show, and no substance ; all fashion, and no feeding,;, 
 and fit for no service but masks and May-games. Thev 
 citizens have dealt with them as it is said the Indians are 
 dealt with; they have given them counterfeit brooches: 
 and bugle-bracelets for gold and silver ; * pins and peacock 
 
 * Sir Giles Mompesson and Sir James Mitchell tad the monopolies 
 of gold lace, which they sold in a counterfeit state ; and not only 
 cheated the people, but, by a mixture of copper, the ornaments madj^' 
 of it are said to have rotted the flesh. As soon as the grievancs was 
 shown to James, lie expressed his abhorrence of the' pi-aotiee, and' 
 even declared that no person connected with the villanous fraud^ 
 should escape punishment. The brotlier of hia favourite. Bucking-' 
 ham, was known to be one, and with Sir Giles Overreach (as Massin-' 
 ger conceals the name of Mompesson), was compelled to fly the coun-' 
 try. The style of James, in ' his speech, is indeed' different from ' 
 kings' speeches in parliament ; he speaks as indignantly as any indi- 
 vidual who v/as personally aggrieved: "Three patents at this time 
 have been complained of,, and thought great grievances ; my purpose 
 is to strike them all dead, and, that time may not be lost, I will havO^ 
 it done presently. Had these things been complained of to me, 
 before the parliament, I could have done the office of a just kiiig, and 
 have punished then) ; peradv^ntyre mpre than now. ye ijjtend to do. 
 No private person whatsoever, were he ever so dear unto me, shall be 
 
A PIOTURK OF THE AGE. 567 
 
 feathers for lands and tenements ; gilded coaches and 
 outlandish hobby-horses for goodly castles and ancient 
 mansions ; their woods are turned into wardrobes, theiir 
 leases into laces ; and their goods and chattels into 
 guarded coats and gaudy toys. Should your Majesty 
 fly to them for relief, you would fare like those birds 
 that peck at painted fruits ; all outside." The writer 
 then describes the affected penurious habits of the grave 
 citizens, who were then preying on the country gentle- 
 men : — ^" When those big swoln leeches, that have thus 
 sucked them, wear rags, eat roots, speak like jugglers that 
 have reeds in their mouths ; look like spittle-men, espe- 
 cially when your Majesty hath occasion to use them ; 
 their fat lies in their hearts, their substance is buried in 
 their bowels, and he that will have it must first take 
 their lives. Their study is to get, and their chiefest care 
 to conceal; and most from yourself, gracious sir; not a 
 commodity comes from their hand, but you pay a noble 
 in the pound for hooking, which they call forbearing.* 
 They think it lost time if they double not their principal 
 in two years. They have attractive powders to draw 
 these flies into their claws; they will entice men with 
 honey into their hives, and with wax entangle them ; \ 
 
 respected by me by many degrees as the public good ; and I hope, my 
 lords, that ye will do me that right to publish to my people this my 
 heart purposes. Proceed judicially ; spare none,, whore ye find just 
 cause to punisli : but remember that laws have not their eyes in their 
 necks, but in their foreheads." — Rush worth, vol. u, p. 26. 
 
 * The credit which these knavish traders gave their customers, who 
 eojild not conveniently pay their money down, was carried to an exor- 
 bitant charge; since, even in Elizabeth's reign, it was one of the pop- 
 ular grievances brought into Parliameat — it is there called, " A bill 
 against DovMn Payments of Book Debts." One of the country mem- 
 bers, who made a speech cojusisting entirely of proverbs, said, "Pay 
 the reckoning overnight, and you shall not be troubled in the morn- 
 ing." 
 
 f In the life of a, famous usurer of that day, who died worth 
 400,000/., an amazing sum at that period, we find numberless expe- 
 
568 CHABAOTBB OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 they pack tlie cards, and their confederates, the lords, 
 deal, by which means no other men have ever good 
 game. Thfey have in a few years laid up riches for many, 
 and yet can never be content to say — Soul, take thy rest, 
 or hand receive no more ; do no more wrong : but still 
 they labour to join house to house, and land to land. 
 What want they of being kings, but the name? Look- 
 into the shires and counties, where, with their purchased 
 lordships and manors, one of their private letters has 
 equal power with your Majesty's privy seal.* It is better 
 to be one of their hinds, than your Majesty's gentlenian 
 usher ; one of their grooms, than your guards. What 
 care they, if it be called tribute or no, so long, as it 
 comes in termly : or whether their chamber be called 
 Exchequer, or the dens of cheaters, so that the money 
 be left there." 
 
 This crushing usury seemed to them a real calamity ; for 
 although in the present extraordinary age of calculations 
 
 dients and oontriyanoea of the money trader, practised on improvident 
 landholders and careless heirs, to entangle them in his nets. He gen- 
 erally contrived to make the wood pay for , the land, which he called 
 "making the feathers pay for the goose." He never pressed hard for 
 his loans, but fondly compared his bonds " to infants, which battle 
 best by sleeping;" to battle is to be nourished — ^a term still retained 
 in.the battle-book of the university. I have elsewhere preserved the 
 character and habits of the money-dealer in the age of James I. — See 
 "Curiosities of Literature," 11th Edit., p. 228. 
 
 * It is observed, in the same life, that his mortgages, and statutes, 
 and his judgments were so numerous, that his papers would have 
 made a good map of England. A view of the chamber of this usurer 
 is preserved by Massinger, who can only be understood by the modern 
 reader in Mr. Gifford's edition: — 
 
 Here lay ■ 
 
 A manor, bound fast in a skin of parchment; 
 
 Here a sure deed of gift for a market-town, 
 
 If not redeem'd this day, which is not in 
 
 The unthrift's purse; there being scarce one shire 
 
 In Wales or England, where my monies are not 
 
 Lent out at usury, the certain, hook 
 
 To draw in more. MassujOer's (My Madam. 
 
ANECDOTES OF THE MANNERS OF THE AGE. 569 
 
 and artificial -wealth, we can suffer " a dunghill-breed of 
 men," like Mompesson and his contemptible partner of 
 this reign, to accumulate in a rapid period more than a 
 ducal fortune, without any apparent injury to the public 
 welfare, the result was different then ; the legitimate and 
 enlarged principles of commerce were not practised by 
 our citizens in the first era of their prosperity ; their , 
 absorbing avarice rapidly took in all the exhausting prodi- 
 gality of the gentry, who were pushed back on the 
 people to prey in their turn on them ; those who found 
 their own acres disappearing, became enclosers of com- 
 mons ; this is one of the grievances which Massinger 
 notices, while the writer of the " Five Years of King 
 James " tells us that these discontents between the gen- 
 try and the commonality grew out into a petty rebel- 
 lion ; and it appears by Peyton that " divers of the pe^ 
 pie were hanged up." 
 
 ATSTECDOTES OF THE MANNERS OF THE AGE. 
 
 The minute picture of the domestic manners of this 
 age exhibits the results of those extremes of prodigality 
 and avarice which struck observers in that contracted 
 circle which then constituted society. The king's prodi- 
 gal dispensations of honours and titles seem at first to 
 have been political ; for James was a foreigner, and 
 designed to create a nobility, as likewise an inferior 
 order, who might feel a personal attachment for the new 
 monarch ; but the facility by which titles were acquired, 
 was one cause which occasioned so niany to crowd to the 
 metropolis to enjoy their airy honour by a substantial 
 ruin ; knighthood had become so common, that some of 
 the most inf3,mous and criminal characters of this age we 
 
570 CHAEACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 find in that rank.* The young females, driven to neces- 
 sity by the fashionable ostentation of their parents, were 
 brought to the metropolis as to a market; "where," 
 says a contemporary, " they obtained pensions, or some- 
 times marriages, by their beauty." When Gondomar, 
 the Spanish ambassador, passed to his house, the ladies 
 were at their balconies on the watch, to make themselves 
 known to him ; and it appears that every one of those 
 ladies had sold their favours at a dear rate. Among 
 these are some, " who pretending to be wits, as they called 
 them," says Arthur Wilson,f " or had handsome nieces 
 or daughters, drew a great resort to their houses." And 
 it appears that Gondomar, to prevent these conversa- 
 ziones from too freely touching on Spanish politics, 
 sweetened their silence by his presents.J The same 
 
 * A statesman may read witli advantage Sir Edward Walker on 
 " The inconveniences that have attended tlie frequent promotions to 
 Titles, since King James came to the crown." Sir Edward appears 
 not to disapprove of these promotions during the first ten years of his, 
 reign, but "when alliance to a favourite, riches though gotten in. a 
 shop, persons of private estates, and of famihes whose fathers would 
 have thought themselves highly honoured to have been but knights in 
 Queen Elizabeth's time, were advanced, then the fruits began to appear. 
 The greater nobility were undervalued ; the ancient baronage saw 
 inferior families take precedency over them ; nobUity lost its respect, 
 and a parity in conversation was introduced which in English disposi- 
 tions begot contempt ; the king could not employ them all ; some grew 
 envious, some factious, some ingrateful, however obliged, by being ; 
 once denied."^p. 302. 
 
 j One may conjecture, by this expression, that the term of " wits " 
 was then introduced, in the sense we now use it. 
 
 j: Wilson has preserved a characteristic trait of one of the lady wits. 
 When Gondomar oho day, in Drury-lane, was passing Lady Jacob's 
 house, she, exposing herself for a salutation from him, he bowed, but 
 in return she only opened her mouth, gaping on him. This was again 
 repeated the following day, when he sent a gentleman to complain of' 
 her incivility. She replied, that he had purchased some favours of 
 the ladies at a dear rate, and she had a mouth to be stopped as well as 
 others. 
 
ANECDOTES OF THE MANNERS OP THE AGE. 571 
 
 grossness of manners was among the higher females of 
 the age ; -when we see that grave statesman, Sir Dudley 
 Carleton, narrating the adventm-es of a bridal night, and 
 all " the petty sorceries," the romping of the " great ladies, 
 who were made shorter by the skirts," we discover their 
 coarse tastes ; but when we find the king going to the 
 bed of the bride in his nightgown, to give a reveille-matin 
 and remaining a good time in or upon the bed, " Choose 
 which you will believe ;" this bride was not more decent 
 than the ladies who publicly, on their balconies, were 
 soliciting the personal notice of Gondomar. 
 
 This coarseness of manners, which still prevailed in 
 the nation, as it had in the court of Henry VIII. and 
 Elizabeth, could not but influence the familiar style of 
 their humour and conversation. James I., in the Edict 
 on Duels, employs the expression of ovr dearest bedfellow 
 to designate the qvieen ; and there was no indelicacy 
 attached to this singular expression. Much of that silly 
 and obscene correspondence of James with Buckingham, 
 while it adds one more mortifying instance of " the follies 
 of the wise," must be attributed to this cause.* Are not 
 
 * Our wonder and Burmisea have been oftea raised at the strange 
 subscriptions of Buckingham to the king, — " Your dog," and James as 
 ingenuously calling him " dog Steenie." But this was not peculiar to 
 Buckingham; James also called the grave Cecil his "little beagle." 
 The Earl of Worcester, writing to Cecil, who had succeeded in his 
 search after one Bywater, the earl says, " If the IHntfs ieagk can hunt 
 by land as well as he hath done iy water, we will leave capping of 
 Jowler, and cap the beagle." The queen, writing to Buckingham to 
 intercede with the king for Eawleigh's life, addresses Buckingham by 
 " My kind Dog." James appears to have been ilways playing on some 
 whimsical appellative by which he characterised his ministers and 
 favourites, analogous to the notions of a huntsman. Many of our 
 writers, among them Sir Walter Scott, have strangely misconceived 
 these playful appellatives, unconscious of the origin of this familiar 
 humour. The age was used to the coarseness. We did not then 
 eioel all Kurope, as Addison set the model, in the delicacy of humour ; 
 indeed, even so late as Congreve's time, they were discussing its essen- 
 tial distinction from wit. 
 
572 CHARACTER OP JAMBS THE FIRST. 
 
 most of the dramatic works of that day frequently unread- 
 able from this circumstance ? As an historian, it would 
 he my duty to show how incredibly gross were the 
 domestic language and the domestic familiarities of 
 kings, queens, lords, and ladies, which were much like 
 the lowest of our populace. We may felicitate ourselves 
 on having escaped the grossness, without, howerer, 
 extending too far these self-congratulations. 
 
 The men were dissolved in all the indolence of life and 
 its wantonness ; they prided themselves in traducing 
 their own innocence rather than suffer a lady's name to 
 pass unblemished.* The marriage-tie lost its sacredness 
 amid these disorders of social life. The luxurious idlers 
 of that day were polluted with infamous vices ; and 
 Drayton, in the " Mooncalf," has elaborately drawn full- 
 length pictures of the lady and the gentleman of that 
 day, which seem scarcely to have required the darkening 
 tints of satire to be hideous — in one line the Muse de-, 
 scribes " the most prodigious birth " — 
 
 He's too much woman and She's too much man. 
 
 The trades of foppery, in Spanish feshions, suddenly 
 sprung up in this reign, and exhibited new names and 
 new things. Now silk and gold-lace shops first adorned 
 Cheapside, which the oontinuator of Stowe calls " the 
 beauty of London ;" the extraordinary lise in price of 
 these fashionable articles forms a curious contrast with 
 those of the preceding reign. Scarfs, in Elizabeth's time, 
 of thirty shillings value, were now wrought up to as 
 many pounds ; and embroidered waistcoats, which in the 
 queen's reign no workman knew how to make worth 
 ftve pounds, were now so rich and curious as to be cheap* 
 ened at forty. Stowe has recorded a revolution in shoe- 
 
 =* The expression of one of these gallants, as preserved by Wilson, 
 cannot be deountly given, but is more expressive. — p. 147. 
 
ANECDOTES OF THE MANNERS OF THE AGE. ^tS 
 
 buckles, portentously closing in shoe-roses, whicli were 
 puffed k;nots of silk, or of precious embroidery, worn even 
 by men of mean rank, at the cost of more than five 
 pounds, who formerly had worn gilt copper shoe-buckles. 
 
 In the new and ruinous excess of the use of tobacco, 
 ±nany consumed three or four hundred pounds a year 
 James, who perceived the inconveniences of this sudden 
 luxury in the nation, tried to discountenance it, although 
 the purpose went to diminish his own scanty revenue. 
 Nor was this attack on the abuse of tobacco peculiar to 
 his majesty, although he has been so ridiculed for it ; a 
 eontemporary publication has well described the mania 
 and its consequences : " The smoak of fashion hath quite 
 blown away the smoak of hospitalitie, and turned the 
 chimneys of their forefathers into the noses of their 
 children."* The king also reprobated the finical em- 
 barrassments of the new fashions, and seldom wore new 
 clothes. When they brought him a Spanish hat, he flung 
 it away with scorn, swearing he never loved them nor 
 their fashions ; and when they put roses on his shoes, he 
 swore too, " that they should not make him a ruffe-footed 
 dove; a yard of penny ribbon would serve that turn." 
 
 The sudden wealth which seems to have rushed into 
 the nation in this reign of peace, appeared in massy plate 
 and jewels, and in " prodigal maniage-portions, which 
 were grown in fashion among the nobility and gentry, as 
 if the skies had rained plenty." Such are the words of 
 Hacket, in his "Memorial of the Lord-Keeper Williams." 
 JEnormous wealth was often accumulated. An usurer 
 died worth 400,000^. ; Sir Thomas Compton,, a citizen, 
 left, it is said, 800,000^., and his heir was so overcome with 
 this sudden irruption of wealth, that he lost his senses ; 
 and Cranfield, a citizen, became the Earl of Middlesex, 
 
 The continued peace, which produced this rage for • 
 
 * The "Peace-Maker," 1618. 
 
574 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 dress, equipage, and magnificeiice, appeared in all forms 
 of riot and excess ; corruption bred corruption. The in- 
 dustry of the nation was not the commerce of the many, 
 but the arts of money-traders, confined to the suckers of 
 the state ; and the unemployed and dissipated, who were 
 every day increasing the population in the capital, were 
 a daring petulant race, described by a contemporary as 
 " persons of great expense, who, having run themselves 
 into debt, were constrained to run into faction ; and de- 
 fend themselves from the danger of the law."* These 
 appear to have enlisted under some show of privilege 
 among the nobility ; and the metropolis was often shaken 
 by parties, calling themselves Roaring-boys, Bravadoes, 
 Roysters, and Bonaventures.f Such were some of the 
 turbulent children of peace, whose fiery spirits, could 
 they have found their proper vent, had been soldiei's 
 of fortune, as they were younger brothers, distressed 
 often by their own relatives ; and wards ruined by their 
 own guardians ; J all these were clamorous for bold pira- 
 cies on the Spaniards : a visionary island, and a secret 
 mine, would often disturb the dreams of these unemployed 
 youths, with whom it was no uncommon practice to take 
 a purse on the road. Such felt that — 
 
 In this pletity 
 And fat of peace, our young men ne'er were trained 
 To martial discipline, an:d our ships unrigg'd 
 Rot in the harbour. Massinger. 
 
 The idleness which rusts quiet minds effervesces in 
 fiery spirits pent up together ; and the loiterers in the 
 environs of a court, surfeiting with peace, were quick at 
 quarrel. It is remarkable, that in the pacific reign of 
 
 * " Five Tears of King James." Harl. Misc. 
 
 ■f A. Wilson's " Hist, of James I." p. 28. 
 j^ That ancient oppressive institution of the Court of Wards then 
 existed; and Massinger, the great painter of our domestic manners in 
 this reign, has made it the subject of one of his interesting dramas. 
 
ANECDOTES OF THE MANNERS OF THE AGE. 575 
 
 James I. never was so much blood shed in brawls, nor 
 duels so tremendously barbarous. Hume observed this 
 circumstance, and attributes it to "the turn that the 
 romantic chivalry, for which the nation was formerly so 
 renowned, had lately taken." An inference probably 
 drawn from the extraordinary duel between Sir Edward 
 Sackville, afterwards Lord Dorset, and the Lord Bruce.* 
 These two gallant youths had lived as brothers, yet could 
 resolve not to part without destroying each other ; the 
 na,rrative so wonderfully composed by Sackville, S'till 
 makes us shudder at each blow received and given.. 
 Books were published to instruct them by a system of 
 quarrelling, " to teach young gentlemen when they are 
 beforehand and when behindhand ;" thus they incensed 
 and incited those youths of hope and promise, whom 
 Lord Bacon, in his charge on duelling, calls, in the lan- 
 , guage of the poet, AuroroBfiUi, the sons of the morning, 
 ; — ^who often were drowned in their own blood ! But, on 
 a nearer inspection, when we discover the personal ma- 
 lignity of these hasty quarrels, the coarseness of their 
 manners, and the choice of weapons and places in their 
 mode of butchering each other, we must confess that they 
 rarely partake of the spirit of chivalry. One gentleman 
 biting the ear of a Templar, or switching a poltroon 
 lord ; another sending a challenge to fight in a saw-pit ; 
 or to strip to their shirts, to mangle each other, were 
 sanguinary duels, which could only have fermented in 
 the disorders of the times, amid that wanton pampered 
 indolence which made them so petulant and pugnaciouSi 
 Against this evil his Majesty published a voluminous 
 edict, which exhibits many proofs that it was the labour 
 of his own hand, for the same dignity, the same eloquence, 
 the same felicity of illustration, embellish the state- 
 
 * It may be found in the popular pages of the " Guardian ;" there 
 first printed from a MS. in the library of the Harleys. 
 
576 CHARACTER 01? JAilES THE FIRST. 
 
 papers ; * and to remedy it, James, who rarely consented 
 to shed blood, condemned an irascible lord to suffer the 
 ignominy of the gallows. 
 
 But, while extortion and monppoly prevailed among 
 the monied men, and a hollow magnificence among the 
 gentry, bribery had tainted even the lords. All were 
 hurrying on in a stream of venality, dissipation, and 
 want ; and the nation, amid the prosperity of the king- 
 dom in a long reign of peace, was nourishing in its breast 
 the secret seeds of discontent and turbulence. 
 
 From the days of Elizabeth to those of the Charleses, 
 Cabinet transmitted to Cabinet the caution to preserve 
 the kingdom from the evils of an overgrown metropolis. 
 A political hypochondriacism : they imagined the head 
 was becoming too large for the body, drawing to itself . 
 
 * " A publication of his Majestie's edict and seuere censurajagainst 
 private combats and combatants, &c," 1613. It is a volume of about 
 150 pages. As a specimen of the royal style, I transcribe two pas- 
 sages: — 
 
 "The pride of humours, 4he libertie of times, the conniuencie of 
 magistrates, together with a kind of prescription of impunity, hath bred 
 ouer all this Icingdome, not onlj' an opinion among the wealcest,, but a 
 coDStant beleete among many tliat desire to be reputed among the 
 wisest, of a certain freedome loft to all men vpou earth by nature, as 
 their Mrth-right to defend their reputations with their swords, and to 
 take reuenge of any wrong either offered or apprehended, in that 
 measure .which their owne inward passion or aflfection doth suggest, 
 without any further proofe ; so as tlie challenge be sent in a civil 
 manner, though' without leave demanded of the sovereign,'''' ka 
 
 The king employs a bold and poetical metaphor to describe duelling 
 — to turn this hawk into a singing-bird, clip its wings, and cage* it. 
 "By comparing forraino mischiefes with home-bred accidents, it will 
 not be hard to judge into what region this bolde bird of audacious pre- 
 Biimption, in dealing blowes so confidently, will mount, if it bee oBoe 
 let flie, from the breast wherein it lurkes. And therefore it behoveth 
 justice both to keep herstill in her own close cage, with care that she 
 learn neuer any other dittie then Est iene ; but withall, that for pre- 
 uention of the worst that may fall out, wee clippe her wings, tliat they 
 grow not too fast. For according to that of the proverb, M is labow 
 lost to lay nets 'before the eyes of winged fowlss," &o.~p. 13. 
 
ANECDOTES 03? THE MANNERS OF THE AGE. 577 
 
 all tlie moisture of life from the middle and the extremities. 
 A statute against the erection of new buildings was passed 
 by Elizabeth ; and from James to his successors, procla- 
 mations were continually issued to forbid any growth of 
 the city. This singular prohibition may have originated 
 in their dread of infection from the plague, but it cer- 
 tainly became the policy of a weak and timid govern- 
 ment, who dreaded, in the enlargement of the metropolis, 
 the consequent concourse of those they designated as 
 " masterless men," — sedition was as contagious as the 
 plague among the many. But proclamations were not 
 listened to nor read ; houses were continually built, for 
 they were in demand, — and the esquires, with their wives 
 and daughters, hastened to gay or busy London, for a 
 knighthood, a marriage, or a monopoly. The govern- 
 ment at length were driven to the desperate " Order in 
 Council " to pull down all new houses within ten miles of 
 the metropolis — and further, to direct the Attorney- 
 , General to indict all those sojourners in town who had 
 country houses, and mulct them in ruinous fines. The 
 rural gentry were " to abide in their own counties, and 
 by their housekieeping in those parts were to guide and 
 relieve the meaner people according to the ancient usage 
 of the English nation." The Attorney-General, like all 
 great lawyers, looking through the spectacles of his 
 books, was short-sighted to reach to the new causes and 
 the new effects which were passing around. The wisest 
 laws are but foolish when Time, though not the lawyers, 
 has annulled them. The popular sympathy was, how- 
 ever, with the Attorney-General, for it was imagined 
 that the country was utterly ruined and depopulated by 
 the town. 
 
 And so in the view it appeared, and so all the satirists 
 
 chorused ! for in the country the ancient hospitality 
 
 was not kept up ; the crowd of retainers had vanished, 
 
 the rusty chimneys of the mansion-house hardly smoked 
 
 37 
 
578 CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 through a Christmas weet, while in London all was ex- 
 orbitantly prosperous ; masses of treasure were melted 
 down into every object of magnificence. " And is not 
 this wealth drawn from our acres ? " was the outcry of 
 the rural censor. Yet it was clear that the country in 
 no way was impoverished, for the land rose in price ; and 
 if manors sometimes changed their lords, they suffered 
 no depreciation. A sudden wealth was diffused in the 
 nation ; the arts of commerce were first advancing ; the 
 first great ship launched for an Indian voyage, was then 
 named the " Trade's Increase." The town, with its mul- 
 tiplied demands, opened a perpetual market for the coun- 
 try. The money-traders were breeding their boards as 
 the graziers their flocks ; and while the goldsmiths' shops 
 blazed in Cheap, the agriculturists beheld double bar- 
 vests cover the soil. The innumerable books on agricul- 
 ture, published during these twenty years of peace.is an 
 evidence of the improvement of the country — sustained 
 by the growing capitals of the men in trade. In this 
 progress of domestic conveniency to metropolitan luxury, 
 there was a transition of manners; new objects and new 
 interests, and new modes of life, yet in their incipient state. 
 The evils of these luxuriant times were of quick 
 growth ; and as fast as they sprungi the Father of his 
 people encountered them by his proclamations, which, 
 during long intervals of parliamentary recess, were to be 
 enforced as' laws : but they passed away as morning 
 dreams over a happy, but a thoughtless and wanton people. 
 
 JAMES THE FIRST DISCOVERS THE BISORr 
 DERS AND DISCONTENTS OF A PEACE OF 
 MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS. 
 
 The king was himself amazed at the disorders and 
 discontents he at length discovered; and, in one of 
 
DISOKDEBS OP A TWENTY YEARS' PBACB. §79 
 
 his later speeches, has expressed a motimM disap* 
 pointment : — 
 
 " And now, I confess, that when I looked before upon 
 the face of the government, I thought, as every man 
 would have done, that the people were never so happy as 
 in my time ; but even, as at divers times I have looked 
 upon many of my coppices, riding about them, and they 
 appeared, on tlie outside, very thick and well-grown unto 
 me, but, when I turned into the midst of them, I found 
 them all bitten within, and full of pMtis and bare spots; 
 like the apple or pear, fair and smooth without, but when 
 you cleave it asunder, you find it rotten at heart. Even 
 so this kingdom, the external government being as good 
 as ever it was, and I am sure as learned judges as ever it 
 had, and I hope as honest administering justice within it; 
 arid for peace, both at home and abroad, more settled, 
 and longer lasting, than ever any before ; together with as 
 great plenty as ever : so as it may be thought, every 
 man might sit in safety under his owli vine and fig- 
 tree," &c., &c.* 
 
 But while we see this king of peace surrounded by 
 national grievances, and that " this fair coppice was very 
 thick and well-grown," yet loud in murmurs, to what 
 cause are we to attribute them ? Shall we exclaim i^ith 
 ' Catharine Macaulay against "the despotism of James," 
 and " the intoxication of his power ?" — a monarch wlio 
 did not even enforce the proclamations or edicts hie wis- 
 dom dictated; f and, as Hume has observed, while vaunt- 
 ing his prerogative, had not a single regiment of guards 
 to maintain it. Must we agree with Hume, and reproach 
 
 * Bnshworth, vol. i., p. 29 ; Sub anno 1621. . ;. 
 
 f James I. s!aid; " I will never offer to briflgf a ne^v^ eiMtom upon my 
 people without the people's consent ; like a good physician, tell them 
 what is amiss, if they will not concur to aareud it, yet I have discharged 
 my part." Amoiig the difficulties of this king was that of beinga foreigner, 
 and amidst the contending factions of that day tlie " British SolomoB" 
 seems to have been unjustly reproached for his Seottrsh partialities. 
 
580 CHARAOTER OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 the king ynth his indolence and love of amusement — " par- 
 ticularly of hunting ?" * 
 
 THE KING'S PRIVATE LIFE IN HIS OCCA- 
 SIONAL RETIREMENTS. 
 
 The king's occasional retirements to Royston and Newr 
 market have even been surmised to have borne some anal- 
 ogy to the horrid Caprsea of Tiberius ; but a witness has 
 accidentally detailed the king's uniform life in these occa- 
 sional seclusions. James I. withdrew at times from pub- 
 lic life, but not from public affairs ; and htmting, to which 
 he then gave alternate' days, was the cheap amusement 
 and requisite exercise of his sedentary habits : but the 
 chase only occupied a few hours. A part of the day was 
 spent by the king in his private studies : another at his 
 dinners, wherie he had a reader, and was perpetually 
 sending to Cambridge for books of reference : state affairs 
 were transacted at night ; for it was observed, at the time, 
 that his secretaries sat up later at night, in those occa- 
 sional retirements, than when they were at London.f I 
 have noticed, that the state papers were composed by 
 
 * La Boderie, the French Ambassador, complains of the king's fre- 
 quent absences ; but James did not wish too close an intercourse with 
 one who was making a French party about Prince Henry, and whose 
 sole object was to provoke a Spanish war : the king foiled the French . 
 intriguer ; but has incurred his contempt for being " timid and irreso- 
 lute." James's cautious neutrality was no merit in the Frenchman's 
 eye. 
 
 La Boderie resided at our court from 1606 to 1611, and his "Am- 
 bassades," in 5 vols., are interesting in English history. The most 
 satirical accounts of the domestic life of James, especially in his un- 
 guarded hours of boisterous merriment, are foun<3 in the correspondence 
 of the French ambassadors. They studied to flavour their dish, made 
 of spy and gossip, to the taste of their master. Henry IV. never for- 
 gave James for his adherence to Spain and peace, instead of France 
 ^d warlike designs. 
 
 f Hacket's Scrinia Reserata, Part I., p. 2t. 
 
THE KING'S PRIVATE LIFE. 581 
 
 himself; that he ■wrote letters on important occasions with- 
 out consulting any one ; and that he derived little aid 
 from his secretaries. James was probably never indo- 
 lent ; but the uniform life and sedentary habits of literary 
 men usually incur this reproach from those real idlers who 
 bustle in a life of nothingness. While uo one loved 
 more the still-life of peace than this studious monarch, 
 w'hose habits formed an agreeable combination of the con- ' 
 templative and the active life, study and business — no 
 king more zealously tried to keep down the growing 
 abuses of his government, by personally concerning him- 
 self in the protection of the subject.* 
 
 * As evidences of this zeal for reform, I throw into this note some 
 extracts from the MS. letters of contemporaries. — Of the king's inter- 
 ference between the judges of two courts about prdhibitions, Sir Dud- 
 ley Carleton gives this account : — " The king played the best part in 
 collecting arguments on both sides, and concluded that he saw muc}! 
 endeavour to draw water to their several mills ; and advised them to 
 take moderate coarses, whereby the good of the subject might be more 
 respected than their particular jurisdictions. The king sat also at the 
 Admiralty, to look himself into certain disorders of government there; 
 he told the lawyers ' he would leave hunting of hares, and hunt them 
 in their quirks and subtilities, with w;hich the subject had been too long 
 abused.' " — MS. Letter of Sir Dudley Carleton. 
 
 In "Win wood's Memorials of State '' there is a letter from Lord 
 Northampton, who was present at one of these strict examinations of 
 the king ; and his language is warm with admiration: the letter beiiig 
 a private one, can hardly be suspected of court flattery. " His Majesiy 
 hath in person, with thegreatest dexterity of wit and strength of argii- 
 ment that mine ears ever heard, compounded between the parties of 
 the civil and ecclesiastical courts, who begin to comply, by the king's 
 sweet temper, on points that were held to be incompatible." — Wiii- 
 ■ wood's Mem. iii., p. 54. 
 
 In his progresses through the country, if any complained of having 
 received injury from any of the court, the king punished, or had satis- 
 faction made to the wronged, immediately. 
 
582 CHAEACTBR OP JAMBS THE FIRST. 
 
 DISCREPANCIES OF OPINION AMONG THE 
 DECRIERS OP JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 Let us detect, among tte modern decriers of the charac- 
 ter of James I., those contradictory opinions, wh|ch start 
 out in the same page ; for the conviction of truth flashesj 
 on the eyes of those who systematically vilified him, and 
 must often have pained them ; while it embarrassed and 
 cpnfused those, who, being of no party, yet had adopted 
 the popular notions. Even Hume is at variance with 
 himself; for he censures James for his indolence, " which 
 prevented him making any progress in the practice of ■ 
 foreign politics, and diminished that regard which all the 
 neighbouring nations had paid to England during the 
 reign of his predecessor." p. 29. Yet this philosopher 
 observes afterwards, on the military character of Prince 
 Henry, at p. 63, that " had he lived, he had probably pro- 
 moted the glory, perhaps not the felicity, of his people. 
 The unhappy prepossession of men in favour of ambition, 
 &c., engages them into such pursuits as ^^^troy thfiir 
 own peace, and that of the rest of manMndi." This is true 
 philosophy, however politicians may comment, and how- 
 ever the military may command the state. Had Hume,, 
 with all thp sweetness of his temper, been a philosopher 
 on the throne, himself had probably incurred the censure 
 he passed on James I. Another important contradiction 
 in Hume deserves detection. The king, it seems, "boast-. 
 ed of his management of Ireland as hi? masterpiece.". 
 According to the accounts of Sir John I)avies, whose po- 
 litical works are still read, and whom Hume quotes, J ames 
 L "in the space of nine years made greater advances to- 
 wards the reformation of that kingdom, than had been 
 effected in more than four centuries ;" on this Hume adds 
 that the king's, " vanity in this particular >y^s not with- 
 out foundation." Thus in describing that wisest act of 
 
OPINIONS OF THE DECEIERS OF JAMES I. 583, 
 
 a sovereign, the art of humanising his ruder subjects by 
 colonisation, so unfortunate is James, that even his most 
 skilful apologist, influenced by popular prepossessions, em- 
 ploys a degrading epithet — and yet he, who had indulged 
 a sarcasm on the vanity of James, in closing his gen- 
 eral view of his wise administration in Ireland, is carried 
 away by his nobler feelings. — " Such were the arts," ex- 
 claims the historian, " by which James introduced human- 
 ity and justice among a people who had ever been buried 
 in the most profound barbarism. Noble cares ! much su- 
 perior to the vain and criminal glory of conquests." Let 
 us add, that had the genius of James the First been war- 
 like, had he commanded a battle to be fought and a vic- 
 tory to be celebrated, popular historians, the panders of 
 ambition, had adorned their pages with bloody trophies ; 
 but the peace the monarch cultivated ; the wisdom which 
 dictated the plan of civilisation; and the persevering 
 arts which put it into practice — these are the still virtues 
 which give no motion to the spectacle of the historian, 
 and are even forgotten in his pages. 
 
 What were the painful feelings of Catharine Macaulay, 
 in summing up the character of James the First. The 
 king has even extorted from her a confession, that " his 
 conduct in Scotland was unexceptionable," but " despicar 
 ble in his Britannic government." To account for . this 
 seeming change in a man who, from his first to his last 
 day, was always the same, required a more sober his- 
 torian. She tells us also, he affected " a sententious wit ;" 
 but she adds, that it consisted " only of quaint and stale 
 conceits." We need not take the word of Mrs. Macaulay, 
 since we have so much of this " sententious wit " record- 
 ed, of which probably she knew little. Forced to confess 
 that James's education had been " a more learlied one than 
 is usually bestowed on princes," we find how useless it is 
 to educate princes at all ; for this " more learned educa- 
 tion " made this prince " more than comnlbnly deficient 
 
584 CHARACTEE OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 ^n all the points he pretended to have any knowledge 
 of." This incredible result gives no encouragement for a 
 prince, having a Buchanan for his tutor. Smollett, hav- 
 ing compiled the, popular accusations of the " vanity, the 
 prejudices, the littleness of soul," of this abused monarch, 
 surprises one in the same page by discovering enough • 
 good qualities to make something more than a tolerable 
 king. " His reign, though ignoble to himself, was happy 
 to his people, who were enriched by commerce, felt no 
 severe impositions, while they made considerable progress 
 in their liberties." So that, on the whole, the nation ap^ 
 pears not to have had all the reason they have so fully 
 exercised in deriding and vilifying a sovereign, who had 
 made them prosperous at the price of making himself 
 contemptible ! I shall notice another writer, of an amia- 
 ble character, as an evidence of the influence of popular 
 prejudice, and the effect of truth. 
 
 When James went to Denmark to fetch his queen, he 
 passed part of his time among the learned ; but such 
 was his habitual attention in studying the duties of a 
 sovereign, that he closely attended the Danish courts of 
 justice ; and Daines Barrington, in his curious " Obser- 
 vations on the Statutes," mentions, that the king bor- 
 rowed from the Danish code three statutes for the pun- 
 ishment of criminals. But so provocative of sarcasm is 
 the ill-used name of this monarch, that our author could 
 not but shrewdly observe, that James " spent more time 
 in those courts than in attending upon his destined con- 
 sort." Yet this is not true : the king was jovial there, 
 and was as indulgent a husband as he was a father. 
 Osbonie even censures James for once giving marks of 
 Ms uxoriousness ! * Biit while Daines Ba'rrington' de- 
 grades, by unmerited' ridicule, the honourable employ- 
 ment of the "British Solomon," he becomes himself per- 
 
 * See "Curioaities of Literature," vol. iii., p. 334. 
 
opimosrs of the decriers of james i. 585 
 
 plexed at the truth that flashes on his eyes. He ex- 
 presses the most perfect admiration of James the First, 
 whose statutes he declares " deserve much to be enforced ; 
 nor do I find any one which hath the least tendency to 
 extend the prerogative, or abridge the liberties and 
 rights of his subjects." He who came to scoflF remained 
 to prajr. Thxis a lawyer, in exanfining the laws of James 
 the First, concludes by approaching nearer to the truth : 
 the step was a bold one! He says, "i< is at present a 
 sort of fashion to suppose that this king, because he 
 was a pedant, had no real understanding, or merit." 
 Had Daines Barrington been asked for proofs of the 
 pedantry of James the First, he had been still more per- 
 plexed ; but what can be more convincing than a law- 
 yer, on a review of the character of James the First, 
 being struck, as he tells us, by " his desire of being in- 
 structed in the English law, and holding frequent, confer- 
 ences for this purpose with the most eminent lawyers, — 
 as Sir Edward Coke, and others !" , Such was the mon- 
 arch whose character was perpetually i-eproached for in- 
 dolent habits, and for exercising arbitrary power ! Even 
 Mr. Brodie, the vehement adversary of the Stuarts, 
 quotes and admires James's prescient decision on the 
 character of Laud in that remarkable conversation with 
 Buckingham and Prince Charles recorded by Haeket.* 
 
 But let us leave these moderns perpetuating traditional 
 prejudices, and often to the fiftieth echo, still sounding 
 with no voice of its, own, to learn, what the unprejudiced 
 coi).temporaries of James I. thought of the cause of the 
 disorders of thejr age. They were alike struck by the 
 wisdom and the .zpaL of the monarch, and the prevalent 
 discontents of this long reign of peace. At first, says 
 the continuatoFjOf Stowe, all ranks but those "who were 
 settled in piracy," as he designates the cormorants of 
 
 * Brodie'a "history of British Empire," vol. it, pp. 244, 411. 
 
586 CHABAOTBa OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 ■war, and curiously enumerates their classes, " were right 
 joyful of the peace ; hut, in a few years afterwards, all 
 the henefits were generally forgotten, and the happiness 
 of the general peace of the most part contemned." The 
 honest annalist accounts for this unexpected result by 
 the natural reflection — " Such is the world's corruption, 
 and man's vile ingratftude." * My philosophy enables 
 me to advance but little beyond. A learned contempor 
 rary, Sir Symond D'Ewes, in his manuscript diary, 
 notices the death of the monarch, whom he calls " our 
 learned and peaceable sovereign." — " It did not a little 
 amaze me to see all men generally slight and disregard 
 the loss of so mild and gentle a prince, which made me 
 even to feel, that the ensuing times might yet render his 
 loss more sensible, and his memory more dear unto pos- 
 terity." Sir Symond censures the king for not engaging 
 in the German war to support the Palsgrave, and main- 
 tain " the true church of God ;" but deeper politicians 
 have applauded the king for avoiding a war, in which he 
 could not essentially have served the interests of the rash 
 prince who had assumed the title of King of Bohemia.f 
 "Yet," adds Sir Symond, "if we consider his virtues 
 and his learning, his augmenting the liberties of the 
 English, rather than his oppressing them by any un- 
 limited or illegal taxes and corrosions, his death deserved 
 more sorrow and condolement from his subjects than it 
 found."! 
 
 Another contemporary author, "Wilson, has not ill- 
 traced the generations of this continued peace — " peace 
 begot plenty, plenty begot ease and wantonness, and 
 ease and wantonness begot poetry, and poetry swelled 
 
 * Stowe's Annala, p. 845. 
 
 f See Sir Edward Walker's "Hist. Disoouraes," p. 321; and Bar- 
 ringtoa's " Observ. on the Statutes," who says, " For this he deserveS^ 
 the highest praise and commendation from a nation of islanders." 
 
 ^1 Harl. MSS. 646. 
 
SUMMAET 0? HIS CHARACTER. 587 
 
 out into that bulk in this king's time which begot mon- 
 strous satyrs." Such were the lascivious times, which 
 dissolving the ranks of society in a general corruption, 
 created on one part the imaginary and unlimited wants 
 of prosperity ; and on the other produced the riotous 
 children of indolence, and the turbulent adventurers of 
 want. The rank luxuriance of this reign was a steaming 
 hot-bed of peace, which proved to be the seed-plot of 
 that revolution which was reserved for the unfortunate 
 son. 
 
 In the subsequent reign a poet seems to have taken a 
 retrospective view of the age of peace of James I. con- 
 templating on its results in his own disastrous times — 
 
 States that never know 
 A change but in their growth, which a long peace 
 Hath brought unto perfection, are like steel, 
 "Which being neglected will consume itself 
 With its own rust; so doth Security 
 Eat through the hearts of states, while they are sleeping 
 And lulled into false quiet. 
 
 Nabb's Hannibal and Scypio, 
 
 SUMMARY OF HIS CHARACTER. 
 
 Tans the continued peace -of Jamps I. had calamities 
 of its own ! Are we to attribute them to the king ? It 
 has been usual with us, in the solemn expiations of our 
 history, to convert the sovereign into the scape-goat for 
 the people ; the historian, like the priest of the Hebrews, 
 laying his hands on Azazel,* the curses of the multitude 
 are heaped on that devoted head. And thus the histo- 
 rian conveniently solves all ambiguous events. 
 
 The character of James I. is a moral phenomenon, a sin- 
 gularity of a complex nature. We see that we cannot 
 
 * The Hebrew name, which Oalmet translates Bow Emissaire, and 
 we Soape Goat, or rather Escape Goat. 
 
588 CHAEACTEK OF JAMES THE FIRST. 
 
 trust to those modern -writers who have passed their 
 censures upon him, however just may be those very 
 censures ; for when we look narrowly into their represent- 
 ations, as surely we find, perhaps without an exception, 
 that an invective never closes without some unexpected 
 mitigating circumstance, or qualifying abatement. At 
 the moment of inflicting the censure, some recollection 
 in opposition to what is asserted passes in the mind, and 
 to approximate to Truth, they ofier a discrepancy, a self- 
 contradiction. James must always be condemned on a 
 system, while his apology is only allowed the benefit of 
 a parenthesis. 
 
 How it has happened that our luckless crowned phi- 
 losopher has been the common mark at which so many 
 quivers have been emptied, should be quite obvious 
 when so many causes were operating against him. The 
 shifting positions into which he was cast, and the ambi- 
 guity of his character, will unriddle the enigma of his 
 life. Contrarieties cease to be contradictions when 
 operated on by external causes. 
 
 James was two persons in one, frequently opposed to 
 each other. He was an antithesis in human nature — or 
 even a solecism. We possess ample evidence of his 
 shrewdness and of his simplicity; we find the lofty 
 regal style mingled with - his familiar bonhommie. 
 Warm, hasty, and volatile, yet with the most patient 
 zeal to disentangle involved deception ; such gravity in 
 sense, such levity in humour ; such wariness and such in- 
 discretion ; such mystery and such openness — all these 
 must have often thrown his Majesty into some awkward 
 dilemmas. He was a man of abstract speculation in the 
 theory of human affairs ; too witty or too aphoristic, he 
 never seemed at a loss to decide, but too careless, per- 
 haps too infirm, ever to come to a decision, he leaned on 
 Others. He shrunk from the council-table ; he had that 
 distaste for the routine of business which studious seden- 
 
SUMMARY OF HIS CHAEAOTEE. 589 
 
 tary men are too apt to indulge ; and imagined that his 
 health, which he said was the health of the kingdom, 
 depended on the alternate days which he devoted to 
 the chase ; Royston and Theobalds were more delectable 
 than a deputation from the Commons, or the Court at 
 Whitehall. 
 
 It has not always been arbitrary power which has 
 forced the people in the dread circle of their fate, sedi- 
 tions, rebellions, and civil wars ; nor always oppressive 
 taxation which has given rise to public grievances. 
 Such were not the crimes of James the First. Amid 
 the full blessings of peace, we find how the people are 
 prone to corrupt themselves, and how a philosopher on 
 the throne, the father of his people, may live without 
 exciting gratitude, and- die without inspiring regret — ■ 
 xmregarded, unremembered ! 
 
Ilf DEX. 
 
 Abebnetht's opinion of enthusiasm, 
 195. 
 
 ABftTRAOTioiT of mind in great men, 
 r- 1T9-188. 
 
 Actors, traits of character in great, 
 185. 
 
 AnEiAif VI., Pope, persecutes literary 
 men, 83. 
 
 .Esthetic critics^ 868. 
 
 Akensidb on the nature of genius, 47. 
 
 Alpikei, childhood of, 50; looelinesB of 
 his' character, 182; excited hy Flu- 
 tarch''B works, 190 
 
 As&BLo, MicnAEL, WTtfSttates Datvfee, 8&,- 
 his ideas of intellectnal labour, 118; 
 his reason for a solirjiry life, 151 ; his 
 picture of battle of Pisa destroyed by 
 Bandinelli, 211 ; his elevated char- 
 acter^ 881; his letter to Vasari de- 
 scribing the death of his servant, 485. 
 
 Antipathies of men of genius, 214-218. 
 
 Anxiety of genius, 104 ; of authors and 
 artists over their labours. 112-122. 
 
 Aristophanes, popularised by a false 
 preface, 875, 
 
 Art Friendships, 276-2T8, 
 
 Aktibts, *• Studies," or first thoughts, 
 176; their mutual jealousies, 30&-212. 
 
 Autobiography, its interest, 885. 
 
 Baeet the painter, his love of ancient 
 literature, 88; his general enthusiasm, 
 86; his rude eloquence, 146. 
 
 Baillet and his catalogue, 458. 
 
 Bbattie describes the powerful effect 
 on himself of metaphysical study, 197. 
 
 BiECH, Dr., and >^ Robertson the Histo- 
 rian, 445-455. 
 
 Boccaocio's friendship for Petrarch, 
 
 Book Collkctoeb, 299-304. 
 
 BooKBELLBES, the tost of publlc opinion, 
 258. 
 
 Bosius, his researches in the Eoman 
 catacombs, 194. 
 
 BoTLB on the disposition of childhood, 
 49 ; his advertisf ment agninst visitors, 
 ft.,' 154; his idea of a literary retreat, 
 249. 
 
 Bruce, the traveller, disbelieved, 110. 
 
 BuFFON gives a reason for his fame, 
 127. 
 
 Buonaparte revives old military tac- 
 tics, 84a 
 
 BtrRN8''s diary of the heart, 100. 
 Burton, his constitutional melancholy, 
 
 290.' 
 BuNYAN a aelf-taup!ht genius, 86r 
 Bykon''8 loneliness of feeling, «., 188. 
 
 Calumny frequently attacks genius, 
 246. 
 
 Cantenao and his autobioffraphy, 886. 
 
 Caitaoci, the, their uofoi-tunate jeal^ 
 ousies, 210. 
 
 Cabtagno murders a rival artist, 211. 
 
 Charles V., friendship for Titian, 832; 
 
 ■ EobertStm^s Iffef of, 446'. 
 
 CiiATKLKT, Madame dp, a female philoso- 
 pher and IHend of Ttiltatre, 13ft 
 
 Chatham, Earl of, his coifetancy of 
 study, 182. 
 
 Chewirr a literary frntricide. !380. . -r 
 
 Cicero on youihml influence, 50. 
 
 Clauetcdon, his love of retirement, 153, 
 
 CoAOnBB, their first invention, 467. 
 
 Coal, its first use as fuel, 471. 
 
 Coma Vigil, a disease produced by 
 study, 198. 
 
 Composition, its toils, 112-113. 
 
 Contemporary criticism, frequently un- 
 just, 105. 
 
 Conversations of men of genius, 186- 
 149 ; those who converse well seldom, 
 write well, 143. 
 
 CoTiN, Abb6, troubled by wealth, 249. 
 
 Ceacherode, Rev. C M., his collections 
 of art and literature, «., 26. 
 
 Criticism not always just, 92-106. 
 
 CURRiE, his idea of the power of genius, 
 42. 
 
 Cuvike's discoveries in natural history, 
 194. 
 
 Dante, his great abstraction of mind, 
 
 180. 
 Deaths of literary men, 819. 
 Depreciation, theory of, 214. 
 Diaries, their Value, 165. 
 Disease induced by severe study, 197. 
 DoMBNicniNo poisoned by rivals, 211. 
 Domestic Novelties at first condemned. 
 
 462-474. ^ 
 
 Domestic life of literary men, 281-247, 
 Dreams of eminent men, 171-173. 
 Drouais an enthusiastic painter, 205. 
 
 England and its tastes, 346. 
 
692 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Pratties of great men, 196. 
 Peeoibuses, 411-415. 
 Predibposition of the mind, 160 
 Pkefaces, their interest, 878; their 
 
 occasional falsetmod, 874; vanity of 
 
 authors in, 376 ; idle apologies in, 877 ; 
 
 Dryden's interesting, 378. 
 Prejudices, literai'y, 218-216. 
 Public Taste formed by public writers, 
 
 S51. 
 
 Eaoine, sensibility of, 116; 424-482. 
 
 Rambouillet, Hotel de, 411-413. 
 
 KEAniNG analyzed, 888-894. 
 
 Becluse manners in great authors, 135- 
 186 
 
 Eelics of men of genius, 835-338. 
 
 Remuneration of literature, 257-259. 
 
 Kestdenceb of literary men, 835-588. 
 
 Reynolds, Sir J., his "automatic sys- 
 tem," 42; discovers its inconsistencies, 
 44. 
 
 Ridicule the terror of genius, ISO. 
 
 EoBERTbON the histoi-iiin, 448-455. 
 
 Roland, Madame, anecdote of the power 
 of poetry on, 189. 
 
 RoHNET, his anxiety over his picture 
 of the Tempest, 114. 
 
 EouBBEAu's expedient to endure society, 
 103; his domesticlnfelicity, 284. 
 
 Royal Society, attacks on, n., 27. 
 
 BuBENS* transcripts of the poets, 36. 
 
 Sandwich, Lord, his first Idea of a 
 
 stratagem at sea, 178. 
 SouDEiiY, Mademoiselle, 412. 
 Senbitivenebb of genius, 101-108; 109- 
 
 110; 187-189. 
 Self-immolation of genius to labour, 
 
 203. 
 Self-praise of genius, 217-227. 
 Servants, a dissertation on, 474-486. 
 SuEE, Sir M. A., relations of poetry and 
 
 painting, to., 37. 
 Shbnstonk, his early love, 264. 
 SiDOONS, Mrs., anecdote of, 185, 
 Sinoleni:bs cn^ genius, 322-325. 
 Society, artificial, an injury to genius, 
 
 124. 
 Solitude loved by men of genius, 64-60 : 
 
 149-157. 
 Steam first discovered, 180. 
 SiERNE, anecdotes of^ 432-44S, 
 
 Studies of advanced life, 817-820. 
 Style and%.s peculiarities, 860-385. 
 Susceptibility of men of genius, 226- 
 
 229. 
 Suggestions of one mind perfected by 
 
 another, 860-861. 
 
 Tasso uneasy in his labours, 117. 
 
 Taylor, Br." Bruok, his torpid melan- 
 choly, 233. 
 
 Temple, Sir W.. his love of gardens, 870. 
 
 Thf.obktigal history, 445. 
 
 Thomson, his sensitiveness to grand 
 poetry, 191; irritability over false 
 criticisms, 92. 
 
 Tobacco, its introduction into England, 
 470. 
 
 Toothpicks, origin of, 465. 
 
 TowNLEY Gallery of Sculpture, «.., 26. 
 
 Troubadours, their infiuence, 873. 
 
 TTmbeellab, their history, 466. 
 Utilitakianism and its narrow view of 
 
 literature, 28. 
 Univeksahty of genius, 820. 
 
 Van Praun refuses to part with his 
 
 collection to an emperor, 302 
 Vebket sketches in a storm, 192. 
 Vers de Socif.tb, 401-404. 
 ViNDicTivBNEsa of genlus, 227-280. 
 Visionaries of genius, 398. ^' 
 Visitors disliked by literary men, 153- 
 
 154. 
 Voltaire, anecdote of his visit to a 
 
 country house, 130; Ms universal 
 
 genius, 822. 
 
 Walpolb's, Horace, opinion of Gray, 
 
 125 ; of Burke, 126. 
 
 ■Watson neglects research in his pro- 
 fessorship, 30. 
 
 Werner's discoveries in science, 194. 
 
 W iLKES desirous of literary glory, 81. 
 
 Wit sometimes mechanical, 170. 
 
 Wives of literary men, 267-275. 
 
 Works intended, but not executed, 166. 
 
 Wood, Anthony, sacrifices all to study, 
 204. 
 
 ToTTNG, the poet, his want of sympathy, 
 
 245. 
 Youth of great men, 62-78. 
 
 THE END,