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Title: Literary Character of Men of Genius

Author: Isaac Disraeli

Editor: Earl of Beaconsfield Benjamin Disraeli

Release date: May 31, 2005 [eBook #15960]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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Editorial note: Due to limitations in rendering some print characters,
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LITERARY CHARACTER OF MEN OF GENIUS

Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions

by

ISAAC DISRAELI

A New Edition
Edited by His Son
THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD.

London:
Frederick Warne and Co.,
Bedford Street, Strand.
London:
Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., Printers, Whitefriars.

1850







PREFACE.


The following Preface is of interest for the expression of the author's
own view of these works.

This volume comprises my writings on subjects chiefly of our vernacular
literature. Now collected together, they offer an unity of design, and
afford to the general reader and to the student of classical antiquity
some initiation into our national Literature. It is presumed also, that
they present materials for thinking not solely on literary topics; authors
and books are not alone here treated of,--a comprehensive view of human
nature necessarily enters into the subject from the diversity of the
characters portrayed, through the gradations of their faculties, the
influence of their tastes, and those incidents of their lives prompted by
their fortunes or their passions. This present volume, with its brother
"CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE," 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 LITERARY CHARACTER has been an old favourite with many of my
contemporaries departed or now living, who have found it respond to their
own emotions.

THE MISCELLANIES are literary amenities, should they be found to deserve
the title, constructed on that principle early adopted by me, of
interspersing facts with speculation.

THE INQUIRY INTO THE LITERARY AND POLITICAL CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST
has surely corrected some general misconceptions, 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. The subject
presented an occasion to exhibit a minute picture of that age of
transition in our national history.

The titles of CALAMITIES OF AUTHORS and QUARRELS OF AUTHORS do not wholly
designate the works, which include a considerable portion of literary
history.

Public favour has encouraged the republication of these various works,
which often referred to, have long been difficult to procure. 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 Calamities of Authors falls to my lot, the delicate
organ of vision with me has suffered a singular disorder,[A]--a disorder
which no oculist by his touch can heal, and no physician by his experience
can expound; so much remains concerning the frame of man unrevealed to
man!

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 circuit before me. The "strucken deer" has the
sad privilege to weep when he lies down, perhaps no more to course amid
those far-distant woods where once he sought to range.

[Footnote A: I record my literary calamity as a warning to my sedentary
brothers. When my eyes dwell on any object, or whenever they are closed,
there appear on a bluish film a number of mathematical squares, which are
the reflection of the fine network of the retina, succeeded by blotches
which subside into printed characters, apparently 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 remarkable that
the usual power of the eye is not injured or diminished for distant
objects, while those near are clouded over.]

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 HER 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.





CONTENTS.
                                                                     PAGE

INTRODUCTION                                                           3


CHAPTER I.

Of literary characters, and of the lovers of literature and art.      11


CHAPTER II.

Of the adversaries of literary men among themselves.--Matter-of-fact
men, and men of wit.--The political economists.--Of those who
abandon their studies.--Men in office.--The arbiters of public
opinion.--Those who treat the pursuits of literature with levity.     14


CHAPTER III.

Of artists, in the history of men of literary genius.--Their habits
and pursuits analogous.--The nature of their genius is similar in
their distinct works.--Shown by their parallel areas, and by a
common end pursued by both.                                           20


CHAPTER IV.

Of natural genius.--Minds constitutionally different cannot have an
equal aptitude.--Genius not the result of habit and education.--
Originates in peculiar qualities of the mind.--The predisposition
of genius.--A substitution for the white paper of Locke.              24


CHAPTER V.

Youth of genius.--Its first impulses may be illustrated by its
subsequent 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.--Facts of the
decisive character of genius.                                         31


CHAPTER VI.

The first studies.--The self-educated are marked by stubborn
peculiarities.--Their errors.--Their improvement from the neglect
or contempt they incur.--The history of self-education in Moses
Mendelssohn.--Friends usually prejudicial in the youth of genius.
--A remarkable interview between Petrarch in his first studies,
and his literary adviser.--Exhortation.                               55


CHAPTER VII.

Of the irritability of genius.--Genius in society often in a state
of suffering.--Equality 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.                                          69


CHAPTER VIII.

The spirit of literature and the spirit of society.--The inventors.
--Society offers seduction and not reward to men of genius.--The
notions of persons of fashion of men of genius.--The habitudes of
the man of genius distinct from those of the man of society.--
Study, meditation, and enthusiasm, the progress of genius.--The
disagreement between the men of the world and the literary
character.                                                            89


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.                                                  99


CHAPTER X.

Literary solitude.--Its necessity.--Its pleasures.--Of visitors
by profession.--Its inconveniences.                                  109


CHAPTER XI.

The meditations of Genius.--A work on the Art of Meditation not yet
produced.--Predisposing the mind.--Imagination awakens imagination.
--Generating 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 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
meditation the first state of existence in genius.                   116


CHAPTER XII.

The enthusiasm of genius.--A state of mind resembling a waking
dream distinct from reverie.--The ideal presence distinguished
from the real presence.--The senses are really affected in the
ideal world, proved by a variety of instances.--Of the rapture
or sensation of deep study in art, 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-immolations.                      136


CHAPTER XIII.

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 sufferer without its malignancy.                                 154


CHAPTER XIV.

Want of mutual esteem among men of genius often originates in
a deficiency of analogous ideas.--It is not always envy or
jealousy which induces men of genius to undervalue each other.       159


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.                             162


CHAPTER XVI.

The domestic life of genius.--Defects 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 neglect of those around them.
--Often accused of imaginary crimes.                                 173


CHAPTER XVII.

The poverty of literary men.--Poverty, a relative quality.--Of
the poverty of literary men in what degree desirable.--Extreme
poverty.--Task-work.--Of gratuitous works.--A project to provide
against the worst state of poverty among literary men.               186


CHAPTER XVIII.

The matrimonial state of literature.--Matrimony said not to be
well-suited to the domestic life of genius.--Celibacy a concealed
cause of the early querulousness 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.                     198


CHAPTER XIX.

Literary friendships.--In early life.--Different from those of
men of the world.--They suffer in 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.         209


CHAPTER XX.

The 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 appearances in the history of
genius.--Why the character of the man may be opposite to that
of his writings.                                                     217


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 Peiresc.--
Their utility to authors and artists.                                226


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.                    238


CHAPTER XXIII.

Universality 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.                          244


CHAPTER XXIV.

Literature an avenue to glory.--An intellectual nobility not
chimerical, but created by public opinion.--Literary honours
of various nations.--Local associations with the memory of the
man of genius.                                                       248


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 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 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 authors.--The
immortality of thought.--The family of genius illustrated by
their genealogy.                                                     258



LITERARY MISCELLANIES.


Miscellanists                                                        281

Prefaces                                                             286

Style                                                                291

Goldsmith and Johnson                                                294

Self-characters                                                      295

On reading                                                           298

On habituating ourselves to an individual pursuit                    302

On novelty in literature                                             305

Vers de Société                                                      308

The genius of Molière                                                310

The sensibility of Racine                                            325

Of Sterne                                                            332

Hume, Robertson, and Birch                                           340

Of voluminous works incomplete by the deaths of the authors          350

Of domestic novelties at first condemned                             355

Domesticity; or a dissertation on servants                           364

Printed letters in the vernacular idiom                              375



CHARACTER OF JAMES THE FIRST.


Advertisement                                                        383

Of the first modern assailants of the character of
James I., Burnet, Bolingbroke and Pope, Harris, Macaulay,
and Walpole                                                          386

His pedantry                                                         388

His polemical studies                                                389

--how these were political                                           392

The Hampton Court conference                                         393

Of some of his writings                                              398

Popular superstitions of the age                                     400

The King's habits of life those of a man of letters                  402

Of the facility and copiousness of his composition                   404

Of his eloquence                                                     405

Of his wit                                                           406

Specimens of his humour, and observations on human life              407

Some evidences of his sagacity in the discovery of truth             410

Of his "Basilicon Doron"                                             413

Of his idea of a tyrant and a king                                   414

Advice to Prince Henry in the choice of his servants
and associates                                                       415

Describes the Revolutionists of his time                             416

Of the nobility of Scotland                                          417

Of colonising                                                      _ib._

Of merchants                                                         418

Regulations for the prince's manners and habits                    _ib._

Of his idea of the royal prerogative                                 421

The lawyers' idea of the same                                      _ib._

Of his elevated conception of the kingly character                   425

His design in issuing "The Book of Sports" for the Sabbath-day       426

The Sabbatarian controversy                                          428

The motives of his aversion to war                                   430

James acknowledges his dependence on the Commons; their conduct      431

Of certain scandalous chronicles                                     434

A picture of the age from a manuscript of the times                  437

Anecdotes of the manners of the age                                  441

James I. discovers the disorders and discontents of a peace
of more than twenty years                                            449

The King's private life in his occasional retirements                450

A detection of the discrepancies of opinion among the
decriers of James I                                                  451

Summary of his character                                             455





TO

ROBERT SOUTHEY, LL.D.,

&c. &c. &c.


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 participate; for I am addressing him, whose
earliest effusions attracted my regard, near half a century past; and
during that awful interval of time--for fifty years is a trial of life of
whatever may be good in us--you have multiplied your talents, and have
never lost a virtue.

When I turn from the uninterrupted studies of your domestic solitude to
our metropolitan authors, the contrast, if not encouraging, is at least
extraordinary. You are not unaware that the revolutions of Society have
operated on our literature, and that new classes of readers have called
forth new classes of writers. The causes and the consequences of the
present state of this fugitive literature might form an inquiry which
would include some of the important topics which concern the PUBLIC MIND,
--but an inquiry which might be invidious shall not disturb a page
consecrated to the record of excellence. They who draw their inspiration
from the hour must not, however, complain if with that hour they pass
away.

I. DISRAELI.




INTRODUCTION.



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 conceived
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 former trial, and confirmed a former truth. By
the great philosophical principle of induction, inferences 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 in
our own breast.

It is not to be inferred from 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, but varies from himself in the different stages of
human life. 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 disorders, which
arise from the same temperament and sympathies, and are the necessary
consequence of occupying the 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
feelings 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 with more 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 different 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 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 regulate the passions, to ascertain the privileges of man,
--such have ever been, and such ever ought to be, the labours of AUTHORS!
Whatever we enjoy of political and private happiness, our most necessary
knowledge as well as our most refined pleasures, are alike owing to this
class of men; and of these, some for glory, and often from benevolence,
have shut themselves out from the very beings whom they love, and for whom
they labour.

Upwards of forty years have elapsed since, composed in a distant county,
and printed at a provincial press, I published "An Essay on the Manners
and Genius of the Literary Character." To my own habitual and inherent
defects were superadded those of my 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
obtained celebrity. They imagined that their attachment 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 which had formerly belonged to the great poetical genius of our
times; and the singular fact, that it had been more than once read by him,
and twice in two subsequent years at Athens, in 1810 and 1811, instantly
convinced me that the volume deserved my renewed attention.

It was with these feelings that I was again strongly attracted to a
subject from which, indeed, during the course of a studious life, it
had never been long diverted. The consequence of my labours was the
publication, in 1818, of an octavo volume, under 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 Lord
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 noble 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 different 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
kindness 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 exception 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]

[Footnote A: As everything connected with the reading of a mind like Lord
BYRON'S interesting to the philosophical inquirer, this note may now be
preserved. On 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
anything, little thinking that those observations would be betrayed to the
author, whose abilities I have always respected, and whose works in
general I have read oftener than perhaps those of any English author
whatever, except such as treat of Turkey."]

Soon after the publication of this third edition, I received
the following letter from his lordship:--


_"Montenero, Villa Dupuy, near Leghorn, June 10, 1822._

"DEAR SIR,--If you will permit me to call you so,--I had some time ago
taken up my pen at Pisa, to thank you for the present of your new edition
of the 'Literary Character,' which has often been 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 officer, and to treat like a gentleman. He turned out to be
neither,--like many other with medals, and in uniform; but he paid for his
brutality with a severe and dangerous wound, inflicted by nobody knows
whom, for, of three suspected, and two arrested, they have been able to
identify neither; which is strange, since he was wounded in the presence
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 had I known 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 so 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 the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, have
sanctioned 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 seem, 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, nevertheless, 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
in 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 Common-place Book, by
my friend Lord Clare, containing a few things, which may perhaps aid his
publication 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 (_if_ 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 echo; 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 Review_, have risen up against me, and my later
publications. Such is Truth! 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 difficult to
irritate. But I am making a dissertation, instead of writing a letter. I
write to you from the Villa Dupuy, near Leghorn, with the islands of Elba
and Corsica visible from my balcony, and my old friend the Mediterranean
rolling blue at my feet. As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for
Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions, and resist or
endure those of others.

"I have the honour to be, truly,

"Your obliged and faithful servant,

"NOEL BYRON.

"To I. D'Israeli, 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 BURKE 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."




LITERARY CHARACTER.



CHAPTER I.

Of Literary Characters, and of the Lovers of Literature and Art.


Diffused 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 Frenchman 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, Molière, and Cervantes--

  Contemporains de tous les hommes,
  Et citoyens de tous les lieux.

A khan of Tartary admired the wit of Molière, and discovered the Tartuffe
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 even among the Turks and the
Tartars. We see the Italian Pignotti referring to the opinion of an
English critic, Lord Bolingbroke, 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 literature 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 perceived
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 community 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 will
ever be a brotherhood where there is a father-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, by _poverty_ depress'd;

not yet conscious that he himself was devoting his days to cast the minds
of his contemporaries and of the succeeding 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 LITERARY CHARACTER 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 talents and tempers, and the remoteness of
times and places, the literary character has ever preserved among its
followers the most striking family resemblance. The passion for study, the
delight in books, the desire of solitude and celebrity, the obstructions
of human life, the character 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 PLINY as by PETRARCH and
ERASMUS, and as they have been by HUME and GIBBON. And this similarity,
too, may equally be remarked with respect to that noble passion 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.[A] We trace the feelings of our literary
contemporaries in 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 knowledge and those who preserve
unbroken the vast chain of human acquisitions. The one have stamped the
images of their minds on their works, and the others have preserved the
circulation of this intellectual coinage, this

                       --Gold of the dead,
Which Time does still disperse, but not devour.

[Footnote A: The Rev. C.M. Cracherode bequeathed at his death, in 1799, to
the British Museum, the large collection of literature, art, and virtu he
had employed an industrious life in collecting. His books numbered nearly
4500 volumes, many of great rarity and value. His drawings, many by early
Italian masters, and all rare or curious, were deposited 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 classic sculpture
was purchased of his executors by Government for 28,200_l_. 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 Sir William
Hamilton, Gavin Hamilton, and other active collectors; and was the friend
and correspondent of D'Haucarville and Winckelmann.--ED.]




CHAPTER II.

Of the Adversaries of Literary Men among themselves.--Matter-of-fact
Men, and Men of Wit.--The Political Economist.--Of those who abandon
their studies.--Men in office.--The arbiters of public opinion.--Those
who treat the pursuits of literature with levity.


The pursuits of literature have been openly or insidiously 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.[A]

Matter-of-fact men, or men of knowledge, and men of wit and taste, were
long inimical to each other's pursuits.[B] The Royal Society in its origin
could hardly support itself against the ludicrous attacks of literary
men,[C] and the Antiquarian Society has afforded them amusement.[D] Such
partial views have ceased to contract the understanding. Science yields a
new substance to literature; literature combines new associations for the
votaries of knowledge. There is no subject in nature, and in the history
of man, which will not associate with our feelings and our curiosity,
whenever genius extends its awakening 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.

[Footnote A: 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 in the literary republic, its numerical
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.]

[Footnote B: The cause is developed in the chapter on "Want of Mutual
Esteem."]

[Footnote C: 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 nihil nisi pulices, pediculos--et
se ipsos_;"--nothing they admire but fleas, lice, and themselves! The
illustrious SLOANE endured a long persecution from the bantering humour of
Dr. KING. One of the most amusing declaimers against what he calls _les
Sciences des faux Sçavans_ 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
in _false studies_, is, that they have attached the _idea of learned_
where they should not." Astronomy, antiquarianism, history, ancient
poetry, and natural history, are all mowed down by his metaphysical
scythe. When we become acquainted with the _idea_ Father Malebranche
attaches to the term _learned_, we understand him--and we smile.]

[Footnote D: See the chapter on "Puck the Commentator," in the
"Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii.; also p. 304 of the same volume.]

A new race of jargonists, the barbarous metaphysicians 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 intellectual tasks of
the library and the studio by "the demand 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
some other important characters, are forced down into the class "of
buffoons, singers, opera-dancers, &c." In a system of political economy it
has been discovered that "that _unprosperous race_ of men, called _men of
letters_, must _necessarily_ occupy their present _forlorn state_ in
society much as formerly, when a scholar and a beggar seem to have been
terms very nearly synonymous."[A] 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 wharf, or as he spins in the
factory; 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 consumed in the development of thought and the gradual
accessions 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
WORLD!" The prosperity and the happiness of a people include something
more evident and more permanent than "the Wealth of a Nation."[B]

[Footnote A: "Wealth of Nations," i. 182.]

[Footnote B: Since this murmur has been uttered against the degrading
views of some of those theorists, it afforded me pleasure to observe that
Mr. Malthus has fully sanctioned its justness. On this head, at least, Mr.
Malthus 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 delight communicated by SHAKSPEAKE
and MILTON, by the _price_ 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 hence he acknowledges,
that "_some unproductive labour is of much more use and importance_ than
productive labour, but is incapable 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." They
would have demonstrated to the learned Grecian, that this was just as it
ought 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."]

There is a more formidable class of men of genius who are heartless to the
interests of literature. Like CORNELIUS 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 judgments. But, with others of this class,
study has usually served as the instrument, not as the object, of their
ascent; it was the ladder which they once climbed, but it was not the
eastern star which guided and inspired. Such literary characters were
WARBURTON,[A] WATSON, and WILKES, who abandoned their studies when their
studies had served a purpose.

[Footnote A: For a full disquisition of the character and career of
Warburton, see the essay in "Quarrels of Authors."]

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 adopted, that the 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
expressed 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 character 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 when he
cherished the aspirations of a votary. Once he desired Lloyd to announce
the edition of Churchill, 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 majesty 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 adventurer'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, who has formed no work of genius; this
bold advocate for popular freedom, who sunk his patriotism in the
chamberlainship; was indeed desirous of leaving behind him some trace of
the life of an _escroc_ in a piece of autobiography, which, for the
benefit of the world, has been thrown to the flames.

Men who have ascended into office through its gradations, 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 despotism 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, afterwards persecuted literary men, and, say the Italians,
dreaded lest his brothers might shake the Pontificate itself.[A]

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 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.[B] Scorn, sarcasm, and invective, the
egotism of the vain, and the irascibility 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.[C]

[Footnote A: It has been suspected that Adrian VI. has been calumniated,
for that this pontiff was only too sudden to begin the reform he
meditated. But Adrian VI. 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 _cui bono_ race, a branch of our political
economists. When they showed him the Laocoön, Adrian silenced their
raptures by the frigid observation, that all such things were _idola
antiquorum_: and ridiculed the _amena letteratura_ till every man of
genius retreated from his court. Had Adrian's reign extended beyond 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.]

[Footnote B: Listen to a confession and a recantation of an illustrious
sinner; the Coryphæus of the amusing and new-found art, or artifice, of
modern criticism. In the character of BURNS, the Edinburgh Reviewer, with
his peculiar felicity of manner, attacked 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 indifference even for their own
works, generously avowed that, "a certain tone of exaggeration is
incidental _we 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 our sentiments_: when a little _controversial warmth_ is
added to a little _love of effect_, an excess of colouring 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! 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 of 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 afflicted, and we are protected while we
are degraded.]

[Footnote C: _Nouer l'aiguillette_, of which the extraordinary effect is
described by Montaigne, is an Oriental custom still practised.--_Mr.
Hobhouse's Journey through Albania_, p. 528.]

That spirit of levity which would shake the columns of society, by
detracting from or burlesquing the elevating principles which have
produced so many illustrious men, has recently attempted to reduce the
labours of literature to a mere curious amusement: a finished composition
is likened to a skilful game of billiards, or a piece of music finely
executed; and curious researches, to charades and other insignificant
puzzles. With such, an author is an idler who will not be idle, amusing or
fatiguing others who are completely so. The result of a work of genius
is contracted to the art of writing; but this art is only its last
perfection. Inspiration is drawn from a deeper source; enthusiasm is
diffused through contagious pages; and without these movements of the
soul, how poor and artificial a thing is that sparkling composition which
flashes with the cold vibrations of mere art or artifice! 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 consequence, however important or successful." A sort of catholic
doctrine, to mortify an author into a saint, extinguishing the glorious
appetite of fame by one Lent all the year, and self-flagellation every
day! BUFFON and GIBBON, VOLTAIRE and POPE,[A] who gave to literature
all the cares, the industry, and the glory of their lives, assuredly
were too "sensible to their celebrity, and deemed their pursuits of
much consequence," particularly when "important and successful." The
self-possession of great authors sustains their own genius by a sense of
their own glory.

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

[Footnote A: The claims of Pope to the title of a great poet were denied
in the days of Byron; and occasioned 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.]




CHAPTER III.

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


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

               Let the artist share
The palm; he shares the peril, and dejected
Faints o'er the labour unapproved--alas!
Despair and genius!--

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

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

The poet and the painter are only truly great by the mutual influences of
their studies, and the jealousy of glory has only produced an idle
contest. This old family-quarrel for precedence was renewed by our
estimable President, in his brilliant "Rhymes on Art;" where he maintains
that "the narrative of an action is not comparable to the action itself
before the eyes;" while the enthusiast BARRY considers painting "as poetry
realised."[B] This error of genius, perhaps first caught from Richardson's
bewildering pages, was strengthened by the extravagant principle adopted
by Darwin, who, to exalt his solitary talent of descriptive poetry,
asserted that "the essence of poetry was picture." The philosophical
critic will find no difficulty in assigning to each, sister-art her
distinct province; and it is only a pleasing delirium, in the enthusiasm
of artists, which has confused the boundaries of these arts. The dread
pathetic story of Dante's "Ugolino," under the plastic hand of Michael
Angelo, formed the subject of a basso-relievo; and Reynolds, with his
highest effort, embodied the terrific conception of the poet as much as
his art permitted: but assuredly both these great artists would never have
claimed the precedence of the Dantesc genius, and might have hesitated at
the rivalry.

[Footnote A: Rubens 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.]

[Footnote B: The late Sir Martin Archer Shee, P.R.A. This accomplished
artist, who possessed a large amount of poetical and literary power, asks,
"What is there of _intellectual_ in the operations of the poet which the
painter does not equal? What is there of _mechanical_ which he does not
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 language, and is
common to prose." Poetry he values as the earliest of arts, painting as
the latest and most refined.--ED.]

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

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

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

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

[Footnote A: Few writers were so competent to instruct in art as Gesner,
who was not only an author and a poet, but an artist who decorated his
poems by designs as graceful as their subject.--ED.]




CHAPTER IV.

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

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

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

Theories of genius are the peculiar constructions of our own philosophical
times; ages of genius had passed away, and they left no other record than
their works; no preconcerted theory described the workings of the
imagination 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
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 _equality 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 process; and
when this process had been traced, they inferred that what was done by
some men, under the influence of fundamental laws which 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 invisible 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 ACCIDENTALLY determined by some
_particular direction_." On this principle we must infer that the
reasoning LOCKE, or the arithmetical DE MOIVRE, could have been the
musical and fairy SPENSER.[A] This conception of the nature of genius
became prevalent. It induced 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 Dugald Stewart; and
REYNOLDS, the pupil of Johnson in literature, adopting the paradox,
constructed his automatic system on this principle of _equal aptitude_. He
says, "this excellence, however expressed by genius, taste, or the gift of
Heaven, I am confident may be _acquired_." Reynolds had the modesty to
fancy that so many rivals, unendowed by nature, might have equalled the
magic 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 discipline and application, might have led armies to victory or
kingdoms to prosperity; might have wielded the thunder of eloquence, or
discovered and enlarged the sciences." All this we find in the _text_; 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 has himself so abundantly and so judiciously supplied. There is
something ludicrous in the result of a theory of genius which would
place HOBBES and ERASMUS, those timid and learned recluses, to open a
campaign with the military invention and physical intrepidity of a
Marlborough; 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 watchings of the mind, the system and the
demonstrations of Newton.

[Footnote A: It is more dangerous to define than to describe: a dry
definition excludes so much, an ardent description at once appeals to our
sympathies. How much more comprehensible our great critic becomes when he
nobly describes genius, "as the power of mind that collects, combines,
amplifies, and animates; the energy without which judgment is cold, and
knowledge is inert!" And it is this POWER OF MIND, this primary faculty
and native aptitude, which we deem may exist separately from education and
habit, since these are often found unaccompanied by genius.]

Such theorists deduce the faculty called genius from a variety of exterior
or secondary causes: zealously rejecting the notion that genius may
originate in constitutional dispositions, and be only a mode of the
individual's existence, they deny that minds are differently constituted.
Habit and education, being more palpable and visible in their operations,
and progressive in the development of the intellectual faculties, have
been imagined fully sufficient to make the creative faculty a subject of
acquirement.

But when 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 accidents had
ever supplied the _want of genius_ in the individual. 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 struck by the
hand of Nature, and which, to give it a name, we may be allowed to call
the _predisposition_ of genius? The _accidents_ so triumphantly held
forth, which are imagined to have created the genius of these men, have
occurred to a thousand who 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.[A] 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.

[Footnote A: I transcribe the last opinions of Mr. Edgeworth. "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
introduction 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 _natural powers_ of
different persons; but not so great as is generally supposed."--
_Edgeworth's Memoirs_, ii. 388.]

Others have strenuously denied that we are born with any peculiar species
of mind, 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 conclude 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.[A]

In substituting the term _capacity_ for that of _genius_, 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
fervently 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.[B]

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.

[Footnote A: Johnson once 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 walk 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 reversion which has
been missed by the many respectable dunces who have been sons of men of
genius.]

[Footnote B: 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 _philosopher_." It is amusing to learn another
result of his ungenial metaphysics. This sage demonstrates and concludes
in these words, "It will therefore be found, with little exception, that
_a great poet is but an ordinary 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.]

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 that they have not revealed it. The phenomena of
_predisposition_ in the mind are not more obscure and ambiguous 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 constitutional 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 habits, than to conjecture that these
men of genius could not have been such but from _accident_, or that they
differ only in their _capacity_?

Every class of men of genius has distinct habits; all poets resemble one
another, as all painters and all mathematicians. There is a conformity in
the cast of their 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 reverse required for another. If these are truisms, as they may
appear, we need not demonstrate that from which we only wish to draw our
conclusion. Why does this remarkable similarity prevail through the
classes of genius? Because each, in 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 will the young musician's ear wander in the creation of
sounds, and the philosopher's head mature its meditations. It is then the
aptitude of the appropriate organ, however it varies in its character, in
which genius seems most concerned, and which is connatural and connate
with the individual, and, as it was expressed in old days, is _born_ 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 education, have ever supplied its want. To discriminate between the
_habit_ and the _predisposition_ is quite impossible; because whenever
great genius discovers itself, as it can only do by 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
  The flame of genius to _the human breast_.

But in the final revision of that poem, which he left many years after,
the bard has vindicated the solitary and independent origin of genius, by
the mysterious epithet,

                      THE CHOSEN BREAST.

The veteran poet was, perhaps, schooled by the vicissitudes of his own
poetical life, and those of some of his brothers.

Metaphors are but imperfect illustrations in metaphysical 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 a flame above its head; the wings and the flame
express more than some metaphysical conclusions. 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 artificial
substance. In the soils of the earth we may discover that variety of
primary qualities which we believe to exist in human minds. The botanist
and the geologist always find the nature of the strata indicative of its
productions; the meagre light herbage announces the 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 experience and
observation will often deduce from consciousness what we cannot from
demonstration. If Nature, 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.

Youth of genius.--Its first impulses may be illustrated by its subsequent
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.
--Facts 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 us; yet though realities are but dimly 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 convince 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 indications or predispositions, announcing the permanent
character? Is not great sensibility born with its irritable fibres? Will
not the deep retired character cling to its musings? And the unalterable
being of intrepidity and fortitude, will he not, commanding even amidst
his sports, lead on his equals? The boyhood of Cato 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,
betrayed the same early appearance of 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 incident which he relates, evinced, as he thought, that
even then he preferred to aggravate his fault rather than consent to
suppress any part of the truth, an effort which had been unnatural to his
mind. His fanciful, yet striking illustration may open our inquiry. "This
trivial passage," the little story alluded to, "I 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 perceived whilst they are children, and when they are
dying. These little sudden actions are the greatest discoverers of men's
true humours."

ALFIERI, that historian of the literary mind, was conscious 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 impassioned 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 predispositions 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 extremes; stubborn and impatient against
force, but most open to kindness, more restrained by the dread of
reprimand than by anything else, susceptible of shame to 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
_child_."[A]

[Footnote A: See in his Life, chap. iv., entitled _Sviluppo dell' indole
indicato da vari fattarelli_. "Development of genius, or natural
inclination, indicated by various little matters."]

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 beautiful 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 previous observation of those who
attended his lectures, would advise one to engage in political studies,
then exhorted another to compose history, elected these to be poets, and
those to be 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
principle 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 Fontenelle,
_adolescens omnibus numeris absolutus et inter discipulos princeps_, "a
youth accomplished in every respect, and the model for his companions;"
but when they describe the elder Crébillon, _puer ingeniosus sed insignis
nebulo_, "a shrewd boy, but a great rascal," they might not have erred so
much as they appear to have done; for an impetuous boyhood showed the
decision of a character which might not have merely and misanthropically
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 countenance, for he was much 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 unhappy genius in the
family, who perplexed and plagued the cowherd and his wife and his twelve
brothers, was 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 difficulties of ordinary men, unassisted by that feeble
ductility which adapts itself to the common destination. Parents are 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 disobedience
and grief. LILLY, our famous astrologer, has described the frequent
situation of such a youth, like the cowherd's son who would be a knight.
Lilly proposed to his father that he should try his fortune in the
metropolis, where he expected that his learning and his talents would
prove serviceable to him; the father, quite incapable of discovering the
latent genius of his son in his studious disposition, very 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 genius
have repeated.[A]

[Footnote A: The father of Sir Joshua Reynolds reproached him frequently
in his boyish days for his constant attention to drawing, and wrote on the
back of one of his sketches the condemnatory words, "Done by Joshua out of
pure idleness." Mignard distressed his father the surgeon, by sketching
the expressive faces of his patients instead of attending to their
diseases; and our own Opie, when a boy, and working with his father at his
business as a carpenter, used frequently to excite his anger by drawing
with red chalk on the deal boards he had carefully planed for his trade.
--ED.]

In reading the memoirs of a man of genius, we often reprobate the domestic
persecutions of those who opposed his inclinations. No poet but is moved
with indignation at the recollection of the tutor at the Port Royal thrice
burning the romance which RACINE at length got by heart; no geometrician
but bitterly inveighs against the father of PASCAL for not suffering him
to study Euclid, which he at length understood without studying. The
father of PETRARCH cast to the flames the 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
deprived him of the Roman laurel. The uncle of ALFIERI for more than
twenty years suppressed the poetical character 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 whose 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 parents of a man of genius; they have
another association of ideas respecting him than ourselves. We see a great
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 is rarely that of fortune or happiness; and the
father, who himself may not be insensible to glory, dreads lest his
son be found among that obscure multitude, that populace of mean artists,
self-deluded yet self-dissatisfied, who must expire at the barriers of
mediocrity.

If the youth of genius be struggling with a concealed impulse, he will
often be thrown into a train of secret instruction which no master can
impart. Hippocrates profoundly observed, that "our _natures_ have not been
taught us by any master." The faculty which the youth of genius displays
in after-life may exist long ere it is perceived; and it will only make
its own what is homogeneous with itself. We may often observe how the mind
of this youth stubbornly rejects whatever is contrary to its habits, and
alien to its affections. Of a solitary character, for solitariness is the
wild nurse of his contemplations, he is fancifully described 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 sensations, 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
precedes reflection. One truly inspired unfolds the secret story--

  Endow'd with all that Nature 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!

But the solitude of the youth of genius has a local influence; 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 hero Scipio; and a young poet,
from some favourite description in Cowley, called a spot he loved to muse
in, "Cowley's Walk."

A temperament of this kind has been often mistaken for melancholy.[A]
"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
concluded that he was overcome with a growing melancholy. 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 hack 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 to write either in verse or prose in any language whatever."

[Footnote A: This solemnity of manner was aped in the days of Elizabeth
and James I. by 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 given to melancholy," and receiving the assurance, "It's
your only fine humour, sir; your true melancholy breeds your perfect fine
wit, sir."--ED.]

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:--

                  --From my very birth
  My soul was drunk with love, which 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 cared to mingle in the clamorous fray
  Of squabbling imps; but to the forest sped.

BOSSUET would not join his young companions, and flew 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 suetus 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 I might read
and study in quiet;" but they beat the bushes, and started in his burrow
the future man of erudition. 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;[A] as
were HOBBES and BACON. 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
  Born to that end, born to promote all truth,
  All righteous things.

[Footnote A: Dr. Gregory says of Chatterton, "Instead of the thoughtless
levity of childhood, he possessed the pensiveness, gravity, and melancholy
of maturer life. He was frequently so lost in contemplation, that for many
days together he would say but very little, and that apparently by
constraint. His intimates in the school were few, and those of the most
serious cast." Of Burns, his schoolmaster, Mr. Murdoch, says--"Robert's
countenance was generally grave, and expressive of a serious,
contemplative, and thoughtful mind:"--Ed.]

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 dancing-master, whose
art made him at once shudder and laugh. HORACE, by his own confession, was
a very awkward 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 hundred voices to the rills,
  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 contemplative race in
their great representatives VIRGIL and HORACE. When they accompanied
Mecænas into the country, while the minister amused himself at tennis,
the two bards reposed on a vernal bank amidst the freshness of the shade.
The younger Pliny, who was so perfect a literary character, was charmed by
the Roman mode of hunting, or rather fowling by nets, which admitted him
to sit a whole day with his tablets and stylus; so, says he, "should I
return with empty nets, my tablets may at least be full." THOMSON was the
hero of his own "Castle of Indolence;" and the elegant WALLER infuses into
his luxurious verses the true feeling:

  Oh, low I long my careless limbs to lay
  Under the plantane 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.[A]
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 attached to the inferior sedentary labourers are
participated in by men of genius; the analogy is obvious, and their fate
is common. Literary men may be included in Ramazzini's "Treatise on the
Diseases of Artizans." ROSSEAU 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, destroys his strength, and
renders him pusillanimous.[B] But there is a higher principle which guides
us to declare, that men of genius should not _excel_ in "all manly
exercises." SENECA, whose habits were completely literary, admonishes the
man of letters that "Whatever amusement 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 manly exercises," would in some cases intrude into the habits of a
literary man, and sometimes 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 succeeded in invigorating his physical powers.

[Footnote A: Dr. Currie, in his "Life of Burns," has a passage which may
be quoted here: "Though by nature of an athletic 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
cause, of depression of spirits."--ED.]

[Footnote B: In the Preface to the "Narcisse."]

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 influence, and even imagined that they had discovered
its cause. The Abbé 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 retire from the world. He
maintained this to be a species of melancholy, and humorously called it
the small-pox of the mind, because scarce one in a thousand escaped the
attack. I myself have had this distemper, 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 for 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. ARIOSTO, 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 Thisbe, to be represented by his
brothers and sisters, and at this time also delighted himself in
translating the old French and Spanish romances. Sir WILLIAM JONES, at
Harrow, divided the fields according to a map of Greece, and to each
schoolfellow 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 reflecting 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 character. 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
Patroclus or Sarpedon. We seem here to detect, reflected in his boyish
sports, the pleasing genius of the author of Numa Pompilius, Gonsalvo of
Cordova, and William Tell. BACON, when a child, was so remarkable for
thoughtful observation, 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 "He 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 courtiership,
undoubtedly 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 afterwards so fully appeared in his
writings.

For a youth to be distinguished by his equals is perhaps 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 invention 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
water, 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 thought 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 wisdom, or Ulyssean cunning, which
marked his mature character, Franklin raised his wharf at the expense of
another'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 invention 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 character. 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 stripling;" 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 arrogant
fierceness." The puerile characters of Lord BOLINGBROKE 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, in looking 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 disposition 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 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 feebleness 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 composition, as we may judge
by some fragments his son has preserved, remarkably contrasts with his
writings; for these fragments abound with those points and conceits which
he afterwards abhorred. The tender 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 père!"--"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 simplicity 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. Who could have imagined, in
examining the _Dream_ of Raphael, that the same pencil could hereafter
have poured out the miraculous _Transfiguration?_ Or that, in the
imitative pupil of Hudson, our country was at length to pride herself on
another Raphael?[A]

[Footnote A: Hudson was the fashionable portrait-painter who succeeded
Kneller, 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 style was formality itself; but was approved in an
age of formalism; the earlier half of the last century.--ED.]

Even the manhood of genius may pass unobserved by his companions, and,
like. Æneas, he may be 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 disposition. His
sedateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juvenile amusements, 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
Fabius afterwards displayed, they then imagined had lain concealed under
the apparent contrary qualities. The boy of genius may indeed seem slow
and dull even to the phlegmatic; for thoughtful and observing 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 companions of a man of genius, that at school he
appeared heavy and unpromising. Rousseau imagined that the childhood of
some men is accompanied by this seeming and deceitful dulness, which is
the sign of a profound genius; and Roger Ascham has placed among "the best
natures 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 Passeri, while he has
happily expressed the still labours of his concealed genius, _sua
taciturna 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 in the proper knowledge of
genius, which some imagine indicates 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;[A]
and, indeed, to his latest hour he was surprising his friends by
productions 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 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 little
to decide from early unfavourable appearances, 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 that he was the dullest and most hopeless of her
sons. BODMER, at the head of the literary class in Switzerland, who had so
frequently discovered 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 had overlooked 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 entirely devoted.

[Footnote A: 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 following
chapter, on "The First Studies," p. 56.]

Thus it happens that in the first years of life the education of the youth
may not be the education of his genius; he lives unknown to himself and
others. In all these cases nature had dropped the seeds in the soil: but
even 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, unable to discover the object of
its aptitude, a thirst and fever in the temperament 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 Angelo," 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'Argenville throws some doubt over; but as Tibaldi during twenty
years abstained from his pencil, a singular circumstance seems explained
by an extraordinary occurrence. 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 BERGMAN. His friends, to gain
him over to the more lucrative 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 desire 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 powerfully influenced the
innate genius of BOCCACCIO, and fixed his instant decision. As yet young,
and in the neighbourhood 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 occupied 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 for ever the occupations of commerce,
dedicating himself to literature. PROCTOR, the lost Phidias of our
country, would often say, that he should never have quitted his mercantile
situation, 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 predisposition which only waits
for an occasion to declare itself.

Abundant facts exhibit genius unequivocally discovering 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, who has related an anecdote of the infancy of
his genius, which indicated the manhood. He declared to his daughter that
the intention of writing a book upon the nature of man, was conceived 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 Duty, and the Expectation of Man." JOHN
HUNTER conceived his notion of the principle of life, which to his last
day formed the subject of his inquiries and experiments, when he was very
young; for at that period of life, Mr. Abernethy tells 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 verified 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 _L'Esprit des Loix_, 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,
wandering 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.[A]

[Footnote A: 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 the middling as well as with the great,
the same habits must operate. Early in life, I was struck by the inductive
philosophy of Bacon, and sought after a Moral Experimental Philosophy; and
I had then in my mind an observation of Lord Bolingbroke's, for I see I
quoted it thirty years ago, that "Abstract 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. From
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
into philosophy. As I began I fear I shall end.]

The predisposition of genius has declared itself in painters 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 _born_ a minister; the
late Dr. SHAW I always considered as one _born_ a naturalist, and I know a
great literary antiquary who seems to me to have been also _born_ 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 _born_ with him, so that his _Cabinet of Rarities_ may
be said to have commenced with _his being_." This strange metaphorical
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 productions of nature, and he exulted in their accomplishment; 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 vehement 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
neighbourhood; then that vehement passion for knowledge "began to burn
like fire in a forest," as Gassendi happily describes 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 _genealogical_, and the other
to _geographical_ pursuits, that, "let a man do what he will, if nature
incline us to certain things, there is no 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 and 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 tendency to tale-writing, in a passage of his genealogy of
the gods:--"Before seven years of age, when as yet I had met with no
stories, was without a master, and hardly knew my letters, I had a natural
talent for fiction, and produced some little tales." Thus the "Decamerone"
was appearing much earlier than we suppose. DESCARTES, while yet a boy,
indulged such habits of deep meditation, that he was nicknamed by his
companions "The Philosopher," always questioning, and ever settling the
cause and the effect. He was twenty-five years of age before he left the
army, but the propensity for meditation had been early formed; and he has
himself given an account of the pursuits which occupied his youth, and of
the progress of his genius; of the secret struggle which he so long
maintained with his own mind, wandering in concealment over the world for
more than twenty years, and, as he says of himself, like the statuary
labouring to draw out a Minerva from the marble block. MICHAEL ANGELO, as
yet a child, wherever he went, busied himself in drawing; and when his
noble parents, hurt that a man of genius was disturbing the line of their
ancestry, forced him to relinquish the pencil, the infant artist flew to
the chisel: the art which was in his soul would not allow of idle hands.
LOPE DE VEGA, VELASQUEZ, ARIOSTO, and TASSO, are all said to have betrayed
at their school-tasks the most marked indications of their subsequent
characteristics.

This decision of the impulse of genius is apparent in MURILLO. This young
artist was undistinguished at the place of his birth. A brother artist
returning home from London, where he had studied under Van Dyk, surprised
MURILLO by a chaste, and to him hitherto unknown, manner. Instantly he
conceived the project of quitting his native Seville and flying to Italy
--the fever of genius broke forth with all its restlessness. But he was
destitute of the most ordinary means to pursue a journey, and 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, whose 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 countryman, 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, VELASQUEZ 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 noticed his
absence the theatre of his glory.

The same imperious impulse drove CALLOT, at the age of twelve years, from
his father's roof. His parents, from prejudices of birth, had conceived
that the art of engraving 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-consideration, 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 his parents. The father, whose patience and forgiveness
were now exhausted, permitted his son to become the most original genius
of French art--one who, in his vivacious groups, the touch of his graver,
and the natural expression of his figures, anticipated the creations of
Hogarth.

Facts of this decisive character are abundant. See the boy NANTEUIL biding
himself in a tree to pursue the delightful exercise of his pencil, while
his parents are averse to their son practising his young art! See
HANDEL, intended for a doctor of the civil laws, and whom no parental
discouragement could deprive of his enthusiasm, for ever touching
harpsichords, and having secretly conveyed a musical instrument to a
retired apartment, listen to him when, sitting through the night, he
awakens his harmonious spirit! Observe FERGUSON, the child of a peasant,
acquiring the art of reading without any one suspecting it, by listening
to his father teaching his brother; observe him making a wooden watch
without the slightest knowledge of mechanism; and while a shepherd,
studying, like an ancient Chaldean, the phenomena of the heavens, on a
celestial globe formed by his own hand. That great mechanic, SMEATON, when
a child, disdained the ordinary playthings of his age; he collected the
tools of workmen, observed them at their work, and asked questions till he
could work himself. One day, having watched some millwrights, the child
was shortly after, to the distress of the family, discovered in a
situation of extreme danger, fixing up at the top of a barn a rude
windmill. Many circumstances of this nature occurred before his sixth
year. His father, an attorney, sent him up to London to be brought up to
the same profession; but he declared that "the study of the law did not
suit the _bent of his genius_"--a term he frequently used. He addressed a
strong memorial to his father, to show his utter incompetency to study
law; and the good sense of the father abandoned Smeaton "to the bent of
his genius in his own way." Such is the history of the man who raised the
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 excitement, or any
other of those sources of genius, so frequently assigned for its
production?

Yet these cases are not more striking than one related of the Abbé 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 ten 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, suspecting
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 steeple 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. Relieving 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. There may be a virgin thought as well as a virgin habit--nature
before education--which first opens the mind, and ever afterwards is
shaping its tender folds. Accidents may occur to call it forth, but
thousands of youths have found themselves in parallel situations with
SMEATON, 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 in 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
influence 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
daughter. 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 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 faculties which produced a sublime tragedian? In all 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 development, 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 susceptibility 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
ludicrous 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 chancellor. This circumstance he
imputes to Sir Thomas More "being from a child so delighted with humour,
that he seemed to be even born for it." And we know that he died as he had
lived, with a jest on his lips. The hero, who came at length to regret
that he had but one world to conquer, betrayed the majesty of his restless
genius when but a youth. Had Aristotle been nigh when, solicited to join
in the course, the princely boy replied, that "He would run in no career
where kings were not the competitors," the prescient tutor might have
recognised in his pupil the future and successful rival of Darius and
Porus.

A narrative of the earliest years of Prince Henry, by one of his
attendants, forms an authentic collection of juvenile anecdotes, which
made me feel very forcibly that there are some children who deserve to
have a biographer at their side; but anecdotes of children are the rarest
of biographies, and I deemed it a singular piece of good fortune to have
recovered such a remarkable evidence of the precocity of character.[A]
Professor Dugald Stewart has noticed a fact in ARNAULD'S infancy, which,
considered in connexion with his subsequent life, affords a good
illustration of the force of impressions received in the first dawn of
reason. ARNAULD, who, to his eightieth year, passed through a life of
theological controversy, when a child, amusing himself in the library of
the Cardinal Du Perron, requested to have a pen given to him. "For what
purpose?" inquired the cardinal. "To write books, like you, against the
Huguenots." The cardinal, then aged and infirm, could not conceal his joy
at the prospect of so hopeful a successor; and placing the pen in his
hand, said, "I give it you as the dying shepherd, Damcetas, bequeathed his
pipe to the little Corydon." Other children might have asked for a pen--
but to write against the Huguenots evinced a deeper feeling and a wider
association of ideas, indicating the future polemic.

[Footnote A: I have preserved this manuscript narrative in "Curiosities of
Literature," vol. ii.]

Some of these facts, we conceive, afford decisive evidence 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 working in the character 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 even crushing the germ--these
have been of late often detected, and sometimes 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
peculiarities.--Their errors.--Their improvement from the neglect or
contempt they incur.--The history of self-education in Moses Mendelssohn.
--Friends usually prejudicial in the youth of genius.--A remarkable
interview between Petrarch in his first studies, and his literary
adviser.--Exhortation.


The first studies form an epoch in the history of genius, and
unquestionably have sensibly influenced its productions. 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, 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 character 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 experiences a similar dangerous period.
Early bad tastes, early peculiar habits, early defective instructions, all
the egotistical pride of an untamed intellect, are those evil spirits
which will dog genius to its grave. An early attachment 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 writing 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 became 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 suspected, 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 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
Turkish 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.[A]

[Footnote A: 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
Rycaut's folio, which probably led to this class of books:

"Knolles--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 Arabian 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 without
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 preserve
it, as it may enter into the history of his lordship's character:

"When I was in Turkey I was oftener tempted to turn Mussulman than poet,
and have often regretted since that I did not. 1818."]

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
found De Foe's "Essay on Projects," from which work impressions were
derived which afterwards influenced some of the principal events of his
life. The lectures of REYNOLDS probably originated in the essays of
Richardson. It is acknowledged that these first made him a painter, and
not long afterwards an author; and it is said that many of the principles
in his lectures may be traced in those first studies. Many were the
indelible and glowing impressions caught by the ardent Reynolds from those
bewildering pages of enthusiasm! Sir WALTER RAWLEIGH, according to a
family tradition, when a young man, was perpetually reading and conversing
on the discoveries of Columbus, and the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro.
His character, as well as the great events of his life, seem to have been
inspired by his favourite histories; to pass beyond the discoveries of the
Spaniards became a passion, and the vision of his life. It is formally
testified that, from a copy of Vegetius _de Re Militari_, in the school
library of St. Paul's, MARLBOROUGH imbibed his passion for a military
life. If he could not understand the text, the prints were, in such a
mind, sufficient to awaken the passion for military glory. ROUSSEAU in
early youth, full of his Plutarch, while he was also devouring the trash
of romances, could only conceive human nature in the colossal forms, or be
affected by the infirm sensibility of an imagination mastering all his
faculties; thinking like a Roman, and feeling like a Sybarite. The same
circumstance happened to CATHERINE MACAULEY, who herself has told us how
she owed the bent of her character to the early reading of the Roman
historians; but combining Roman admiration with English faction, she
violated truth in English characters, and exaggerated romance in her
Roman. But the permanent effect of a solitary bias in the youth of genius,
impelling the whole current of his after-life, is strikingly displayed in
the remarkable character of Archdeacon BLACKBURNE, the author of the
famous "Confessional," and the curious "Memoirs of Hollis," written with
such a republican fierceness.

I had long considered the character of our archdeacon as a _lusus
politicus et theologicus_. Having subscribed 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! 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, may 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 education 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 began to read Virgil
for his own amusement, and not in school hours as a task." Such is the
force of self-education in genius, that the celebrated physiologist, JOHN
HUNTER, who was entirely self-educated, evinced such penetration in his
anatomical discoveries, that he has brought into notice passages from
writers he was unable to read, and which had been overlooked by profound
scholars.[A]

[Footnote A: Life of John Hunter, by Dr. Adams, p. 59, where the case is
curiously illustrated. [The writer therein defends Hunter from a charge of
plagiarism from the Greek writers, who had studied accurately certain
phases of disease, which had afterwards been "overlooked by the most
profound scholars for nearly two thousand years," until John Hunter by his
own close observation had assumed similar conclusions.]]

That the education of genius must be its own work, we may appeal to every
one of the family. It is not always fortunate, for many die amidst a waste
of talents and the wreck of mind.

                 Many a soul sublime
  Has felt the influence of malignant star.

An unfavourable position in society is a usual obstruction in the
course of this self-education; and a man of genius, through half his
life, has held a contest with a 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 with their
contemporaries. WINCKELMANN, who passed his youth in obscure misery as a
village schoolmaster, paints feelings which strikingly contrast with his
avocations. "I formerly filled the office of a schoolmaster with the
greatest punctuality; and I taught the A, B, C, to children with filthy
heads, at the moment I was aspiring after the knowledge of the beautiful,
and meditating, low to myself, on the similes of Homer; then I said to
myself, as I still say, 'Peace, my soul, thy strength shall surmount thy
cares.'" The obstructions of so unhappy a self-education 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 [Greek:
opsimatheis], _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 _late-learned_ is a useful distinction. 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. BUDÆUS declared that he was both "self-taught and
late-taught."

The SELF-EDUCATED are marked by stubborn peculiarities. 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
acknowledged. They have improved themselves by the very neglect or even
contempt which their unfortunate efforts were doomed to meet; and when
once they have learned what is beautiful, they discover a living but
unsuspected source in their own wild but unregarded originality. Glorying
in their strength at the time that they are betraying their weakness, yet
are they still mighty in that enthusiasm 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 perplexed feelings and the tumultuous thoughts of the most visionary
enthusiast, who is often only a man of genius misplaced.[A] We may find a
whole race of these self-taught among the unknown writers of the old
romances, and the ancient ballads of European nations; there sleep many a
Homer and Virgil--legitimate heirs of their genius, though possessors of
decayed estates. BUNYAN is the Spenser of the people. The fire burned
towards Heaven, although the altar was rude and rustic.

[Footnote A: "One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own
experience, that there exist folios on the human 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 found as much
fulness of heart and intellect as burst forth in many a simple page of
George Fox and Jacob Behmen."--_Mr. Coleridge's Biographia Litteraria_, i.
143.]

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 disordered, and the
same fortitude of soul; but he found his self-taught pen, like his
pencil, betray his genius.[B] A vehement 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 character 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 self-educated man, once listening 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!

[Footnote B: Like Hogarth, when he attempted to engrave his own works, his
originality of style made them differ from the tamer and more mechanical
labours of the professional engraver. They have consequently less beauty,
but greater vigour.--ED.]

But even such pages as those of BARRY'S are the aliment of young genius.
Before we can discern the beautiful, must we not be endowed with the
susceptibility 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 reveries 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 discovered 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 honourable title of "the Jewish
Socrates."[A] So great apparently were the invincible obstructions which
barred out Mendelssohn from the world of literature and philosophy, that,
in the history of men of genius, it is something like taking in the
history of man the savage of Aveyron from his woods--who, destitute of a
human language, should at length create a model of eloquence; who, without
the faculty of conceiving a figure, should at length be capable of adding
to the demonstrations of Euclid; and who, without a complex idea and with
few sensations, should at length, in the sublimest strain of metaphysics,
open to the world a new view of the immortality of the soul!

[Footnote A: I composed the life of MENDELSSOHN so far back as in 1798, in
a periodical publication, whence our late biographers have drawn their
notices; a juvenile production, which happened to excite the attention of
the late BARRY, then not personally 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 of 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.]

Mendelssohn, the son of a poor rabbin, in a village in Germany, received
an education completely rabbinical, and its nature must be comprehended,
or the term of _education_ would be misunderstood. The Israelites in
Poland and Germany live with all the restrictions of their ceremonial law
in an insulated state, and are not always instructed in the language of
the country of their birth. They employ for their common intercourse a
barbarous or _patois_ Hebrew; while the sole studies of the young rabbins
are strictly confined to the Talmud, of which the fundamental principle,
like the Sonna of the Turks, is a pious rejection of every species of
profane learning. This ancient jealous spirit, which walls in the
understanding and the faith of man, was to shut out what the imitative
Catholics afterwards called heresy. It is, then, these numerous folios of
the Talmud which the true Hebraic student contemplates through all the
seasons of life, as the Patuecos in their low valley imagine their
surrounding mountains to be the confines of the universe.

Of such a nature was the plan of Mendelssohn's first studies; but even in
his boyhood this conflict of study occasioned an agitation of his spirits,
which affected his life ever after. Rejecting the Talmudical dreamers, he
caught a nobler spirit from the celebrated Maimonides; and his native
sagacity was already clearing up the surrounding darkness. An enemy not
less hostile to the 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 another 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 knowledge 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 vagrant, 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 corners, 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 Germany was sitting on those steps!

The Polander, whose deep melancholy had settled on his heart, died--yet he
had not lived in vain, since the electric spark that lighted up the soul
of Mendelssohn had fallen from his own.

Mendelssohn was now left alone; his mind teeming with its chaos, and still
master of no other language than that barren idiom which was incapable of
expressing the ideas he was meditating on. He had scarcely made a step
into the philosophy of his age, and the genius of Mendelssohn had probably
been lost to Germany, had not the singularity of his studies and the cast
of his mind been detected by the sagacity of Dr. Kisch. The aid of this
physician was momentous; for he devoted several hours every day to the
instruction of a poor youth, whose strong capacity he had the discernment
to perceive, and the generous temper to aid. Mendelssohn was soon enabled
to read Locke in a Latin version; but with such extreme pain, that,
compelled to search for every word, and to arrange their Latin order, and
at the same time to combine metaphysical ideas, it was observed that he
did not so much translate, as guess by the force of meditation.

This prodigious effort of his intellect retarded his progress, but
invigorated his habit, as the racer, by running against the hill, at
length courses with facility.

A succeeding effort was to master the living languages, and chiefly the
English, that he might read his favourite Locke in his own idiom. Thus a
great genius for metaphysics and languages was forming itself alone,
without aid.

It is curious to detect, in the character of genius, the effects of local
and moral influences. There resulted from Mendelssohn's early situation
certain defects in his Jewish education, and numerous impediments in his
studies. Inheriting but one language, too obsolete and naked to serve the
purposes of modern philosophy, he perhaps overvalued his new acquisitions,
and in his delight of knowing many languages, he with difficulty escaped
from remaining a mere philologist; while in his philosophy, having adopted
the prevailing principles of Wolf and Baumgarten, his genius was long
without the courage or the skill 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 literary intercourse: he
became a great and original thinker in many beautiful speculations in
moral and critical philosophy; 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 labyrinth of Judaical learning, in his middle
age oppressed by indigence and malady, and in his mature life wrestling
with that commercial station whence he derived his humble 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 disconcerted 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 its prophetic feeling can
anticipate the public opinion. When a young writer's first essay is shown,
some, through mere inability of censure, see nothing but beauties; others,
from mere imbecility, can see none; and others, out of pure malice, see
nothing but faults. "I was soon disgusted," says Gibbon, "with the modest
practice of reading the manuscript to my friends. Of such friends some
will praise for politeness, and some will criticise for vanity." Had
several of our first writers set their fortunes on the cast of their
friends' opinions, we might have lost some precious compositions.
The friends of Thompson discovered nothing but faults in his early
productions, one of which happened to be his noblest, the "Winter;" they
just could discern that these abounded with luxuriances, without being
aware that, they were the luxuriances of a poet. He had created a new
school in art--and appealed from his circle to the public. From a
manuscript letter of our poet's, written when employed on his "Summer," I
transcribe his sentiments on his former literary friends in Scotland--he
is writing to Mallet: "Far from defending these two lines, I damn them to
the lowest depth of the poetical Tophet, prepared of old for Mitchell,
Morrice, Rook, Cook, Beckingham, and a long &c. Wherever I have evidence,
or think I have evidence, which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as
all the mules in Persia." This poet of warm affections felt so irritably
the perverse criticisms of his learned friends, that they were to share
alike a poetic Hell--probably a sort of _Dunciad_, or lampoons. One of
these "blasts" broke out in a vindictive epigram on Mitchell, whom he
describes with a "blasted eye;" but this critic literally having one, the
poet, to avoid a personal reflection, could only consent to make the
blemish more active--

  Why all not faults, injurious Mitchell! why
  Appears one beauty to thy _blasting_ eye?

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,"[A] 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, and to the world, he
observes, in his Journal, "it is pleasant to see one who hardly passed for
anything in Ireland, make his way here with a little friendly forwarding."
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, viewing it,
and perceiving no trace of his own manner, exclaimed that he did not paint
so well as when he left England; while another, who conceived no higher
excellence than Kneller, treated with signal contempt the future Raphael
of England.

[Footnote A: This weekly journal was chiefly supported by the abilities of
the rising young men of the Scottish Bar. Henry Mackenzie, the author of
the "Man of Feeling," was the principal contributor. The publication was
commenced in January, 1779, and concluded May, 1790.--ED.]

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 Quintilian. One mode to obtain such an invaluable critic is the
cultivation 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 more 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
forwards. 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
predominant faculty was an exuberance of imagination when excited by
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 particular 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, whatever 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
them, he may detect some of his predominant habits, resume 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 experience, he had not been able to
surpass." A young writer, in the progress of his studies, should often
recollect 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 raptures 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 companion for kings and emperors!"
This was the feeling which rendered the thoughts of obscurity painful and
insupportable 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 darkness. 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 conveyed to us by Petrarch, in a
conversation with John of Florence, to whom the young poet often resorted
when dejected, to reanimate his failing powers, to confess his faults, and
to confide to him his dark and wavering resolves. It was a question with
Petrarch, whether he should not turn away from the pursuit of literary
fame, by 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 happened 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 of the crowd, and to acquire a name; and surely not without
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
myself 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
return to you to teach me, or at least advise me. Shall I for ever quit my
studies? Shall I strike into some new course of life? My father, have pity
on me! draw me out of the frightful state in which I am lost.' I could
proceed no farther without shedding tears. 'Cease to afflict yourself, my
son,' said that good man; 'your condition 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 presumption. In
ascending an elevated spot, we gradually discover many things whose
existence before was not suspected by us. Persevere in the career which
you entered with my advice; feel confident that God will not abandon 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!

INGENUOUS YOUTH! 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 theirs, 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 circumstances, encountered the same difficulties and overcome them by
the same means; then let not your courage be lost in your admiration, but
listen to that "still small voice" in your heart which cries with
CORREGGIO and with MONTESQUIEU, "Ed io anche son pittore!"




CHAPTER VII.

Of the irritability of genius.--Genius in society often in a state of
suffering.--Equality 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.


The modes of life of a man of genius, often tinctured by eccentricity and
enthusiasm, maintain an eternal 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 strengthen his peculiarities, and increase his
sensibility. Genius in society is often in a state of suffering.
Professional characters, who are themselves so often literary, yielding 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 conversation 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 moment changes; the
philosophical historian is suddenly absorbed 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
prepares 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 sometimes querulous; now the soul of tenderness and
tranquillity,--then stung by jealousy, or writhing in aversion! A fever
shakes his spirit; a fever which has sometimes generated a disease, and
has even produced a slight perturbation of the faculties.[A] In one of
those 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.

[Footnote A: I have given a history of _literary quarrels from personal
motives_, in "Quarrels of Authors," p. 529. There we find how many
controversies, in which the public get involved, have sprung from some
sudden squabbles, some neglect of petty civility, some unlucky epithet, or
some casual observation dropped without much consideration, which
mortified or enraged the _genus irritabile_; a title which from ancient
days has been assigned to every description of authors. The late Dr.
WELLS, who had some experience in his intercourse with many literary
characters, observed, that "in whatever regards the fruits of their mental
labours, this is universally acknowledged to be true. Some of the
malevolent passions indeed frequently become in learned men more than
ordinarily strong, from want of that restraint upon their excitement which
society imposes." A puerile critic has reproached me for having drawn my
description entirely from my own fancy:--I have taken it from life!
See further symptoms of this disease at the close of the chapter on
_Self-praise_ in the present work.]

Once we were nearly receiving from the hand of genius the most curious
sketches of the temper, the irascible humours, 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
chronology of his emotions. It was natural for such a creature 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 all 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, discovering that he could no
longer "pour out his bosom, his every thought and floating fancy, his very
inmost soul, with unreserved confidence to another, without hazard of
losing part of that respect which man deserves from man; or, from the
unavoidable imperfections attending human nature, of one day repenting his
confidence." 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 lock 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 miserable pride, the infirmity of men of imagination, which 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 Glencairn," was "wounded to the soul" because
his lordship showed "so much attention, engrossing attention, to the only
blockhead at table; the whole company consisted of his lordship,
Dunderpate, and myself." This Dunderpate, who dined with Lord Glencairn,
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
neglecting the irritable poet "for the mere carcass of greatness, or when
his eye measured the difference 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 acquaintance," adds
Burns, at the moment that the solitary haughtiness of his own genius had
entirely escaped his self-observation.

This character of genius is not singular. Grimm tells of MARIVAUX, that
though a good man, there was something dark and suspicious in his
character, which made it difficult to keep on terms with him; the most
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 acquaintance 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 capricious to childishness! while minds of a less delicate
texture are not frayed and fretted by casual frictions; and plain sense
with a coarser grain, is sufficient to keep down these aberrations of
their feelings. How mortifying is the list of--

  Fears of the brave and follies of the wise!

Many have been sore and implacable on an allusion 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 infection 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, before 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;"[A] and even the robust mind of
JOHNSON could not suffer to be exhibited as "blinking Sam."[B] 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
indignation in four iambics. The praise of a skipping ape raised the
feeling of envy in that child of nature and genius, GOLDSMITH. VOITURE,
the son of a vintner, like 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, arrived
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.

[Footnote A: He was represented as an ill-made monkey in the frontispiece
to a satire noted in "Quarrels of Authors," p. 286 (last edition).--ED.]

[Footnote B: Johnson was displeased at the portrait Reynolds painted of
him which dwelt on his nearsightedness; 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.]

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
prevalent among MEN OF LETTERS, 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 profound 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 flies about
one, or, what is worse, to be bandying compliments, this to me is not
bearable." He hit on the expedient of making lace-strings, carrying his
working cushion 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 predispositions 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 far 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 encounters 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 agitation of the spirits, the same poignant delight, the
same weariness, the same dissatisfaction, the same querulous languishment
after excellence? Is the man of genius an INVENTOR? the discovery is
contested, or it is not comprehended for ten years after, perhaps not
during his whole life; even men of science are as children before him. Sir
Thomas Bodley wrote to Lord Bacon, remonstrating with him on his _new mode
of philosophising_. It seems the fate of all originality of thinking to be
immediately 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 celebrity--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 Loix_ to be read by that man
in France, whom he conceived to be the best judge, and in return received
the most mortifying remarks. The great philosopher exclaimed 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. COPERNICUS
so much dreaded the prejudice of mankind against his treatise on "The
Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies," that, by a species of continence of
all others most difficult to a philosopher, says Adam Smith, he detained
it in his closet for thirty years together. LINNÆUS once in despair
abandoned his beloved studies, from a too irritable feeling of the
ridicule in which, as it appeared to him, a professor Siegesbeck had
involved his famous system. Penury, neglect, and labour LINNÆUS could
endure, but that his botany should become the object of ridicule for all
Stockholm, shook the nerves of this great inventor in his science. Let him
speak for himself. "No one cared how many sleepless nights and toilsome
hours I had passed, while all with one voice declared, that Siegesbeck had
annihilated me. I took my leave of Flora, who bestows on me nothing but
Siegesbecks; 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 LINNÆUS returned to the discoveries which he had
forsaken in the madness of the mind! The great SYDENHAM, who, like our
HARVEY and our HUNTER, effected a revolution 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 emulation 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 HUNTER 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 approbation. "We bees do not provide honey for ourselves,"
exclaimed VAN HELMONT, when worn out by the toils of chemistry, and still
contemplating, amidst tribulation and persecution, and approaching death,
his "Tree of Life," which he imagined he had discovered in the cedar. 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 short record of the fates of the inventors 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
theories, 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 secret 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
dinner, 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 confession of even slight
doubts which may shake its truth. It is a curious fact which we have
but recently discovered, that ROUSSEAU was disturbed by a terror he
experienced, 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"[A] without disgust after the work had been published! He
acknowledged that there were more suffrages against his notions than for
them. "I am not displeased," says he, "with myself on the style and
eloquence, but I still dread that my writings are good for nothing at the
bottom, and that all my theories are full of extravagance." [_Je crains
toujours que je pèche par le fond, et que tous mes systèmes ne sont que
des extravagances._] HARTLEY with his "Vibrations and Vibrationeles,"
LEIBNITZ with his "Monads," CUDWORTH with his "Plastic Natures,"
MALEBRANCHE with his paradoxical doctrine of "Seeing all things in God,"
and BURNET with his heretical "Theory of the Earth," must unquestionably
at times have betrayed an irritability which those about them may have
attributed to temper, rather than to genius.

[Footnote A: In a letter by Hume to Blair, written in 1766, apparently
first published in the _Literary Gazette_, Nov. 17, 1821.]

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 makes 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! MONTESQUIEU has described this feeling 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 always to the reigning taste, whatever it chance to be,
of the public. Burnet criticised VARILLAS unsparingly;[A] but 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 its 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 confutation 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 friendly to revelation.[B]
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.

[Footnote A: For an account of this work, and Burnet's _exposé_ of it, see
"Curiosities of Literature," vol. i. p. 132.--ED.]

[Footnote B: This great work the _Canon Chronicus_, was published in 1672,
and was 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 _Diatriba Chronologica_, published in 1649.
--ED.]

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 posterity, AFTER SOME GENERATIONS SHALL BE past. BRUCE 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 public. Mortified and indignant
at the reception of his great labour by 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 contemporaries, and who
was long thrown aside among legendary writers.[A]

[Footnote A: 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 truthful 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 Corte di Milioni_: and a vulgar
caricature of the great traveller was always introduced in their
carnivals, who was termed _Marco Milione_; and delighted them with the
most absurd stories, in, which everything was computed by millions.--ED.]

HARVEY, though his life was prolonged to his eightieth year, hardly lived
to see his great discovery of the circulation 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 express their
astonishment that it had ever escaped observation. Incredulity and envy
are the evil spirits which have often dogged great inventors to their
tomb, and there only have vanished.--But I seem writing the "calamities of
authors," and have only begun the catalogue.

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 RACINE produced his "Athalie,"
it was not at all relished: Boileau 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 suspecting 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 themselves
under that general amnesty too freely granted, that tastes are allowed to
differ; but we should approximate 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 mind is not always found under the pen, any more
than the artist's conception can always breathe in his pencil. Like
FIAMINGO'S image, which he kept polishing till his friend exclaimed, "What
perfection would you have?"--"Alas!" exclaimed the sculptor, "the original
I am labouring 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 we hang over the illusion of his pages, and become
himself. ARIOSTO wrote sixteen different ways the celebrated stanza
descriptive of a tempest, as appears 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, Ugo 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
cannot 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 foam 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 illusion!
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 attainment, that a man of
genius, late in life, may discover how its secret conceals itself in the
habit; how discipline consists 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 language, 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 over 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 composition, 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 manuscripts of ROUSSEAU display as many erasures as
those of Ariosto or Petrarch; 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 BUFFON 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 effect 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 agonies,
witness his description of the depressions and elevations of genius:

  Who pants for glory, finds but short repose;
  A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows!

When ROMNEY undertook to commence the first subject for the Shakspeare
Gallery, in the rapture of enthusiasm, amidst the sublime and pathetic
labouring in his whole mind, arose the terror of failure. The subject
chosen was "The Tempest;" and, as Hayley truly observes, it created many a
tempest in the fluctuating spirits of Romney. The vehement desire of that
perfection which genius conceives, and cannot always execute, held a
perpetual contest with that dejection of spirits which degrades the
unhappy sufferer, and casts him, grovelling among the mean of his class.
In a national work, a man of genius pledges his honour to the world for
its performance; but to redeem that pledge, there is a darkness in the
uncertain issue, and he is risking his honour for ever. By that work he
will always be judged, for public failures are never forgotten, 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 his friends could scarcely inspire
him with sufficient courage to proceed with his arduous picture, which
exercised 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 pour fourth a more fervent orison to Heaven, than Romney when
this labour was complete. He had a fine genius, with all its solitary
feelings, but he was uneducated, and incompetent even to write a letter;
yet on this occasion, relieved from his intense anxiety under so long a
work, he wrote one of the most eloquent. It is a document in the history
of genius, and reveals all those feelings which are here too faintly
described.[A] I once heard an amiable author, whose literary career has
perhaps not answered the fond hopes of his youth, half in anger and in
love, declare that he would retire to some solitude, where, if any
one would follow him, he would found a new order--the order of THE
DISAPPOINTED.

[Footnote A: "My DEAR FRIEND,--Your 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 it had nearly overwhelmed me. I thought I
should absolutely have sunk into despair. O! what a kind friend is in
those times! I thank God, whatever my picture may be, I can say thus much,
I am a greater philosopher and a better Christian."]

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
some, 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 distressed; and JOHN HUNTER, in a mixed company, found
that conversation fatigued, instead of amusing him. HAWKESWORTH, in the
second paper of the "Adventurer," has drawn, from his own feelings, an
eloquent comparative 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 men or
artisans to Vulcan and Minerva, because both those deities alike are hard
labourers. Yet with genius all does not terminate, even with the most
skilful labour. What the toiling Vulcan and the thoughtful Minerva may
want, will too often be absent--the presence of the Graces. In the
allegorical 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 often recollect--_Senza di noi ogni fatica è vana_.

The anxious uncertainty of an author for his compositions resembles the
anxiety of a lover when he has written 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 "ambition _perseveres_ in the
desire of acquiring power, genius _flags_ of itself. Genius in the midst
of society is a pain, an internal fever which would require to be treated
as a real disease, if the records of glory did not soften the sufferings
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; the 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[A].
Corneille's objections he would attribute to jealousy--at his pieces when
burlesqued at the Italian theatre[B] he would smile outwardly, though sick
at heart; but his son informs 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 MOLIERE and Racine, in vexation of spirit, resolved to abandon their
dramatic career; it was BOILEAU who ceaselessly animated their languor:
"Posterity," he cried, "will avenge the injustice of our age!" And
CONGREVE'S comedies met with such moderate success, that it appears the
author was extremely mortified, and on the ill reception 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 severity of the French author,[C]
--more of mortification and humility might have been in Congreve's
language than of affectation or pride.

[Footnote A: 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.]

[Footnote B: See the article on "The Sensibility of Racine" in "Literary
Miscellanies," (in the present volume) and that on "Parody," in
"Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii. p. 459.--ED.]

[Footnote C: Voltaire quietly said he should not have troubled himself to
visit him if he had been merely a private gentleman.--ED.]

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 discussions, and either occasioned or increased a mental
alienation. 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 forms 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 imagination, in which 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 manuscripts
in Mr. Dibdin's late "Tour." She seems to have inflicted tortures on his
pen, surpassing even those which may be seen in the fac-simile page which,
thirty years ago, I gave of Pope's Homer.[A] 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:--

  Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto,
    Ch' un marmo solo in se non circoseriva
    Col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva
  La man che obbedisce all' intelletto.

                    IMITATED.

  The sculptor never yet conceived a thought
    That yielding marble has refused to aid;
  But never with a mastery he wrought--
    Save when the hand the intellect obeyed.

[Footnote A: It now forms the frontispiece to vol. ii. of the last edition
of the "Curiosities of Literature."--ED.]

An interesting domestic story has been preserved of GESNER, who so
zealously devoted his 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 was, the
tenderness of his wife and friends could not soothe his distempered
feelings; it was necessary to abandon him to his own thoughts, till, after
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
vines; his eye appeared at length to glisten; and a sudden return
to good humour broke out in this lively apostrophe--"Ah! see those
playful children, they always dance!" 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[A]--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 sometimes 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 without 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 _author_, I
should, in all probability, have spared myself the _incredible labour_ and
_chagrin_ I 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.

[Footnote A: See Ramazini, "De Morbis Artificium Diatriba," which Dr.
James translated in 1750. It is a sad reflection, resulting from this
curious treatise, that the arts entail no small mischief upon their
respective workmen; so that the means by which they live are too often the
occasion of their being hurried out of the world.]

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 suppressed resentment--"His
forcible mode of expression, the brilliant quick movements of his eyes,
and the gestures of his body," these betrayed the pangs of contempt, or of
aversion! HOGARTH, in a fit of the spleen, advertised that he had
determined not to give the world any more original works, and intended to
pass the rest of his days in painting portraits. The same advertisement is
marked by farther irritability. He contemptuously offers the purchasers of
his "Analysis of Beauty," to present them _gratis_ with "an eighteenpenny
pamphlet," published by Ramsay the painter, written in opposition to
Hogarth's principles. So untameable was the irritability of this great
inventor in art, that he attempts to conceal his irritation by offering to
dispose gratuitously of the criticism which had disturbed his nights.[A]

[Footnote A: Hogarth was not without reason for exasperation. He was
severely attacked for his theories about the 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.]

Parties confederate against a man of genius,--as happened to Corneille, to
D'Avenant,[A] and Milton; and a Pradon and a Settle carry away the meed of
a Racine and a Dryden. It was to support the drooping spirit of his friend
Racine on the opposition raised against Phædra, that Boileau addressed to
him an epistle "On the Utility to be drawn from the Jealousy of the
Envious." The calm dignity of the historian DE THOU, amidst the passions
of his times, confidently expected that justice from posterity which his
own age refused to his early and his late labour. That great man was,
however, compelled by his injured 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 subterfuge to
which a great genius was forced. The acquaintances 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 immortal odes? Can we forget the dignified complaint of the
Rambler, with which he awfully closes his work, appealing to posterity?

[Footnote A: See "Quarrels of Authors," p. 403, on the confederacy of
several wits against D'Avenant, a great genius; where I discovered that a
volume of poems, said "to be written by the author's friends," which had
hitherto been referred to as a volume of panegyrics, contains nothing but
irony and satire, which had escaped the discovery of so many transcribers
of title-pages, frequently miscalled literary historians.]

Genius contracts those peculiarities of which it is so loudly accused
in its solitary occupations--that loftiness of spirit, those quick
jealousies, those excessive affections and aversions which view everything
as it passes in its own ideal world, and rarely as it exists in the
mediocrity of reality. If this irritability of genius be a malady which
has raged even among philosophers, we must not be surprised at the
temperament of poets. These last have abandoned their country; they have
changed their name; they have punished themselves with exile in the rage
of their disorder. No! not poets only. DESCARTES sought in vain, even in
his secreted life, for a refuge for his genius; he thought himself
persecuted in France, he thought himself calumniated among strangers, and
he went and died in Sweden; and little did that man of genius think that
his countrymen would beg to have his ashes restored to them. Even the
reasoning HUME once proposed to change his name and his country; and I
believe did. The great poetical genius of our own times has openly
alienated himself from the land of his brothers. He becomes immortal in
the language of a people whom he would contemn.[A] Does he accept with
ingratitude the fame he loves more than life?

[Footnote A: I shall preserve a manuscript note of Lord BYRON on this
passage; not without a hope that we shall never receive from him the
genius of Italian poetry, otherwise than in the language of his "_father
land_"; an expressive term, which I adopted from the Dutch language some
years past, and which I have seen since sanctioned by the pens of Lord
Byron and of Mr. Southey.

His lordship has here observed, "It is not my fault that I am obliged to
write in English. If I understood my present language equally well, I
would write in it; but this will require ten years at least to form a
style: no tongue so easy to acquire a little of, or so difficult to master
thoroughly, as Italian." On the same page I find the following note: "What
was rumoured of me in that language? If true, I was unfit for England: if
false, England was unfit for me:--'There is a world elsewhere.' I have
never regretted for a moment that country, but often that I ever returned
to it at all."]

Such, then, is that state of irritability in which men of genius
participate, whether they be inventors, men of learning, fine writers, or
artists. It is a state not friendly to equality of temper. In the various
humours incidental to it, when they are often deeply affected, the cause
escapes all perception of sympathy. The intellectual malady eludes even
the tenderness of friendship. At those moments, the lightest injury to the
feelings, which at another time would make no impression, may produce a
perturbed state of feeling in the warm temper, or the corroding chagrin of
a self-wounded spirit. These are moments which claim the encouragements of
a friendship animated by a high esteem for the intellectual excellence of
the man of genius; not the general intercourse of society; not the
insensibility of the dull, nor the levity of the volatile.

Men of genius are often reverenced only where they are known by their
writings--intellectual beings in the romance of life; in its history, they
are men! ERASMUS compared them to the great figures in tapestry-work,
which lose their effect when not seen at a distance. Their foibles and
their infirmities are obvious to their associates, often only capable of
discerning these qualities. The defects of great men are the consolation
of the dunces.




CHAPTER VIII.

The spirit of literature and the spirit of society.--The Inventors.
--Society offers seduction and not reward to men of genius.--The notions
of persons of fashion of men of genius.--The habitudes of the man of
genius distinct from those of the man of society.--Study, meditation, and
enthusiasm, the progress of genius.--The disagreement between the men of
the world and the literary character.


The Inventors, who inherited little or nothing from their predecessors,
appear to have pursued their insulated studies in the full independence of
their mind and development of their inventive faculty; they stood apart,
in seclusion, the solitary lights of their age. Such were the founders of
our literature--Bacon and Hobbes, Newton and Milton. Even so late as the
days of Dryden, Addison, and Pope, the man of genius drew his circle round
his intimates; his day was uniform, his habits unbroken; and he was never
too far removed, nor too long estranged from meditation and reverie: his
works were the sources of his pleasure ere they became the labours of his
pride.

But when a more uniform light of knowledge illuminates from all sides, the
genius of society, made up of so many sorts of genius, becomes greater
than the genius of the individual who has entirely yielded himself up
to his solitary art. Hence the character of a man of genius becomes
subordinate. A conversation age succeeds a studious one; and the family of
genius, the poet, the painter, and the student, are no longer recluses.
They mix with their rivals, who are jealous of equality, or with others
who, incapable of valuing them for themselves alone, rate them but as
parts of an integral.

The man of genius is now trammelled with the artificial and mechanical
forms of life; and in too close an intercourse with society, the
loneliness and raciness of thinking is modified away in its seductive
conventions. An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life
constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opulent age; but of
late, while the arts of assembling in large societies have been practised,
varied by all forms, and pushed on to all excesses, it may become a
question whether by them our happiness is as much improved, or our
individual character as well formed as in a society not so heterogeneous
and unsocial as that crowd termed, with the sort of modesty peculiar to
our times, "a small party:" the simplicity of parade, the humility of
pride engendered by the egotism which multiplies itself in proportion to
the numbers it assembles.

It may, too, be a question whether the literary man and the artist are not
immolating their genius to society when, in the shadowiness of assumed
talents--that counterfeiting of all shapes--they lose their real form,
with the mockery of Proteus. But nets of roses catch their feet, and a
path, where all the senses are flattered, is now opened to win an
Epictetus from his hut. The art of multiplying the enjoyments of society
is discovered in the morning lounge, the evening dinner, and the midnight
coterie. In frivolous fatigues, and vigils without meditation, perish the
unvalued hours which, true genius knows, are always too brief for art, and
too rare to catch its inspirations. Hence so many of our contemporaries,
whose card-racks are crowded, have produced only flashy fragments.
Efforts, but not works--they seem to be effects without causes; and as a
great author, who is not one of them, once observed to me, "They waste a
barrel of gunpowder in squibs."

And yet it is seduction, and not reward, which mere fashionable society
offers the man of true genius. He will be sought for with enthusiasm, but
he cannot escape from his certain fate--that of becoming tiresome to his
pretended admirers.

At first the idol--shortly he is changed into a victim. He forms,
indeed, a figure in their little pageant, and is invited as a sort of
_improvisatore_; but the esteem they 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
personal interest in the literary 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. From a melancholy turn, from
living reclusely, and from a little too much 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 intellect which
genius exacts. He rejected Chatterton, and quarrelled with every literary
man and every artist whom he first invited to familiarity--and then hated.
Witness the fates of Bentley, of Muntz, of Gray, of Cole, and others. Such
a mind was incapable 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
authorism yet_, and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and to
be one: _he will know better one of these 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 heartless man of
literature and rank!

                          That thing of silk,
  Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk!

The confidential confession of RACINE to his son is remarkable:--"Do not
think that I am sought after by the great for my dramas; Corneille
composes nobler verses than mine, but no one notices him, 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 hear. My
talent with them consists, 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 compromise for the tribute he exacted, but
he consoled himself when, at his entrance into the theatre, the audience
usually rose to salute him. The great comic genius of France, who indeed
was a very thoughtful and serious man, addressed a poem to the painter
MIONARD, 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 à la cour se dérobe à son art;
  Un esprit partagé rarement se consomme,
  Et les emplois de feu demandent tout l'homme.

Has not the fate in society of our reigning literary favourites been
uniform? Their mayoralty hardly exceeds 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 what 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 of BUFFON, the modern 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 piuma,
  In Fama non si vien, nè sotto coltre;
  Sanza la qual chi 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:
  Without which, whosoe'er consumes his days,
  Leaveth such vestige of himself on earth
  As smoke in air, or foam upon the wave.[A]

[Footnote A: Cary's Dante, Canto xxiv.]

But men 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 discover among those cultivators of literature and the arts
who have recourse to them for their pleasure, impassioned admirers, rather
than unmerciful judges--judges who have only time to acquire that degree
of illumination 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 feelings 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 effect, and they do nothing for
fame but what obtains an instant purpose. Yet their fame is not therefore
the more real, for everything connected with fashion becomes obsolete. Her
ear has a great susceptibility 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 sparkles 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 insulated 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 loses its freshness 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. "It is not sufficient that we
speak the same language," says a witty philosopher, "but we must learn
their dialect; we must think as they think, and we 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 themselves; he will soon find
that to think like them will in time become to act like them. But he who
in solitude adopts no transient feelings, and reflects no artificial
lights, who is only himself, possesses an immense advantage: 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 make 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 æneas, are impalpable to his strokes: but remember 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 comprehension, 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. VOLTAIRE, and his companion, the scientific Madame DE CHATELET,
she who introduced Newton to the French nation, lived entirely devoted to
literary pursuits, and their habits were strictly literary. It happened
once that this learned pair dropped unexpectedly into a fashionable circle
in the _château_ of a French nobleman. A Madame de Staël, the _persifleur_
in office of Madame Du Deffand, has copiously narrated the whole affair.
They arrived at midnight like two famished spectres, and there was some
trouble to put them to supper and bed. They are called apparitions,
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 uneasy companions: they will
neither play nor walk; they will not dissipate their mornings with the
charming circle about them, nor allow the charming circle to break into
their studies. Voltaire and Madame de Chatelet would have suffered the
same pain in being forced to an abstinence of their regular studies, as
this circle of "agréables" would have at the loss of their meals and their
airings. However, the _persifleur_ declares they were ciphers "en
société," adding no value to the number, and to which their learned
writings bear no reference.

But if this literary couple would not play, what was worse, Voltaire
poured out a vehement declamation against a fashionable species of
gambling, which appears to have made them all stare. But Madame de
Chatelet is the more frequent victim of our _persifleur_. The learned lady
would change her apartment--for it was too noisy, and it had smoke without
fire--which last was her emblem. "She is reviewing her _Principia_; an
exercise she repeats every year, without which precaution they might
escape from her, and get so far away that she might never find them again.
I believe that her head in respect to them is a house of imprisonment
rather than the place of their birth; so that she is right to watch them
closely; and she prefers the fresh air of this occupation to our
amusements, and persists in her invisibility till night-time. She has six
or seven tables in her apartments, for she wants them of all sizes;
immense ones to spread out her papers, solid ones to hold her instruments,
lighter ones, &c. Yet with all this she could not escape from the accident
which happened to Philip II., after passing the night in writing, when a
bottle of ink fell over the despatches; but the lady did not imitate the
moderation of the prince; indeed, she had not written on State affairs,
and what was spoilt in her room was algebra, much more difficult to
copy out." Here is a pair of portraits of a great poet and a great
mathematician, whose habits were discordant with the fashionable circle in
which they resided--the representation is just, for it is by one of the
coterie itself.

Study, meditation, and enthusiasm,--this is the progress of genius, and
these cannot be the habits of him who lingers till he can only live among
polished crowds; who, if he bear about him the consciousness of genius,
will still be acting under their influences. 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 often 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 domestic 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 acknowledged 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
ALFIERI, 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 insulated them among the unimpassioned triflers of their
rank. They preserved unbroken the unity of their character, in constantly
escaping from the processional _spectacle_ of society.[A] 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."

[Footnote A: In a note which Lord 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 experience of the greatest of
our age.]

An extraordinary instance of this disagreement between the man of the
world and the literary character, we find in a philosopher seated on a
throne. The celebrated JULIAN 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 abhorred their dances and their horse-races, he was
abstinent even at a festival, and incorrupt himself, perpetually
admonished the dissipated citizens of their impious abandonment of the
laws of their country. The Antiochians 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 Misopogon, 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 could not possibly resemble them, existed in the
unhappy circumstance of having been subject to too strict an education
under a family tutor, 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 make them his models. "Whatever manners," says the
emperor, "I may have previously contracted, whether gentle or boorish, it
is impossible for me now to alter or unlearn. Habit is said to be a second
nature; to oppose it is irksome, but to counteract _the study of more than
thirty years_ 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 existence shall ever
assimilate them? Antipathies and sympathies, those still occult causes,
however concealed, will break forth at an unguarded moment. Clip the wings
of an eagle that he may roost among domestic fowls,--at some unforeseen
moment his pinions will overshadow 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 trammelled paces. Too
impatient amidst the heartless courtesies of society, and little practised
in the minuter attentions, he has rarely sacrificed to the unlaughing
graces of Lord Chesterfield. Plato ingeniously compares Socrates to the
gallipots of the Athenian apothecaries; 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 may exclaim with
Themistocles, "I cannot fiddle, but I can make a little village a great
city;" and with Corneille, he may be allowed to smile at his own
deficiencies, and even disdain to please in certain conventional manners,
asserting that "wanting all these things, he was not the less Corneille."

But with the great thinkers and students, their character is still more
obdurate. ADAM SMITH could never free himself from the embarrassed manners
of a recluse; he was often absent, and his grave and formal conversation
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 sometimes 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 instructor, entering with the most perplexing bow imaginable,
silently sank into his chair. The interview promoted 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 present, poor HUME was to represent a sultan on a
sofa, 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 phlegmatic metaphysician and historian only gave a sign of life by
repeating the same awkward gesture, and the same ridiculous 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 affair," 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 books 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 inquiries to
the nature of _the conversations of men of genius_.




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; ROUSSEAU
was remarkably trite in conversation, not an idea, 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,
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
conversationists; but the poet felt that he could not contribute 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 love it, I love reading better, and would rather be
employed in reading, than in the most agreeable 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 whole 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 prevent 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. HORNE 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 polished and sharpened for display
and use; Curran's was a mine of virgin gold, incessantly crumbling away
from its own richness." CHARLES BUTLER, whose reminiscences of his
illustrious contemporaries are derived from personal intercourse, has
correctly described the familiar conversations of PITT, FOX, and BURKE:
"The most intimate 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 known 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 awaken. His _bonhomie_ attaches our hearts to him by its
simplicity; his legendary conversation makes us, for a moment, poets like
himself.[A]

[Footnote A: This was written under the inspiration of a night's
conversation, or rather listening to Sir WALTER SCOTT.--I cannot bring
myself to erase what now, alas! has closed in the silence of a swift
termination of his glorious existence.]

But that deficient agreeableness in social life with which 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 authoritatively; 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 MALEBRANCHE, "that those who
meditate profoundly can explain 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
with an irruptive heat on the subdued tone of conversation. These men are
too much in earnest for the weak or the vain. Such seriousness kills their
feeble animal spirits. 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 impelled him to break out hastily when
anything was said that did not accord with his ideas. Persons who are
obstinate till they can give up their notions with a safe conscience, are
troublesome intimates. Often too the cold tardiness of decision is only
the strict balancing of scepticism 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 Newton _not always being ready to speak_
on subjects of which he was the sole master. "Inventors seem to treasure
up in their own minds what they have found 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, have
appeared off-hand more expert than the discoverers themselves."

A peculiar characteristic in the conversations of men of genius, which has
often injured them when the listeners were not 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 a playful mind, and are at least as frequently
misrepresented as they are misunderstood. But thus the cunning Philistines
are enabled 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 indulged 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
confessions 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 perfectly 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 misrepresented, 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, happily 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 conviviality, 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 the last age, was
disposed to consider this infantine simplicity 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 himself 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
linguæ_" 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 naturâ
propensior ad jocos quam fortasse deceat_:--more 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 pleasantry 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 difference between the result of
their perceptions and those of a quicker nature; and hence it is that
slow-minded men are not, as men of the world imagine, always the dullest.
NICOLLE said of a scintillant wit, "He vanquishes me in the drawing-room,
but surrenders to me at discretion on the stairs." Many a great wit has
thought the wit it was too late to speak, and many a great reasoner has
only reasoned when his opponent has disappeared. Conversation with such
men is a losing game; and it is often lamentable 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 Dr.
Franklin, energetically hits off that close observer and thinker, wary,
even in society, by noting down "the silence of the celebrated Franklin."
We learn from 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 placidity. "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
attempted to preserve for us, was not agreeable. In company he sat
absorbed in thought, with a melancholy air; and it was on one of these
occasions that a person present observing that this conduct was indicative
of madness, that TASSO, who had heard him, looking on him without emotion,
asked whether he was ever acquainted with a madman 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
DESCARTES; I knew him, and frequently have conversed with him; he was a
good sort of man, and was not wanting 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 antiquity, anything extraordinary.
Two thousand years would have been wanting for our learned critic's
perceptions.

It is remarkable that the conversationists have rarely proved to be the
abler writers. He whose fancy is susceptible of excitement in the presence
of his auditors, making the minds of men run with his own, seizing on the
first impressions, and touching the shadows and outlines 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 doubtful assertions, and his
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 relaxation, 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: but 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 embarrassed 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 KILLEGREW the
sparkling bubbles of his fancy rose and dropped.[A] When the delightful
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 matchless wit.

[Footnote A: Killegrew's eight plays, upon which his character as an
author rests, have not been republished with one exception--_the Parson's
Wedding_--which is given in Dodsley's collection; and which is sufficient
to satisfy curiosity. He was a favourite with Charles the Second, and 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.]

Not, however, that a man of genius does not throw out many 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 submitted 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 Divinity! There 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 inked? 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 ordinary intimates
of a superior genius who complain of his defects might one say, "Do his
productions not delight 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 precious 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 ludicrous
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 persuade himself that the man whom he conversed with 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 good come out of Nazareth?"

Suffer a man of genius to be such as nature and habit have formed him, and
he will then be the most interesting companion; then will you see nothing
but his character. AKENSIDE, in conversation with select friends, often
touched by a romantic enthusiasm, would pass in review those eminent
ancients 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 studies and
feelings were congenial with his own. ROMNEY, with a fancy entirely his
own, would give vent to his effusions, uttered in a hurried accent and
elevated tone, and often accompanied by tears, to which by constitution he
was prone; thus Cumberland, from personal intimacy, describes the
conversation of this man of genius. Even the temperate sensibility
of HUME was touched by the bursts of feeling of ROUSSEAU; who, he says,
"in conversation kindles often to a degree of heat which looks like
inspiration." BARRY, that unhappy genius! was the most repulsive of men in
his exterior. The vehemence of his language, the wildness of his glance,
his habit of introducing vulgar oaths, which, by some unlucky association
of habit, served him as expletives and interjections, communicated even a
horror to some. A pious and a learned lady, who had felt intolerable
uneasiness in his presence, did not, however, leave this man of genius
that very evening without an impression that she had never heard so divine
a man in her life. The conversation happening to turn on that principle of
benevolence which pervades Christianity, and on the meekness of the
Founder, it gave BARRY an opportunity of opening on the character of Jesus
with that copiousness of heart and mind which, once heard, could never be
forgotten. That artist indeed had long in his meditations an ideal head of
Christ, which he was always talking of executing: "It is here!" he would
cry, striking his head. That which baffled the invention, as we are told,
of Leonardo da Vinci, who left his Christ headless, having exhausted his
creative faculty among the apostles, this imaginative picture of the
mysterious union of a divine and human nature, never ceased, even when
conversing, to haunt the reveries of BARRY.

There are few authors and artists who are not eloquently instructive on
that class of knowledge or that department of art which reveals the
mastery of their life. Their conversations of this nature affect the mind
to a distant period of life. Who, having listened to such, has forgotten
what a man of genius has said at such moments? Who dwells not on the
single thought or the glowing expression, stamped in the heat of the
moment, which came from its source? Then the mind of genius rises as the
melody of the Æolian harp, when the winds suddenly sweep over the strings
--it comes and goes--and leaves a sweetness beyond the harmonies of art.

The _Miscellanea_ of POLITIAN are not only the result of his studies in
the rich library of Lorenzo de' Medici, but of conversations which had
passed in those rides which Lorenzo, accompanied by Politian, preferred to
the pomp of cavalcades. When the Cardinal de Cabassolle strayed with
PETRARCH about his valley in many a wandering discourse, they sometimes
extended their walks to such a distance, that the servant sought them in
vain to announce the dinner-hour, and found them returning in the evening.
When HELVETIUS enjoyed the social conversation of a literary friend, he
described it as "a chase of ideas." Such are the literary conversations
which HORNE TOOKE alluded to, when he said "I assure you, we find more
difficulty to finish than to begin our conversations."

The natural and congenial conversations of men of letters and of artists
must then be those which are associated with their pursuits, and these are
of a different complexion with the talk of men of the world, the objects
of which are drawn from the temporary passions of party-men, or the
variable _on dits_ of triflers--topics studiously rejected from these more
tranquillising conversations. Diamonds can only be polished by their own
dust, and are only shaped by the friction of other diamonds; and so it
happens with literary men and artists.

A meeting of this nature has been recorded by CICERO, which himself and
ATTICUS had with VARRO in the country. Varro arriving from Rome in their
neighbourhood somewhat fatigued, had sent a messenger to his friends. "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 conducted him to Cicero's villa.
Here, while Cicero was inquiring after the news of Rome, Atticus
interrupted the political rival of Cæsar, observing, "Let us leave off
inquiring 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 them, 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 language), 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 conversations 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 pleasing 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 these poets found
patrons, and POPE himself discovered critics. The contracted views of
Spence have unfortunately not preserved these literary conversations, but
a curious passage has dropped from the pen of Lord BOLINGBROKE, in what
his lordship calls "a letter to Pope," often probably passed over among
his political tracts. It breathes the spirit of those delightful
conversations. "My thoughts," writes his lordship, "in what order soever
they flow, shall be communicated to you just _as they pass through my
mind_--just as they used to be when _we conversed together_ on these or
any other subject; when _we 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 filled 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 less should we against the legal and the commercial
character; yet all these are as much withdrawn from public and private
life as the literary 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 world than to himself. La Bruyère discovered
the world's erroneous estimate of literary labour: "There requires a
better name," 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
much 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 eminent 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 enthusiasm 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 invocate. 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 divine!

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 and
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 each other, if they do
not pass whole weeks together in their study, without intervening
absences, they will not be admitted into the last recess of the Muses.
Whether their glory come from 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 Armida,
whose enchantments arose amidst solitude, while solitude was everywhere
among those enchantments.

Whenever MICHAEL ANGELO, that "divine madman," as Richardson once wrote on
the back of one of his drawings, was meditating on some great design, he
closed himself up from the world, "Why do you lead so solitary a life?"
asked a friend. "Art," replied the sublime artist, "Art is a jealous god;
it requires the whole and entire man." During his mighty labour in the
Sistine Chapel, he refused 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 occasional excellence, and who so often
deceive themselves by mistaking the evanescent flashes of genius for that
holier flame which burns on its altar, because the fuel is incessantly
supplied?

We observe men of genius, in public situations, sighing for this solitude.
Amidst the impediments of the world, they are doomed to view their
intellectual banquet often rising before them, like some fairy delusion,
never to taste it. The great VERULAM often complained of the disturbances
of his public life, and rejoiced in the occasional retirement he stole
from public affairs. "And now, because I am in the country, I will send
you some of my country fruits, which with me are good meditations; when I
am in the city, they are choked with business." Lord CLARENDON, whose life
so happily combined 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 satisfaction. Each of his solitudes occasioned a new
acquisition; 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 Linternum.
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 Carberry's seat in Wales; and the
"Diversions of Purley" 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 seclusion, and indeed usually lived
in retirement. MONTESQUIEU 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 observes in triumph, "avance à pas de
géant." Harrington, to compose 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, withdrew into a retirement that lasted ten years: even Hume
rallies him for separating himself from the world; but by this means the
great political inquirer satisfied the world by his great work. And thus
it was with men of genius long ere Petrarch withdrew to his Val chiusa.

The interruption of visitors by profession has been feelingly lamented by
men of letters. The mind, maturing its speculations, feels the unexpected
conversation of cold ceremony chilling as March winds over the blossoms 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
plagued, 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 had expended, that he might
reanimate his industry, and not lose a day. EVELYN, continually importuned
by morning visitors, or "taken up by other impertinencies of my life in
the country," stole his hours from his night rest "to redeem his losses."
The literary character has been driven to the most 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 poetical temperament, on one of these occasions,
at his country-house, assured a literary 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 fâcheux arrivent trois volées,
  Que du parc à l'instant assiègent les allées;
  Alors sauve qui peut, et quatre fois heureux
  Qui sait s'échapper, à quelque autre ignoré d'eux.

BRAND HOLLIS 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.[A]

[Footnote A: This curious advertisement is preserved in Dr. Birch's "Life
of Boyle," p. 272. Boyle's labours were so exhausting to his naturally
weak frame, and so continuous from his eager desire for investigation,
that this advertisement was concocted by the advice of his physician, "to
desire to be excused from receiving visits (unless upon occasions very
extraordinary) two days in the week, namely, on the 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, and fill up the _lacunæ_ of them, and to take some
care of his affairs in Ireland, which are very much disordered and have
their face often changed by the public calamities there." He ordered
likewise a board to be placed over his door, with an inscription
signifying when he did, and when he did not receive visits.--ED.]

BOCCACCIO has given an interesting account of the mode of life of the
studious Petrarch, for on 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 studies for 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 regularities 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."[A]--"I am the more desirous,"
he says, "because it is a subject in which I am most deeply interested."
Thus Cowley was requiring a 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, anticipating the dread he entertained
of solitude in advanced life. "I feel, and shall continue to feel, that
domestic solitude, however it may be alleviated by the world, by study,
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."

[Footnote A: This event happening when London was the chief emporium of
books, occasioned many 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
his library.--ED.]

Had the mistaken notions of Sprat not deprived us of Cowley's
correspondence, we doubtless had viewed the picture of lonely genius
touched by a tender pencil.[A] 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 considerations, 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
disregard 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 colours a picture of solitude;
and at length his despair closed with idiotism. Even the playful muse
of GRESSET throws a sombre querulousness over the solitude of men of
genius:--

      --Je les vois, victimes du génie,
  Au foible prix d'un éclat passager,
  Vivre isolés, sans jouir de la vie!
  Vingt ans d'ennuis pour quelques jours de gloire.

Such are the necessity, the pleasures, and the inconveniences 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 and perish but the flame of
genius can only be lighted in their own solitary breast.

[Footnote A: See the article on Cowley in "Calamities of Authors."]




CHAPTER XI.

The meditations of genius.--A work on the art of meditation not yet
produced.--Predisposing the mind.--Imagination awakens imagination.
--Generating 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 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 meditation 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 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 produced; yet such a work
might prove of immense advantage to him who never happened to have more
than one solitary idea. The pursuit of a single principle has produced a
great system. Thus probably we owe ADAM SMITH to the French economists.
And a loose hint has conducted to a new discovery. Thus GIRARD, taking
advantage of an idea first started by Fenelon, produced his "Synonymes."
But while, in every manual art, every great workman improves on his
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. Certain constituent principles of the
mind itself, which the study of metaphysics curiously developes, offer
many important regulations in this desirable art. We may even suspect,
since men of genius in the present age have confided to us the secrets of
their studies, that this art may be carried on by more obvious means than
at first would appear, and even by mechanical contrivances and practical
habits. A mind well organised may be regulated by a single contrivance, as
by a bit of lead we govern the fine machinery by which we track the flight
of time. Many secrets in this art of the mind yet remain as insulated
facts, which may hereafter enter into an experimental history.

Johnson has a curious observation on the Mind itself. He thinks it obtains
a stationary point, from whence it can never advance, occurring before the
middle of life. "When the powers of nature have attained their intended
energy, they can be no more advanced. The shrub can never become a tree.
Nothing then remains but _practice_ and _experience_; and perhaps _why
they do so little may be worth inquiry_."[A] The result of this inquiry
would probably lay a broader foundation for this art of the mind than we
have hitherto possessed, ADAM FERGUSON has expressed himself with
sublimity:--"The lustre which man casts around him, like the flame
of a meteor, shines only while his motion continues; the moments of rest
and of obscurity are the same." What is this art of meditation, but the
power of withdrawing ourselves from the 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.

[Footnote A: I recommend the reader to turn to the whole passage, in
Johnson's "Betters to Mrs. Thrale," vol. i. p. 296.]

There is a government of our thoughts. The mind of genius can be made to
take a particular 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 imagination of their
favourite masters. By touching a magnet, they become a magnet. A
circumstance has been, recorded of GRAY, by Mr. Mathias, "as worthy of all
acceptation among the higher votaries of the divine art, when they are
assured that Mr. Gray never sate down to compose any poetry without
previously, and for a considerable time, reading the works of Spenser."
But the circumstance was not unusual with Malherbe, Corneille, and Racine;
and the most fervid verses of Homer, and the most tender of Euripides,
were often repeated by Milton. Even antiquity exhibits the same exciting
intercourse of the mind of genius. Cicero informs us how his eloquence
caught inspiration from a constant study of the Latin and Grecian poetry;
and it has been recorded of Pompey, who was great even in his youth, that
he never undertook any considerable enterprise without 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 hero. 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 mentem, animumque
  Delius inspiret Vates.

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 sublime
emotions, might have composed the inventive mind of the great critic in
the visions of his theoretical mysteries. A celebrated 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. CURRAN'S 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
imagination 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 dance and revelry.

There are slight habits which may be 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 imaginative
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.
Whenever APOSTOLO ZENO, the predecessor of Metastasio, prepared himself to
compose a new drama, he used to say to himself, "_Apostolo! recordati che
questa è 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 contrived 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 uninteresting 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. MENDELSSOHN, whose feeble
and too sensitive frame was often reduced to the last stage of suffering
by intellectual exertion, when engaged in any point of difficulty, would
in an instant contrive a perfect cessation from thinking, by mechanically
going to the window, and counting the tiles upon the roof of his
neighbour's house. Such facts show how much art may be concerned in the
government of our thoughts.

It is an unquestionable fact that some profound thinkers cannot pursue
their intellectual operations amidst the distractions of light and noise.
With them, attention to what is passing within is interrupted by the
discordant impressions from objects pressing and obtruding on the
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 original
thinkers, 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 can brood over thoughts till the incubation
produces vitality. Such is the feeling in this act of study. In Plutarch's
time they showed a subterraneous place of study built by Demosthenes, and
where he often continued for two or three months together. Malebranche,
Hobbes, Corneille, and others, darkened their apartment when 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 pupil--whose
attention wandered on every passing object, which unfitted him for study
--should be instructed in a darkened apartment, he was 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
recollection. The study of an author or an artist would be ill placed in
the midst of a beautiful landscape; the "Penseroso" of Milton, "hid from
day's garish eye," is the man of genius. A secluded and naked apartment,
with nothing but a desk, a chair, and a single sheet of paper, was for
fifty years the study of BUFFON; the single ornament was a print of Newton
placed before his eyes--nothing broke into the unity of his reveries.
Cumberland's liveliest comedy, _The West Indian_, was written in an
unfurnished apartment, close in front of an Irish turf-stack; and our
comic writer was fully aware of the advantages of the situation. "In all
my hours of study," says that elegant writer, "it has been through life my
object so to locate myself as to have little or nothing to distract my
attention, and therefore brilliant rooms or pleasant prospects I have ever
avoided. A dead wall, or, as in the present case, an Irish turf-stack, are
not attractions that can call off the fancy from its pursuits; and whilst
in these pursuits it can find interest and occupation, it wants no outward
aid to cheer it. My father, I believe, rather wondered at my choice." The
principle ascertained, the consequences are obvious.

The arts of memory have at all times excited the attention of the
studious; they open a world of undivulged mysteries, where every one seems
to form some discovery of his own, rather exciting his astonishment than
enlarging his comprehension. LE SAGE, a modern philosopher, had a memory
singularly defective. Incapable of acquiring languages, and deficient in
all those studies which depend on the exercise of the memory, it became
the object of his subsequent exertions to supply this deficiency by the
order and method he observed in arranging every new fact or idea he
obtained; so that in reality with a very bad memory, it appears that he
was still enabled to recall at will any idea or any knowledge which he had
stored up. JOHN HUNTER happily illustrated the advantages which every one
derives from putting his thoughts in writing, "it resembles a tradesman
taking stock; without which he never knows either what he possesses, or in
what he is deficient." The late WILLIAM HUTTON, a man of an original cast
of mind, as an experiment in memory, opened a book 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 conceived 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 composed all his methods merely by
the aid of his imagination 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 instances of a well-regulated
memory depend on the practice 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 knowledge we have been
acquiring, and all the feelings 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 impressions 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
accumulating power, and in the work of genius is imagined to produce
nothing of itself; yet is memory the foundation 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
incidents of the great novelist often founded on the common 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 expenditure. 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
his 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; but "Of the things
which concern himself," as MARCUS ANTONINUS entitles his celebrated work
--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
Children." That neither of these family books has appeared, is our common
loss. Such legacies from such men ought to become the inheritance of their
countrymen.

To register the transactions of the day, with observations on what, and on
whom, he had seen, was the advice of Lord KAIMES to the late Mr. CURWEN;
and for years his head never reached its pillow without performing a task
which habit had made easy. "Our best and surest road to knowledge," said
Lord Kaimes, "is by profiting from the labours of others, and making their
experience our own." In this manner Curwen tells us he acquired by habit
_the art of thinking_; and he is an able testimony of the practicability
and success of the plan, for he candidly tells us, "Though many would
sicken at the idea of imposing such a task upon themselves, yet the
attempt, persevered in for a short time, would soon become a custom more
irksome to omit than it was difficult to commence."

Could we look into the libraries of authors, the studios of artists, and
the laboratories of chemists, and view what they have only sketched, or
what lie scattered in fragments, and could we trace their first and last
thoughts, we might discover that we have lost more than we possess. There
we might view foundations without superstructures, once the monuments of
their hopes! A living architect recently exhibited to the public an
extraordinary picture of his mind, in his "Architectural Visions of Early
Fancy in the Gay Morning of Youth," and which now were "dreams in the
evening of life." In this picture he had thrown together all the
architectural designs his imagination had conceived, but which remained
unexecuted. The feeling is true, however whimsical such unaccomplished
fancies might appear when thrown together into one picture. In literary
history such instances have occurred but too frequently: the imagination
of youth, measuring neither time nor ability, creates what neither time
nor ability can execute. ADAM SMITH, in the preface 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 "Thirty years ago I entertained no doubt of being able to execute
everything which it announced." The "Wealth of Nations" was but a fragment
of this greater work. Surely men of genius, of all 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 of such men as GIBBON, Sir WILLIAM JONES, and PRIESTLEY. An
invention by which the moral qualities and the acquisitions of the
literary character were combined and advanced together, is what Sir
WILLIAM JONES ingeniously calls his "Andrometer." In that scale of human
attainments and enjoyments which ought to accompany the eras of human
life, it reminds us of what was to be learned, and what to be practised,
assigning to stated periods their appropriate pursuits. An occasional
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 plans 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 moral and
literary excellence.

"It was about this time I conceived," says Franklin, "the bold and arduous
project 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 what he considered to be his failures; he
found himself fuller of faults than he had imagined, but at length his
blots diminished. This self-examination, or this "Faultbook," as Lord
Shaftesbury would have called it, was always carried about him. These
books still exist. An additional contrivance was that of journalising his
twenty-four hours, of which he has furnished us both with descriptions and
specimens of the method; and he closes with a solemn assurance, 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 Franklin, unconnected either by
character or communication, but acted on by the same glorious feeling to
create their own moral and literary character, inventing similar although
extraordinary methods.

The memorials 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 rivalled the calm and
unalterable system pursued by Gibbon, Buffon, and Voltaire, who often only
combined the knowledge 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, 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
competition, 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
singulars_" 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 hours were consecrated to
his books; but even on days of business he would take a few turns in his
walk, to meditate or to dictate; many of his letters are dated before
daylight, some from the senate, at his meals, and amid his morning levées.
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 in his mind by a remarkable
illustration:--he said to Abernethy, "My mind is like a bee-hive." A
simile which was singularly correct; "for," observes Abernethy, "in the
midst of buzz and apparent confusion there was great order, regularity of
structure, and abundant food, collected with incessant industry from the
choicest stores of nature." Thus one man of genius is the ablest
commentator on the thoughts and feelings of another. When we reflect on
the magnitude of the labours of Cicero and the elder Pliny, on those of
Erasmus, Petrarch, Baronius, Lord Bacon, Usher, and Bayle, we seem at the
base of these monuments of study, we seem scarcely awake to admire. These
were the laborious instructors of mankind; their age has closed.

Yet let not those other artists of the mind, who work in the airy looms of
fancy and wit, imagine that they are weaving their webs, without the
direction of a principle, and without a secret habit which they have
acquired, and which some have imagined, by its quickness and facility, to
be an instinct. "Habit," says Reid, "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
occasions; and there may be even an art, unperceived by themselves, in
opening and pursuing a scene of pure invention, and even in the happiest
turns of wit. One who had all the experience of such an artist has
employed the very terms we have used, of "mechanical" and "habitual." "Be
assured," says Goldsmith, "that wit is in some measure mechanical; and
that a man long habituated to catch at even its resemblance, will at last
be happy enough to possess the substance. By a long habit of writing he
acquires a justness of thinking, and a mastery of manner which holiday
writers, even with ten times his genius, may vainly attempt to equal." The
wit of BUTLER was not extemporaneous, but painfully elaborated from notes
which he incessantly accumulated; and the familiar _rime_ of BERNT, the
burlesque poet, his existing manuscripts will prove, were produced by
perpetual re-touches. Even in the sublime efforts of imagination, this
art of meditation may be practised; and ALFIERI has shown us, that in
those energetic tragic dramas which were often produced in a state of
enthusiasm, he pursued a regulated process. "All my tragedies have been
composed three times;" and he describes the three stages of conception,
development, and versifying. "After these three operations, I proceed,
like other authors, to publish, correct, or amend."

"All is habit in mankind, even virtue itself!" exclaimed METASTASIO;
and we may add, even the meditations of genius. Some of its boldest
conceptions, are indeed fortuitous, starting up and vanishing almost in
the perception; like that giant form, sometimes seen amidst the glaciers,
afar from the opposite traveller, moving as he moves, stopping as he
stops, yet, in a moment lost, and perhaps never more seen, although but
his own reflection! Often in the still obscurity of the night, the ideas,
the studies, the whole history of the day, is acted over again. There are
probably few mathematicians who have not dreamed of an interesting
problem, observes Professor Dugald Stewart. In these vivid scenes we are
often so completely converted into spectators, that a great poetical
contemporary of our country thinks that even his dreams should not pass
away unnoticed, and keeps what he calls a register 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 nero adusto suolo_.
  The two, the _dark_ and burning soil has sent."

He discovered that the epithet _black_ was not suitable; "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, cannot 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, will 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 him, had a sleekiness and good-humour, and an unalterable equanimity of
countenance, not the portion of men of genius: indeed one of these has
regretted that his sleep was so profound as 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 characters 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.

If memory do not chain down these hurrying fading children of the
imagination, and

  Snatch the faithless fugitives to light

with the beams of the morning, the mind suddenly finds itself forsaken and
solitary.[A] ROUSSEAU has uttered a complaint 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, encompassed by the
silence and obscurity of the night. Sleepless 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.

[Footnote A: One of the most extraordinary instances of inspiration in
dreams is told of Tartini, the Italian musician, whose "Devil's Sonata" is
well known to musicians. He dreamed that the father of evil played this
piece to him, and upon waking he put it on paper. It is a strange wild
performance, possessing great originality and vigour.--ED.]

But while with genius so much seems fortuitous, in its great operations
the march of the mind appears regular, and requires preparation. The
intellectual faculties are not always co-existent, or do not always act
simultaneously. Whenever any particular faculty is highly active, while
the others are languid, the work, as a work of genius, may be very
deficient. Hence the faculties, in whatever degree they exist, are
unquestionably enlarged by _meditation_. It seems trivial to observe that
meditation should precede composition, but we are not always aware of its
importance; the truth is, that it is a difficulty unless it be a habit. We
write, and we find we have written ill; we re-write, and feel we have
written well: in the second act of composition we have acquired the
necessary meditation. Still we rarely carry on our meditation so far as
its practice would enable us. Many works of mediocrity might have
approached to excellence, had this art of the mind been exercised. Many
volatile writers might have reached even to deep thinking, had they
bestowed a day of meditation before a day of composition, and thus
engendered their thoughts. Many productions of genius have originally been
enveloped in feebleness and obscurity, which have only been brought to
perfection by repeated acts of the mind. There is a maxim of Confucius,
which in the translation seems quaint, but which is pregnant with sense--

  Labour, but slight not meditation;
  Meditate, but slight not labour.

Few works of magnitude presented themselves at once, in their extent
and with their associations, to their authors. Two or three striking
circumstances, unobserved before, are perhaps all which the man of genius
perceives. It is in revolving the subject that the whole mind becomes
gradually agitated; as a summer landscape, 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 of imagination.
How beautifully this state of the mind, in the progress of composition,
is described by DRYDEN, alluding 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
the light, there to be 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 the decline and fall of the empire, &c. I was often tempted to cast
away the labour of seven years." WINCKELMANN was long lost in composing
his "History of Art;" a hundred fruitless attempts were made, before he
could discover a plan amidst the labyrinth. Slight conceptions kindle
finished works. A lady asking for a few verses on rural topics of the Abbé
de Lille, his specimens pleased, and sketches heaped on sketches produced
"Les Jardins." In writing the "Pleasures of Memory," as it happened with
"The Rape of the Lock," the poet at first proposed a simple description in
a few lines, till conducted by meditation the perfect composition of
several years closed in that fine poem. That still valuable work, _L'Art
de Penser_ of the Port-Royal, was originally projected to 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 profound thinker so many new ideas crowded in that
slight task, that he was compelled to call in his friend NICOLLE; and thus
a few projected pages closed in a volume so excellent, that our elegant
metaphysician has recently declared, that "it is hardly possible to
estimate the merits too highly." Pemberton, who knew NEWTON intimately,
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 preserved in the life of the other immortal
man in philosophy, 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 informed us, that his great work on "The
Human Understanding," 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 minds when walking in the
fields, &c., they might find many as well worth preserving 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.[A] 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.

[Footnote A: This anecdote is found in Ruffhead's "Life of Pope,"
evidently given by Warburton, as was everything of personal knowledge in
that tasteless volume of a mere lawyer, who presumed to write the life of
a poet.]

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 assemblies,
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 this
method of study: _Eh! 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 lie
usually carried in his girdle, that he might instantly sketch whatever he
wished to recal to his recollection; and Amoretti discovered, that, in
these light sketches, this fine genius was forming a system of physiognomy
which he frequently inculcated to his pupils.[A] HAYDN carefully noted
down in a pocket-book the 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 arranging 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
observations on the desert of waters? But the constant exercise of the
mind by habitual practice is the privilege of a commanding genius, and, in
a similar situation, we discover CICERO and Sir WILLIAM JONES acting
alike. Amidst the Oriental seas, in a voyage of 12,000 miles, the mind of
JONES kindled with delightful enthusiasm, and he has perpetuated those
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.

[Footnote A: A collection of sixty-four of these sketches were published
at Paris in 1730. They are remarkable as delineations of mental character
in feature as strongly felt as if done under the direction of Larater
himself.--ED.]

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 the vergers. The habitual
meditation of genius combined 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 matter, and have ascertained the laws of attraction, by perceiving
that the same causes might perpetuate the regular motions of the planetary
system; who but a genius of this order, while viewing boys blowing
soap-bladders, could have discovered the properties of light and colours,
and then anatomised a ray? FRANKLIN, on board a ship, observing a partial
stillness in the waves when they threw down water which had been used for
culinary purposes, by the same principle 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 weather, or a landing
facilitated on a dangerous surf, by this solitary meditation of genius.

Thus meditation draws out of the most simple truths the strictness
of philosophical demonstration, converting even the amusements of
school-boys, or the most ordinary domestic occurrences, into the principle
of a new science. The phenomenon of galvanism was familiar 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 the
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 insidentibus
in fluido,_ still extant; and which a great mathematician admires both for
the strictness and elegance of the demonstrations. To as minute a domestic
occurrence as GALVANI'S we owe the steam-engine. When the Marquis 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 application 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 admiring 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
surprised by the appearance of the morning. SOCRATES sometimes remained a
whole day in immovable meditation, 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 enthusiasm, and renders everything that surrounds us as
distant 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 taken up a book, he sunk into a reverie; on his
return he declared that he had neither seen nor heard a single occurrence
in the public exhibition, which had passed unobserved before him. It has
been told of a modern astronomer, that one summer night, when he was
withdrawing 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 before it is late." He had gazed the
entire night in meditation, and was not aware of it. Abernethy 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
accuracy--that so eminently distinguished Newton from other men. It was
this power that enabled him to arrange 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 surrounding objects."

There is nothing incredible in the stories related of some 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 philosopher well describes it. The impressions from our
exterior sensations are often suspended by great mental excitement.
ARCHIMEDES, involved in the investigation of mathematical truth, and the
painters PROTOGENES and PARMEGIANO, found their senses locked up as it
were in meditation, so as to be incapable of withdrawing themselves from
their work, even in the midst of the terrors and storming of the place by
the enemy. MARINO was so absorbed in the composition of his "Adonis," that
he 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!
"Invention 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 HORNE,
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 Commentary on the Psalms. He alludes to himself in
the 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; and he can truly say, that food and
rest were not preferred before it. Every part improved 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 in progress, are alike finely described by MILTON in a
letter to his friend Diodati.

"Such is the character of my mind, that no delay, none of the ordinary
cessations for rest or otherwise, I had 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 the 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 excitement
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 from reverie.--The ideal presence distinguished from the real
presence.--The senses are really affected in 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-immolations.


We left the man of genius in the stillness of meditation. 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_
inadequately indicates. Metaphysical distinctions but ill describe it, and
popular language affords no terms for those 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 sensibility, when all
the senses are awakened by a mixture 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, apparently 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 exterior organs of sense are visibly
affected--they even break out into speech, and often accompany their
speech with gestures.

In this equivocal state the enthusiast of genius produces his
masterpieces. This waking dream is distinct from reverie, where, our
thoughts wandering without connexion, the faint impressions are so
evanescent as to occur without even being recollected. A day of _reverie_
is beautifully painted by ROUSSEAU as distinct from a day of _thinking_:
"J'ai des journées délicieuses, errant sans souci, sans projet, sans
affaire, de bois en bois, et de rocher en rocher, _rêvant toujours et ne
pensant point."_ Far 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 enraging himself that he might portray anger. Nor were these
creative gestures quite unknown to QUINTILIAN, who has nobly compared them
to the lashings of the lion's tail, rousing him to combat. Actors of
genius have accustomed 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 suspend 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.[A]

[Footnote A: The late Mrs. SIDDONS. She herself communicated this striking
circumstance to me.]

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 in words.

Has not the difference between an actual thing, and its image in a glass,
perplexed some philosophers? and it is well known how far the ideal
philosophy has been carried by so fine a genius as Bishop BERKELEY. "All
are pictures, alike painted on the retina, or optical sensorium!"
exclaimed the enthusiast BARRY, 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
vividness of the representative faculty, 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 ancient Greece. "The Last Judgment," the stupendous ideal
presence of MICHAEL ANGELO, seems to have communicated 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 my ears."

Cold and barren tempers without imagination, whose impressions of objects
never rise beyond those of memory 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: unblest with it, the votary will find each sacrifice lying cold
on the altar, for no accepting flame from heaven shall kindle it.

This enthusiasm indeed can only be discovered by men of genius themselves;
yet when most under its influence, 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 ourselves, in that case he would be a man in a state of
disenchantment, 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 will 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 degree. The
senses are more concerned in the ideal world than at first appears. The
idea of a thing will make us shudder; and the bare imagination of it will
often produce a real pain. A curious consequence may be deduced from this
principle; MILTON, lingering amid the freshness of nature in Eden, felt
all the delights of those elements which he was creating; his nerves moved
with the images which excited them. The fierce and wild DANTE, amidst the
abysses of his "Inferno," must often have 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 hears, he feels, by each. How mysterious to us is the
operation of this faculty!

A HOMER and a RICHARDSON,[A] like nature, open a volume large as life
itself--embracing a circuit of human existence! This state of the mind has
even a reality in it for the generality of persons. In a romance or a
drama, tears are often seen in the eyes of the reader or the spectator,
who, before 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.

[Footnote A: Richardson assembles a family about him, writing down what
they said, seeing their very manner of saying, living with them as often
and as long as he wills--with such a personal unity, that an ingenious
lawyer once told me that he required no stronger evidence of a fact in any
court of law than a circumstantial scene in Richardson.]

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 his _Olympiad_, found himself suddenly
moved--shedding tears. The imagined sorrows had inspired real tears; and
they afterwards proved contagious. Had our poet not perpetuated 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, without 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 traces behind them than those of reverie. A
circumstance accidentally preserved has informed us of the tremors of
DRYDEN after having written that ode,[A] which, as he confessed, he had
pursued without the power of quitting it; but these tremors were not
unusual with him--for in the preface to his "Tales," he tells 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."

[Footnote A: This famous and unparalleled ode was probably afterwards
retouched; but Joseph Warton discovered in it the rapidity of the
thoughts, and the glow and the expressiveness of the images; which are the
certain marks of the _first sketch_ of a master.]

We find Metastasio, like others of the brotherhood, susceptible of this
state, complaining of his sufferings during the poetical æstus. "When I
apply with attention, the nerves of my sensorium are put 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 calling on him, GRAY flung open his door
hastily, and in a hurried voice and tone, exclaiming in the first verse of
that ode--

  Hence, avaunt! 'tis holy ground!--

his friend started at the disordered appearance of the bard,
whose orgasm had disturbed his very air and countenance.

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 Tassot:--"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 whole had no connexion with myself. I sought for nothing
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 investigator 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.
Alluding to the famous "Transfiguration," our own RAFFAELLE says--"When I
have stood looking at that picture from figure to figure, the eagerness,
the spirit, the close unaffected attention of each figure to the principal
action, my thoughts have carried me away, that I have forgot myself; and
for that time might be looked upon as an enthusiastic madman; for I could
really fancy the whole action was passing before my eyes."

The effect which the study of Plutarch's Illustrious 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
raved 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 ungovernable, verging to madness. In traversing
the wilds of Arragon, his emotions would certainly have given birth to
poetry, could he have expressed himself in verse. It was a complete state
of the imaginative existence, or this ideal presence; for he proceeded
along the wilds of Arragon in a reverie, weeping and laughing by turns. He
considered 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 those dispositions of
mind and that energy of passion which form the poetical character.

Genius creates by a single conception; the statuary conceives the statue
at once, which he afterwards executes by the slow process of art; and the
architect contrives a whole palace in an instant. In a single principle,
opening as it were on a sudden 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
convulsively. It comes like a whispered secret from Nature. When
MALEBRANCHE first took up Descartes's Treatise on Man, the germ of his own
subsequent philosophic system, such was his intense feeling, that a
violent palpitation 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 Proso-popeia of Fabricius. "I still remember my solitary
transport at the discovery of a philosophical argument against the
doctrine of transubstantiation," exclaimed GIBBON in his Memoirs.

This quick sensibility of genius has suppressed the 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 voice
sunk in ill-articulated sounds from the bottom of his breast." The
tremulous figures of the ancient Sibyl appear to have been viewed in the
land of the Muses, by the energetic description which Paulus Jovius gives
us of the impetus and afflatus of one of the Italian improvvisatori, some
of whom, I have heard from one present at a similar exhibition, have not
degenerated in poetic inspiration, 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."[A]

[Footnote A: The passage is curious:--"Canenti defixi exardent oculi,
sudores manant, frontis venæ contumescunt, et quod mirum est, eruditæ
aures, tanquam alienæ et intentæ, omnem impetum profluentium numerorum
exactissimâ ratione moderantur."]

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 genius, his pencil in his hand, in calm enthusiasm sketching the
terrible world of waters--studying the wave that was rising to devour
him.[A]

[Footnote A: Vernet was the artist whose sea-ports of France still
decorate the Louvre. He was marine painter to Louis XV. and grandfather of
the celebrated Horace Vernet, whose recent death has deprived France of
her best painter of battle-scenes.--ED.]

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 described by one whose imagination had strayed into the occult
learning of antiquity, and in the hymns of Orpheus it seemed to him that
he had lifted the veil from Nature. His feelings were associated with her
loneliness. 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 venerable antiquity; at that moment, the world in silence and
the stars and moon only, watching me." This enthusiasm is confirmed by Mr.
Mathias, who applies this description 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 acknowledge 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 Anacharsis, when in Italy, would often
stop as if overcome by his recollections. Amid camps, temples, circuses,
hippodromes, and public and private edifices, 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 been a citizen of ancient Rome
travelling in the modern. So men of genius have roved amid the awful ruins
till the ideal presence has fondly built up the city anew, and have become
Romans in the Rome of two thousand years past. POMPONOIUS LETUS, who
devoted his life to this study, was constantly seen wandering amidst the
vestiges of this "throne of the world." There, in many a reverie, as his
eye 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.[A] Another enthusiast of this class was BOSIUS, 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 enthusiasm had inspired with
his own sympathy, here he dictated his notes, tracing the mouldering
sculpture, and catching the fading picture. Thrown back into the primitive
ages of Christianity, amid the local impressions, the historian of the
Christian catacombs collected the memorials of an age and of a race which
were hidden beneath the earth.[B]

[Footnote A: Shelley caught much of his poetry in wandering among the
ruins of the palace of the Cæsars on the Palatine Hill; and the
impression made by historic ruins on the mind of Byron is powerfully
evinced in his "Childe Harold."--ED.]

[Footnote B: A large number of these important memorials have been since
removed to the _Galleria Lapidaria_ of the Vatican, and arranged on the
walls by Marini. They are invaluable as mementoes of the early Church at
Rome. Aringhi has also devoted a work to their elucidation. The Rev. C.
Maitland's "Church in the Catacombs" is an able general summary, clearly
displaying their intrinsic historic value--ED.]

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 depended on the muse for
inspiration." His unwritten lecture was a reverie--till kindling in his
progress, blending science and imagination in the grandeur of his
conceptions, 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 fragments of bones, 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 sublime 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 which preceded the existence of his race, and of
thousands of animals that never were contemporaneous with his species_."
Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of
genius. Even in the practical part of a science, painful to the operator
himself, Mr. Abernethy 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 disgusting 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 universe."

This enthusiasm inconceivably fills the mind of genius in all great and
solemn operations. It is an agitation amidst calmness, and is required hot
only in the fine arts, but wherever a great and continued exertion of the
soul must be employed. The great ancients, who, if they were not always
philosophers, were always men of genius, saw, or imagined 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 rampart. View DE THOU, the historian, after his morning
prayers, imploring the Divinity to purify his heart from partiality and
hatred, and to open his spirit in developing the truth, amidst the
contending factions of his times; and HAYDN, employed in his "Creation,"
earnestly addressing the Creator ere he struck his instrument. In moments
like these, man becomes a perfect unity--one thought and one act,
abstracted 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 hack 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 all his honours about him, on the day of battle, at
the sight of those emblems of glory emulated himself. This enthusiasm was
necessary for his genius, and made it effective.

But this enthusiasm, prolonged as it often has been by the operation of
the imaginative existence, becomes a state of perturbed feeling, and can
only be distinguished from a disordered intellect by the power of volition
possessed 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 aberrations 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 exhaustion, confusion of ideas ensues, as
straining any one of our limbs by excessive exertion produces tremor and
torpor.

  With curious art the brain too finely wrought
  Preys on herself and is destroyed by Thought;
  Constant attention wears the active mind,
  Blots out her powers, and leaves a blank behind--
  The greatest genius to this fate may bow.

Even minds less susceptible than high genius may become overpowered by
their imagination. Often, in the deep silence around us, we seek to
relieve ourselves by some voluntary noise or action which may direct our
attention to an exterior object, and bring us back to the world, which we
had, as it were, left behind us. The circumstance is sufficiently
familiar; as well as another; that whenever we are absorbed in profound
contemplation, a startling noise scatters the spirits, and 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 terrible effect of metaphysical studies on BEATTIE has
been told by himself. "Since the 'Essay on Truth' was printed 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 nervous 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 folly. He flew to Genoa, leading a
life of delicious vacuity. To pass the day without doing anything, was all
the enjoyment he was now capable of feeling. But long after he said, "I
felt at that time, and have ever since continued to feel, the consequence
of that exhaustion of spirits I sustained in composing my sixteen
comedies."

The enthusiasm of study was experienced by 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 external objects appear to be passing in a dream.
BOERHAAVE 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 interesting 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 _hallucinatio 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 MALEBRANCHE listening to the voice of God
within him; and Lord HERBEBT, when, to know whether he should publish his
book, he threw himself on his knees, and interrogated the Deity in the
stillness of the sky.[A] And thus PASCAL started at times at a fiery gulf
opening by his side. SPINELLO 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 game ideal presence operated
on the religious painter ANGELONI, who could never represent 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
visionaries; and their illusions were as strong as SEEDENBORG'S, who saw a
terrestrial heaven in the glittering streets of his New Jerusalem; or
JACOB BEHMEN'S, who listened to a celestial voice till he 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 frequently contemplated "a
resplendent light hovering over his shadow."

[Footnote A: In his curious autobiography he has given the prayer he used,
ending "I am not satisfied whether I shall publish this book _de
veritate_; if it be for thy glory, I beseech thee give me some sign from
heaven; if not I shall suppress it." His lordships adds, "I had no sooner
spoken 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, that
I took my petition as granted, and that 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
superstitiously 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 my thinking see the place from whence it came."--ED.]

Such minds identified themselves with their visions! If we pass them over
by asserting that they were insane, we are only cutting the knot which we
cannot untie. We have no right to deny what some maintain, that a sympathy
of the corporeal with the incorporeal nature of man, his imaginative with
his physical existence, is an excitement which appears to have been
experienced by persons of a peculiar organization, and which
metaphysicians in despair must resign to the speculations of enthusiasts
themselves, though metaphysicians reason about phenomena far removed from
the perceptions of the eye. The historian of the mind cannot omit this
fact, unquestionable, however incomprehensible. According to our own
conceptions, this state must produce a strange mysterious personage: a
concentration of a human being within himself, endowed with inward eyes,
ears which listen to interior sounds, and invisible hands touching
impalpable objects, 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 himself 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
faculty 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."[A] The histories
of great visionaries, were they correctly detailed, would probably prove
how their delusions consisted of the ocular _spectra_ of their brain and
the accelerated sensations of their nerves. BAYLE has conjured 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 philosopher some unlucky trick.

[Footnote A: CHARLES BUTLER has drawn up a sensible essay on "Mystical
Devotion." He was a Roman Catholic. NORRIS, and Dr. HENRY MORE, and Bishop
BERKELEY, may be consulted by the curious.]

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 cases. 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 hypochondriacal melancholy, and appears to have meditated on
self-destruction; but it happened that he preserved his habit of dramatic
composition, and produced one of his most energetic dramas--that of
"Misanthropy and Repentance." He tells us that he had never experienced
such a rapid flow of thoughts and images, and he believed, what 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 them ideas have become realities, and suspicions
certainties; while events have been 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 housebreakers. 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 institutions from which he 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 betrayed 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 morgana_, that throws into the air a
pictured land, and the deceived eye trusts till 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 romantic tinge on the feelings, give no indifferent
promise of genius; of that generous temper which knowing nothing of the
baseness of mankind, with indefinite views carries on some glorious design
to charm 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 enthusiast, FÉNÉLON, 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 Piræus
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 luckless 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-immolation of men of genius. Mighty and laborious works have been
pursued, as a forlorn hope, at the certain destruction of the fortune of
the individual. Vast labours attest the enthusiasm which accompanied their
progress. Such men have sealed their works with their blood: they have
silently borne the pangs of disease; they have barred 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 his laboratory, preferred their busy solitude to the honours
and the invitations of Rodolphus II., there writing down what he daily
experienced during 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 fame 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 "Athenæ Oxonienses." MORERI, the
founder of our great biographical collections, conceived the design with
such enthusiasm, and found such seduction in the labour, that he willingly
withdrew from the popular celebrity he had acquired as a preacher, and the
preferment which a minister of state, in whose house he resided, would
have opened to his views.[A] 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 volume to the
world, though he did not live to witness even its publication. All objects
in life appeared mean to him, compared with that exalted delight of
addressing, to the 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!

[Footnote A: Louis Moreri was born in Provence in 1643, and died in 1680,
at the early age of 37, while engaged on a second edition of his great
work. The minister alluded to in the text was M. de Pomponne, Secretary of
State to Louis XIV. until the year 1679.--ED.]

The same enthusiasm inspires the pupils of art consumed by their own
ardour. The young and classical sculptor who raised the statue of Charles
II., 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 constitution: but he was willing, he said, to die at the
foot of his statue. The statue was raised, and the young sculptor, with
the shining eye and hectic flush of consumption, beheld it there--returned
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 the 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 struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain,
  No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
  View'd his own feather on the fatal dart,
  And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heart;
  Keen were his pangs, 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 by excessive
study, was entreated to abandon it, and in the scholastic language of the
day, not to _perdere substantiam propter accidentia_. With a smile the
martyr of study repeated a verse from Juvenal:

  Nec propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
  No! not for life lose that for which I live!

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 existence 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 Archytas, which
beautiful piece of mechanism, while other artists beheld flying, no one
could 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.




CHAPTER XIII.

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 sufferer, 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 LINNÆUS 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 palpable and definite than
intellectual excellence, jealousy does not appear so strongly to affect
the claimant for admiration. The most beautiful woman, in the season 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 XENOPHON, and why does XENOPHON inveigh against PLATO,
studiously collecting every little rumour which may detract from his fame?
They wrote on the same subject! 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 their friendship to
be interrupted 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 GOWER, 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
Corneille, the sweetness of Racine, and the fire of Crébillon? Why did
DRYDEN never speak of OTWAY with kindness 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 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 Petrarch
could behold the solitary Ætna 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 curious to observe Lord
SHAFTESBURY treating with the most acrimonious contempt the great writers
of his own times--Cowley, Dryden, Addison, and Prior. We cannot imagine
that his lordship was so entirely destitute of every feeling of wit and
genius as would appear by this damnatory criticism on all the wit and
genius of his age. It is not, indeed, difficult to comprehend a different
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 delusion, which can gratify no one but
himself.

The moral sense has often been found too weak to temper the malignancy of
literary jealousy, and has impelled some men of genius to an incredible
excess. A memorable example offers in the history of the two brothers, Dr.
WILLIAM and JOHN HUNTER, both great characters 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 youth, was received
by his brother at the height of his celebrity; the doctor initiated him
into his school; they performed their experiments together; and William
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 magnificent work--the proud favourite of
his heart, the assertor of his fame. Was it credible 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
brothers--the brothers of genius.

Such, too, was the jealousy which separated AGOSTINO and ANNIBAL CARRACCI,
whom their cousin LUDOVICO for so many years had attempted to unite, and
who, during the time their academy existed, worked together, combining
their separate powers.[A] The learning and the philosophy of Agostino
assisted the invention of the master genius, Annibal; but Annibal was
jealous of the more literary and poetical character of Agostino, and, by
his sarcastic humour, 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 scornful, immediately
broke with him; and their patron, Cardinal Farnese, was compelled to
separate the brothers. Their fate is striking: Agostino, divided from his
brother Annibal, sunk into dejection and melancholy, and perished by a
premature death, while Annibal closed his days not long after in a state
of distraction. The brothers of Nature and Art could not live together,
and could not live separate.

[Footnote A: See an article on the Carracci in "Curiosities of
Literature." vol. ii.]

The history of artists abounds with instances of jealousy, perhaps more
than that of any other class of men of genius. HUDSON, the master of
REYNOLDS, could not endure the sight of his rising pupil, and would not
suffer him to conclude the term of his apprenticeship; while 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
madness of jealousy, BARRY one day addressing Sir Joshua on his lectures,
burst out, "Such poor flimsy stuff as your discourses!" clenching his fist
in the agony of the convulsion. After the death of the great artist, BARRY
bestowed on him the most ardent eulogium, and deeply grieved over the
past. But the race of genius born too "near the sun" have found their
increased sensibility flame into crimes of a deeper dye--crimes attesting
the treachery and the violence of the professors of an art which, it
appears, in softening the souls of others, does not necessarily mollify
those of the artists themselves. The dreadful story of ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO
seems not doubtful. Having been taught the discovery of painting in oil by
Domenico Venetiano, yet, still envious of the merit of the generous friend
who had confided that great secret to him, Andrea with his own hand
secretly assassinated him, that he might remain without a rival. The
horror of his crime only appeared in his confession on his death-bed.
DOMENICHINO seems to have been poisoned for the preference he obtained
over the Neapolitan artists, which raised them to a man against him, and
reduced him to the necessity of preparing his food With his own hand. On
his last return to Naples, Passeri says, "_Non fu mai più veduto da buon
occhio da quelli Napoletani: e li Pittori lo detestavano perchè egli
era ritornato--mori con qualche sospetto di veleno, e questo non è
inverisimile perchè l'interesso è un perfido tiranno_." So that the
Neapolitans honoured Genius at Naples by poison, which they might have
forgotten had it flourished at Rome. The famous cartoon of the battle
of Pisa, a work of Michael Angelo, which he produced in a glorious
competition with the Homer of painting, Leonardo da Vinci, and in which he
had struck out the idea of a new style, is only known by a print which has
preserved the wonderful composition; for the original, it is said, was cut
into pieces by the mad jealousy of BACCIO BANDINELLI, whose whole life was
made miserable by his consciousness of a superior rival.

In the jealousy of genius, however, there is a peculiar case where the
fever silently consumes the sufferer, without possessing the malignant
character of the disease. Even the gentlest temper declines under its slow
wastings, and this infection may happen among dear friends, whenever a man
of genius loses that self-opinion which animates his solitary labours and
constitutes his happiness. Perhaps when at the height of his class, he
suddenly views himself eclipsed by another genius--and that genius his
friend! This is the jealousy, not of hatred, but of despair. Churchill
observed the feeling, but probably included in it a greater degree of
malignancy than I would now 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 fix
  More sense than I 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?[A]

ADDISON experienced this painful and mixed emotion in his intercourse
with POPE, to whose rising celebrity he soon became too jealously
alive.[B] It was more tenderly, but not less keenly, felt by the Spanish
artist CASTILLO, a man distinguished by every amiable disposition. He was
the great painter of Seville; but when some of his nephew MURILLO'S
paintings were shown to him, he stood in meek astonishmont before them,
and turning away, he exclaimed with a sigh--"_Yà murio Castillo_!"
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 excellences 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.

[Footnote A: The plain motive of all these dislikes is still more amusing,
as given in this couplet of the same poem:--

  "If with such genius heaven has blest 'em,
  Have I not reason to detest 'em."--ED.]

[Footnote B: See article on Pope and Addison in "Quarrels of Authors." ]




CHAPTER XIV.

Want of mutual esteem among men of genius often originates in a deficiency
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 originates in a deficiency of analogous ideas, or
of sympathy, in the parties. On this principle, several curious phenomena
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
Créibillon; the refining Marivaux the familiar Molière. Fielding ridiculed
Richardson, whose manner so strongly contrasted with his own; and
Richardson contemned Fielding, and declared he would not last. Cumberland
escaped a fit of unforgiveness, not living to read his own character by
Bishop Watson, whose logical head tried the lighter elegancies of that
polished man by his own nervous genius, destitute of the beautiful in
taste. There was no envy in the breast of Johnson when he advised Mrs.
Thrale not to purchase "Gray's Letters," as trifling and dull, no more
than there was in Gray himself when he sunk the poetical character of
Shenstone, and debased his simplicity and purity of feeling by an image of
ludicrous contempt. I have heard that WILKES, a mere wit and elegant
scholar, used to treat GIBBON as a mere bookmaker; and applied to that
philosophical historian the verse by which Voltaire described, with so
much caustic facetiousness, the genius of the Abbé Trablet--

  Il a compilé, compilé, compilé.

The deficient sympathy in these men of genius for modes of feeling
opposite to their own was the real cause of their opinions; and thus it
happens that even superior genius is so often liable to be unjust and
false in its decisions.

The same principle operates still more strikingly in the remarkable
contempt of men of genius for those pursuits which require talents
distinct from their own, and a cast of mind thrown by nature into another
mould. Hence we must not be surprised at the poetical antipathies of
Selden and Locke, as well as Longuerue and Buffon. Newton called poetry
"ingenious nonsense." On the other side, poets undervalue the pursuits of
the antiquary, the naturalist, and the metaphysician, forming their
estimate by their own favourite scale of imagination. As we can only
understand in the degree we comprehend, and feel in the degree in which we
sympathize, we may 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 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 unfortunate
translator of Camoens suffered from the person to whom he dedicated "The
Lusiad." The Duke of Buccleugh was the pupil 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 polite literature condemned the study of botany, as adapted
to mediocrity of talent, and only demanding patience; but LINNÆUS 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 antiquarianism, in natural history, and similar pursuits. The
prejudices 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 PEIRESC, whose enthusiasm 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 so universal a sensation.

Madame DE STÄEL 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
reciprocal annoyance. The scholar has nothing to say to the poet, the
poet to the naturalist; and even among men of science, those who are
differently 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 be 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 ignorant 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 intolerable
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-maker among men; and the other a rhymer, nauseously _doucereux_.
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 determination to avoid
henceforward two such disagreeable companions.




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.


Vanity, egotism, a strong sense of their own sufficiency, form another
accusation against men of genius; but the complexion of self-praise must
alter with the occasion; 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 anything to be done, who are so
much displeased with self-lauding, self-love, self-independence,
self-admiration, which with the man of genius may often be 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. We 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 aliment. Our effeminate minds are the
willing dupes 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 "polished 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 complexion come out. What
subterfuges are resorted to by these pretended modest men of genius, to
extort that praise from their private circle which is thus openly denied
them! They have been taken by surprise enlarging their own panegyric,
which might rival Pliny's on Trajan, for care and copiousness; or
impudently veiling themselves with the transparency of a third person; 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
feminine susceptibility. The love of praise is instinctive in their
nature. Praise with them is the evidence of the past and the pledge of the
future. The generous qualities and the virtues of a man of genius are
really produced by the applause conferred on him. "To him whom the world
admires, the happiness of the world must be dear," said Madame DE STÄEL.
ROMNEY, the painter, held as a maxim that every diffident artist required
"almost a daily portion of cheering applause." How often do such find
their powers paralysed by the depression of confidence or the appearance
of neglect! When the North American Indians, amid their circle, chant
their gods and their heroes, the honest savages laud the living worthies,
as well as their departed; and when, as we are told, an auditor hears the
shout of his own name, he answers by a cry of pleasure and of pride. The
savage and the man of genius are here true to nature, but pleasure and
pride in his own name must raise no emotion in the breast of genius amidst
a polished circle. To bring himself down to their usual mediocrity, he
must start at an expression of regard, and turn away even from one of his
own votaries. Madame De Stäel, an exquisite judge of the feelings of the
literary character, was aware of this change, which has rather occurred in
our manners than in men of genius themselves. "Envy," says that eloquent
writer, "among the Greeks, existed sometimes between rivals; it has now
passed to the spectators; and by a strange singularity the mass of men are
jealous of the efforts which are tried to add to their pleasures or to
merit their approbation."

But this, it seems, is not always the case with men of genius, since the
accusation we are noticing has been so often reiterated. Take from some
that supreme confidence in themselves, that pride of exultation, and you
crush the germ of their excellence. Many vast designs must have perished
in the conception, had not their authors breathed this vital air of
self-delight, this creative spirit, so operative in great undertakings. We
have recently seen this principle in the literary character unfold itself
in the life of the late Bishop of Landaff. Whatever he did, he felt it was
done as a master: whatever he wrote, it was, as he once declared, the best
work on the subject yet written. With this feeling he emulated Cicero in
retirement or in action. "When I am dead, you will not soon meet with
another JOHN HUNTER," said the great anatomist to one of his garrulous
friends. An apology is formed by his biographer for relating the fact, but
the weakness is only in the apology. When HOGARTH was engaged in his work
of the _Marriage à-la-Mode_, he said to Reynolds, "I shall very soon
gratify the world with such a sight as they have never seen equalled."
--"One of his foibles," adds Northcote, "it is well known, was the
excessive high opinion he had of his own abilities." So 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?
CORNEILLE has given a very noble full-length of the sublime egotism which
accompanied him through life;[A] but I doubt, if we had any such author in
the present day, whether he would dare to be so just to himself, and so
hardy to the public. 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
terminated 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.

[Footnote A: See it versified in "Curiosities of Literature," vol. i. p.
431.]

Nor is the vanity of Buffon, and Voltaire, and Rousseau purely national;
for men of genius in all ages have expressed a consciousness of the
internal force of genius. 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.[A] There is a
curious passage in the "Purgatorio" 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:--

  Così ha tolto l'uno all'altro Guido
  La gloria della lingua; e _forse è nato
  Chi l'uno e l'altro caccerà di nido_.

  Thus has one Guido from the other snatch'd
  The letter'd pride; _and he perhaps is born
  Who shall drive either from their nest_.[B]

[Footnote A: See "Quarrels of Authors," p. 471.]

[Footnote B: Cary.]

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, 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
experience 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 posterity 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 observer like
myself." He truly predicts that "his discoveries would be verified in
succeeding ages," and prefers 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 exciting envy in others." The sage seems to
consider self-praise as a kind of illustrious impudence, and has one very
striking image: he compares these eulogists to famished persons, who
finding no other food, in their rage have eaten their own flesh, and thus
shockingly nourished themselves by their own substance. He allows persons
in high office to praise themselves, if by this they can repel calumny and
accusation, as did Pericles before the Athenians: but the Romans found
fault with Cicero, who so frequently reminded them of his exertions in the
conspiracy of Catiline; while, when Scipio told them that "they should not
presume to judge of a citizen to whom they owed the power of judging all
men," the people covered themselves with flowers, and followed him to the
capitol to join in a thanksgiving to Jove. "Cicero," adds Plutarch,
"praised himself without necessity. Scipio was in personal danger, and
this took away what is odious in self-praise." An author seems sometimes
to occupy the situation of a person in high office; and there may be
occasions when with a noble simplicity, if he appeal to his works, of
which all men may judge, he may be permitted to assert or to maintain his
claims. It has at least been the practice of men of genius, for in this
very essay we find Timotheus, Euripides, and Pindar censured, though they
deserved all the praise they gave themselves.

EPICURUS, writing to a minister of state, declares, "If you desire glory,
nothing can bestow it more than the letters I write to you:" and SENECA,
in quoting these words, adds, "What Epicurus promised to his friend, that,
my Lucilius, I promise you." _Orna me!_ was the constant cry of CICERO;
and he desires the historian Lucceius to write separately the conspiracy
of Catiline, and to publish quickly, that while he yet lived he might
taste the sweetness of his glory. HORACE and OVID wore equally sensible to
their immortality; but what modern poet would be tolerated with such an
avowal? Yet DRYDEN honestly declares that it was better for him to own
this failing of vanity, than the world to do it for him; and adds, "For
what other reason have I spent my life in so unprofitable a study? Why am
I grown old in seeking so barren a reward as fame? The same parts and
application which have made me a poet might have raised me to any honours
of the gown." Was not CERVANTES very sensible to his own merits when a
rival started up? and did he not assert them too, and distinguish his own
work by a handsome compliment? LOPE DE VEGA celebrated his own poetic
powers under the pseudonyme of a pretended editor, Thomas Barguillos. I
regret that his noble biographer, than whom no one can more truly
sympathise with the emotions of genius, has censured the bard for
his querulous or his intrepid tone, and for the quaint conceit of his
title-page, where his detractor is introduced as a beetle in a _vega_ or
garden, attacking its flowers, but expiring in the very sweetness he would
injure. The inscription under BOILEAU'S portrait, which gives a preference
to the French satirist over Juvenal and Horace, is known to have been
written by himself. Nor was BUTLER less proud of his own merits;
for he has done ample justice to his "Hudibras," and traced out, with
great self-delight, its variety of excellences. RICHARDSON, the novelist,
exhibits one of the most striking instances of what is called literary
vanity, the delight of an author in his works; he has pointed out all the
beauties of his three great works, in various manners.[A] He always taxed
a visitor by one of his long letters. It was this intense self-delight
which produced his voluminous labours.

[Footnote A: I have observed them in "Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii.
p. 64.]

There are certain authors whose very existence seems to require a high
conception 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 peculiar tastes, or with a predilection for
some great work of no immediate interest; in a word, with many unpopular
dispositions. Yet we see them magnanimous, though defeated, proceeding
with the public feeling against them. At length we view them ranking with
their rivals. Without having yielded up their peculiar tastes or their
incorrigible viciousness, they have, however, heightened their individual
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 applied to himself when
addressing a king. "I know," said the great philosopher, "that I am
censured of some conceit of my ability or worth; but I pray your majesty
impute 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
reputation, 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 passed 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 himself
in this work, for which you accuse his pride? Has he dared what required
intrepidity to achieve? Has he 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, is 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 PERCIVAL STOCKDALE. After a parallel between himself and
Charles XII. of Sweden, he concludes that "some parts will be to _his_
advantage, and some to _mine_;" but in regard to fame, the main object
between himself and Charles XII., Percival imagined that "his own will not
probably take its fixed and immovable station, and shine with its expanded
and permanent splendour, till it consecrates 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."[A] 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.

[Footnote A: I have sketched a character of PERCIVAL STOCKDALE, in
"Calamities of Authors" (pp. 218--224); it was taken _ad vivum_.]

It is hard to refuse these men of genius that _aura vitalis_, of which
they are so apt to be liberal to others. Are they not accused of the
meanest adulations? When 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 Romæ!

"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 Æneid, 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 censure. I have elsewhere fully
shown how some have died of criticism.[A] 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 sudden transitions of sentiment
which literary characters have frequently exhibited. They have eulogised
men and events which they had reprobated, and reprobated what they had
eulogised. The recent history of political revolutions has furnished some
monstrous examples of this subservience to power. Guicciardini records one
of his 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 country, 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 better than Pontanus, who
was endowed with such copious literature, and composed with such facility
in moral philosophy, and possessed such acquirements in universal
erudition, that he had made himself a prodigy to the eye of the world."[B]
The student, occupied by abstract pursuits, 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,[C] who
supplied its place by another to Charles II., ought not to be placed to
the account of political tergiversation. 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 to save themselves from ingratitude to their old.

[Footnote A: In the article entitled "Anecdotes of Censured Authors," in
vol. i. of "Curiosities of Literature."]

[Footnote B: Guicciardini, Book II.]

[Footnote C: For the melancholy history of this devoted scholar, see note
to the article on "The Rewards of Oriental Students," in "Calamities of
Authors," p. 189.]

Their vengeance, as quickly kindled, lasts as long. Genius is a dangerous
gift of nature. The same effervescent passions form a Catiline or a
Cicero. 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 enmities of genius are often connected with their
morbid imagination. These originate in casual slights, or in unguarded
expressions, or in hasty opinions, or in witty derision, or even in the
obtruding goodness of tender admonition. The man of genius broods over the
phantom that darkens his feelings: he multiplies 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 inconsiderate jocularity sat down before the Count, and
ordered the prince to pull off his boots. The Count would not affect
greatness, and having executed his commission, in return for the princely
amusement, the Count dashed the boot on Comines' nose, which bled; and
from that time, he was mortified at the court of Burgundy, by retaining
the nickname of _the booted head._ The blow rankled in the heart of the
man of genius, and the Duke of Burgundy has come down to us in COMINE'S
"Memoirs," blackened by his vengeance. Many, unknown 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 Waldegrave'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
written 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]

[Footnote A: See "Calamities of Authors," pp. 131--139.]

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,
"No one now-a-days writes like that great poet." Never was this to be
erased from memory: the stifled resentment of MONTI vehemently broke forth
at the moment the French carried 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!"

The French Revolution affords illustrations of the worst human passions.
When the wretched COLLOT D'HERBOIS was tossed up in the storm to the
summit of power, a monstrous imagination seized him; he projected razing
the city of Lyons and massacring its inhabitants. He had even the heart to
commence, and to continue this conspiracy against human nature; the
ostensible crime was royalism, but the secret motive is said to have been
literary vengeance! As wretched a poet and actor as a man, D'Herbois had
been hissed off the theatre 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 André, 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 he found among his brother's manuscripts.
"Fratricide from literary jealousy," observes the relator of this
anecdote, "was a crime reserved for a modern French revolutionist."[A]
There are some pathethic stanzas which André was composing in his last
moments, when awaiting his fate; the most pathetic of all stanzas is that
one which he left unfinished--

  Peut-être, avant que l'heure en cercle promenée
     Ait posé, sur l'émail brillant,
  Dans les soixante pas où sa route est bornée,
     Son pied sonore et vigilant,
  Le sommeil du tombeau pressera ma paupière--

At this unfinished stanza was the pensive poet summoned to the guillotine!

[Footnote A: _Edinburgh Review_, xxxv. 159]




CHAPTER XVI.

The domestic life of genius.--Defects 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 neglect of those around them.--Often
accused of imaginary crimes.


When the temper and the leisure of the literary character 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 sensible in
their operation than the 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 infelicities 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 revising 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 avocations of a busy and unsettled life,
which undoubtedly produced a deficiency of method in the disposition of
the materials of his great work. The careless rapid lines of DRYDEN
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 encumbered 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, abandoned his
comic talent for several years; and having resumed it, his first comedy
totally failed: "My head," says he, "was occupied with my professional
employment; I was uneasy in mind and in bad humour." A lawsuit, 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
distractions of GUIDO'S studies from his passion for gaming, and of
PARMEGIANO'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 excellence 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 and affection. In no other period of my life
have the same happy circumstances combined to cheer me in any of my
literary labours."

The best years of MENGS' life were embittered by his father, a poor
artist, and who, with poorer feelings, converted his home into a
prison-house, forced his son into the slavery of stipulated task-work,
while bread and water were the only fruits of the fine arts. In this
domestic persecution, the son contracted those morose and saturnine
habits which in after-life marked the character of the ungenial MENGS.
ALONSO CANO, a celebrated Spanish painter, would have carried his art to
perfection, had not 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 unhappiness 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
faculties. After the loss of two wives, whom he regarded with no common
affection, he became unfitted for profound 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 interest. The reason
which ROUSSEAU alleges for the cynical spleen which 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 disagreeable 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 very occupation." 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 subservience 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 feelings,
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 delight on his variety, which resembled the fruits in the
garden of Armida--

  E mentre spunta l'un, l'altro mature.
  While one matures, the 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 remain inexplicable to him who knows not to escape from the
listlessness of life--it is the passion for literary occupation. He whose
eye can only measure the space occupied by the voluminous labours of the
elder Pliny, of a Mazzuchelli, a Muratori, a Montfaucon, and a Gough, all
men who laboured 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 uninteresting pursuits; and,
in these folios, how many 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
Ælian-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 avaricious 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 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 similar 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 indolence.[A] These are the minds which are
without hope if they are without occupation.

[Footnote A: This appears in one of his interesting letters first
published in the _Literary Gazette_, 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 accession of Henry VII.,; and he
engages to give me 1400_l_. for the copy. This 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 employed. It is chiefly as a resource against idleness that I
shall undertake 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."]]

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 domestic 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 painful to her modesty, for it was not a public one. Nor was
it so concise as to be mistaken for a compliment. The theme was copious,
for the heart overflowed in the pages consecrated 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 NECKER's _Comte rendu au Roi_, a political and financial work, a great
and lovely character of domestic excellence in his wife. This was more
obtrusive 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 friends, he declares they owed him to his
father:--

                 --purus et insons
  (Ut me collaudem) si vivo et carus amicis,
  Causa fuit Pater his.

  If pure and innocent, if dear (forgive
  These little praises) to my friends I live,
  My 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, anxiously attending on him to his various
masters. GROTIUS, like Horace, celebrated in verse his gratitude to his
excellent father, who had formed him not only to be a man of learning, but
a great character. VITRUVIUS pours forth a grateful prayer to the memory
of his parents, who had instilled into his soul a love for literary and
philosophical 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 raillery, the Sage of Cheronæa has immortalised.
The father of GIBBON urged him to literary distinction, and the dedication
of the "Essay on Literature" to 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.[A]


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.[B] 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!"

[Footnote A: 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.]

[Footnote B: It still exists in the gardens of the old château at
Montbard. It is a pillar of marble bearing this inscription:--"Excelsæ
turris humilia columna, Parenti suo filius Buffon. 1785."--ED.]

Fathers absorbed in their occupations can but rarely attract their
offspring. The first durable impressions 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 tenderness. The
earnest discernment of a mother's love survives in the imagination of
manhood. The mother of Sir WILLIAM JONES, having formed a plan for the
education of her son, withdrew from great connexions that she might live
only for that son. Her great principle of education, was to excite by
curiosity; the result could not fail to be knowledge. "Read, and you will
know," she constantly 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 attainments. KANT, the German metaphysician,
was always fond of declaring that he owed to the ascendancy of his
mother's character the severe inflexibility of his moral principles. The
mother of BURNS 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
influence on his habits,"--as happy, at least, as his own volatile 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 entirely 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 cherish 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.[A] One of
our most eminent antiquaries has often assured me that his great passion,
and I may say his genius, for his curious knowledge and his vast
researches, he attributes to maternal affection. When his early taste for
these studies was thwarted by the very different one of his father, the
mother silently supplied her son with the sort of treasures he languished
for, blessing the knowledge, which indeed she could not share with him,
but which she beheld imparting happiness to her youthful antiquary.

[Footnote A: 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.]

There is, what may be called, FAMILY GENIUS. In the home of a man of
genius is diffused an electrical atmosphere, and his own pre-eminence
strikes out talents in all. "The active pursuits of my father," says the
daughter of EDGEWORTH, "spread an animation through the house by
connecting children with all that was going on, and allowing them to join
in thought 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 commemorated Evelyn's love of books and
gardens, has delightfully applied them to his lady, in whom, says the
bard, 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 his roof; and
their studious delight in transcribing manuscripts, in consulting authors,
in botanising, drawing and colouring the plants under his eye, formed
occupations which made the daughters happy and the sons eminent.[A] The
painter STELLA inspired his family to copy his fanciful inventions, 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 pencil. The artist has represented himself in the act of
suspending 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 the late ELIZABETH HAMILTON were formed entirely by her brother.
Admiring the man she loved, 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 evening
conversations, was recalling all the ideas, and pourtraying her fraternal
master in her "Hindoo Rajah."

[Footnote A: Haller's death (A.D. 1777) was as remarkable for its calm
philosophy, as his life for its happiness. He was a professional surgeon,
and continued to the last an attentive and rational observer of the
symptoms of the disease which was bringing him to the grave. He
transmitted to the University of Gottingen a scientific analysis of his
case; and died feeling his own pulse.--ED.]

Nor are there wanting instances where this FAMILY GENIUS has been carried
down through successive generations: the volume of the father has been
continued by a son, or a relative. The history of the family of the
ZWINGERS is a combination of studies and inherited tastes. Theodore
published, in 1697, a folio herbal, of which his son Frederic gave an
enlarged edition in 1744; and the family was honoured by their name having
been given to a genus of plants dedicated to their memory, and known in
botany by the name of the _Zwingera_. In history and in literature, the
family name was equally eminent; the same Theodore continued a great work,
"The Theatre of Human Life," which had been begun by his father-in-law,
and which for the third time was enlarged by another son. Among the
historians of Italy, it is delightful to contemplate this family genius
transmitting 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 distinguish the
numerous members, they have been designated as Henry I. and Henry II.,--as
Robert I., the II., and the III.[A] Our country may exult in having
possessed many literary families--the WARTONS, the father and two sons:
the BURNEYS, more in number; and the nephews of Milton, whose humble torch
at least was lighted at the altar of the great bard.[B]

[Footnote A: For an account of them and their works, see "Curiosities of
Literature," vol, i. p. 76.]

[Footnote B: The Phillips.]

No event in literary history is more impressive than the fate of
QUINTILIAN; it was in the midst of his elaborate work, which was composed
to form the literary character of a son, that he experienced the most
terrible affliction in the domestic life of genius--the successive deaths
of his wife and his only child. It was a moral earthquake with a single
survivor amidst the ruins. An awful burst of parental and literary
affliction breaks forth in Quintilian's lamentation,--"My wealth, and my
writings, the fruits of a long and painful life, must now be reserved only
for strangers; all I possess is for aliens, and no longer mine!" We feel
the united agony of the husband, the father, and the man of genius!

Deprived of these social consolations, we see JOHNSON call about him those
whose calamities exiled them from society, and his roof lodges the blind,
the lame, and the poor; for the heart must possess something it can call
its own, to be kind to.

In domestic life, the Abbé DE ST. PIERRE enlarged its moral vocabulary, by
fixing in his language two significant words. One served to explain the
virtue most familiar to him--_bienfaisance_; and that irritable vanity
which magnifies its ephemeral fame, the sage reduced to a mortifying
diminutive--_la gloriole!_

It has often excited surprise that men of genius are not more reverenced
than other men in their domestic circle. The disparity between the public
and the private 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 genius
returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of
life, his companions behold 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 generous openness about them, do not meet
on equal terms with other men. Their frequent abstractions calling off the
mind to whatever enters into its lonely pursuits, render them greatly
inferior to others in practical and immediate observation. Studious men
have been reproached as being so deficient in the knowledge of the human
character, that they are usually disqualified for the management of public
business. Their confidence in their friends has no bound, while they
become the easy dupes of the designing. A friend, 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 this
literary man, to free himself from his annoyance; and yet Cumberland could
not be reproached with any deficiency in a knowledge of the human
character, which he was always touching with caustic pleasantry.

ADDISON and PRIOR were unskilful statesmen; and MALESHERBES confessed, a
few days before his death, that TURGOT and himself, men of genius and
philosophers, from whom the nation had expected much, had badly
administered the affairs of the state; for "knowing men but by books, and
unskilful in business, we could not form the king to the government." A
man of genius may know the whole map of the world of human nature; but,
like the great geographer, may be apt to be lost in the wood which any one
in the neighbourhood knows better than him.

"The conversation 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, avoids too deep a commingling in the
minor cares of life. Hence 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 myself the slave to the minute affairs of a 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 interrupted student. BACON sat at one end of
his table wrapt in many a reverie, while at the other the creatures about
him were trafficking with his honour, and ruining his good name: "I am
better fitted for this," said that great man once, holding out a book,
"than for the life I have of late led. Nature has not fitted me for that;
knowing myself by inward calling to be fitter to hold a book than to play
a part."

BUFFON, who consumed his mornings in his old tower of Montbard, at the end
of his garden,[A] with all nature opening to him, formed all his ideas of
what was passing before him from the arts of a pliant Capuchin, and the
comments of a perruquier on the scandalous chronicle of the village. These
humble confidants he treated as children, but the children were commanding
the great man! YOUNG, whose satires give the very anatomy of human
foibles, was wholly governed by his housekeeper. She thought and acted for
him, which probably greatly assisted the "Night Thoughts," but his curate
exposed the domestic economy of a man of genius by a satirical novel. If I
am truly informed, in that gallery of satirical portraits in his "Love of
Fame," YOUNG has omitted one of the most striking--his OWN! While the
poet's eye was glancing from "earth to heaven," he totally overlooked the
lady whom he married, and who soon became the object of his contempt; and
not only his wife, but his only son, who when he returned home for the
vacation from Winchester school, was only admitted into the presence of
his poetical father on the first and the last day; and whose unhappy life
is attributed to this unnatural neglect:[B]--a lamentable domestic
catastrophe, which, I fear, has too frequently occurred amidst the ardour
and occupations of literary glory. Much, too much, of the tender
domesticity of life is violated by literary characters. All that lives
under their eye, all that should be guided by their hand, the recluse and
abstracted men of genius must leave to their own direction. But let it not
be forgotten, that, if such neglect others, they also neglect themselves,
and are deprived of those family enjoyments for which few men have warmer
sympathies. While the literary character burns with the ambition of
raising a great literary name, he is too often forbidden to taste of this
domestic intercourse, or to indulge the versatile curiosity of his private
amusements--for he is chained 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 to 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 by all
who devote themselves to letters, whether with a view to emolument or to
fame; nor would it perhaps be easy to make it, were it not for the
prospect (seldom, alas! realised) of earning by their exertions that
learned and honourable leisure which he was so fortunate as to attain."

[Footnote A: For some account of this place, see the chapter on "Literary
Residences" in vol. iii. p. 395, of "Curiosities of Literature."]

[Footnote B: These facts are drawn from a manuscript of the late Sir
Herbert Croft, who regretted that Dr. Johnson would not suffer him to give
this account during the doctor's lifetime, in his Life of Young, but which
it had always been his intention to have added to it.]

But men of genius have often been accused of imaginary crimes. Their very
eminence attracts the lie of calumny, which tradition often conveys beyond
the possibility of refutation. Sometimes they are reproached as wanting in
affection, when they displease their fathers by making an obscure name
celebrated. The family of DESCARTES lamented, as a blot in their
escutcheon, that Descartes, who was born a gentleman, should become a
philosopher; and this elevated genius was refused the satisfaction of
embracing an unforgiving parent, while his dwarfish brother, with a mind
diminutive as his person, ridiculed his philosophic relative, and turned
to advantage his philosophic disposition. The daughter of ADDISON was
educated with a perfect contempt of authors, and blushed to bear a name
more illustrious than that of all the Warwicks, on her alliance to which
noble family she prided herself. The children of MILTON, far from solacing
the age of their blind parent, became impatient for his death, embittered
his last hours with scorn and disaffection, and combined to cheat and rob
him. Milton, having enriched our national poetry by two immortal epics,
with patient grief blessed the single female who did not entirely abandon
him, and the obscure fanatic who was pleased with his poems because they
were religious. What felicities! what laurels! And now we have recently
learned, that the daughter of Madame DE SÉVIGNÉ lived on ill terms
with her mother, of whose enchanting genius she appears to have been
insensible! The unquestionable documents are two letters hitherto
cautiously secreted. The daughter was in the house of her mother when an
extraordinary letter was addressed to her from the chamber of Madame de
Sévigné after a sleepless night. In this she describes, with her peculiar
felicity, the ill-treatment she received from the daughter she idolised;
it is a kindling effusion of maternal reproach, and tenderness, and
genius.[A]

[Footnote A: Lettres inédites de Madame de Sévigné, pp. 201 and 203.]

Some have been deemed disagreeable companions, because they felt the
weariness of dulness, or the impertinence of intrusion; described as bad
husbands, when united to women who, without a kindred feeling, had the
mean art to prey upon their infirmities; or as bad fathers, because their
offspring have not always reflected the moral beauty of their own page.
But the magnet loses nothing 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 relative quality.--Of the poverty
of literary men in what degree desirable.--Extreme poverty.--Task-work.
--Of gratuitous works.--A project to provide against the worst state of
poverty among literary men.


Poverty is a state not so fatal to genius, as it is usually conceived to
be. We shall find that it has been sometimes voluntarily chosen; and that
to connect too closely great fortune with great genius, creates one of
those powerful but unhappy alliances, where the one party must necessarily
act contrary to the interests of the other.

Poverty is a relative quality, like cold and heat, which are but the
increase or the diminution in our own sensations. The positive idea must
arise from comparison. There is a state of poverty reserved even for the
wealthy man, the instant that he comes in hateful contact with the
enormous capitalist. But there is a poverty neither vulgar nor terrifying,
asking no favours and on no terms receiving any; a poverty which
annihilates its ideal evils, and, becoming even a source of pride, will
confer independence, that first step to genius.

Among the continental nations, to accumulate wealth in the spirit of a
capitalist does not seem to form the prime object of domestic life. The
traffic of 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 spirit, and things are valued by a market-price
which naturally admits of no such appraisement. In a country where "The
Wealth of Nations" has been fixed as the first principle of political
existence, wealth has raised an aristocracy more noble than nobility, more
celebrated than genius, more popular than patriotism; but however it may
partake at times of a generous nature, it hardly looks beyond 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 to accumulate a large fortune; but I do not lament the mediocrity
of my circumstances in France." The sources of our national wealth have
greatly multiplied, and the evil has consequently increased, since the
visit 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 those monastic orders, beneath whose undisturbed
shade were produced the mighty labours of a MONTFAUCON, a CALMET, a
FLOREZ, and the still unfinished volumes of the BENEDICTINES. Often has
the literary character, amidst the busied delights of study, sighed "to
bid a farewell sweet" to the turbulence of society. It was not discontent,
nor any undervaluing of general society, but the pure enthusiasm of the
library, which once induced the studious EVELYN to sketch a retreat of
this nature, which he addressed to his friend, the illustrious BOYLE. He
proposed to form "A college where persons 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."[A] This abandonment of their life to
their genius has, indeed, often cost them too dear, from the days of
SOPHOCLES, who, ardent in his old age, neglected his family affairs, and
was brought before his judges by his relations, as one fallen into a
second childhood. The aged poet brought but one solitary witness in his
favour--an unfinished tragedy; which having read, the judges rose before
him, and retorted the charge on his accusers.

[Footnote A: This romantic literary retreat is one of those delightful
reveries which the elegant taste of EVELYN abounded with. It may be found
at full length in the fifth volume of Boyle's Works, not in the second, as
the Biog. Brit. says. His lady was to live among the society. "If I and my
wife take up two apartments, for we are to be decently asunder, however I
stipulate, and her inclination will greatly suit with it, that shall be no
impediment to the society, but a considerable advantage to the economic
part," &c.]

A parallel circumstance occurred to the Abbé COTIN, the victim of a rhyme
of the satirical Boileau. Studious, 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. Dragged from his Hebrew and Greek, poor Cotin
resolved to make over his entire fortune to one of his heirs, on condition
of maintenance. His other relations assuming that a man who parted with
his estate in his lifetime must necessarily be deranged, brought the
learned Cotin into court. Cotin had nothing to say in his own favour, but
requested his judges would allow him to address them from the sermons
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 fortune
which had only interrupted 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
genius. GOLDONI, 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 a
parent of the modern literary 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
historian, and living only for literature, he sacrificed to it the two
great acquisitions of human pursuits--fortune and a family: but in what
country had Bayle not a family and a possession in his fame? HUME and
GIBBON had the most perfect conception of the literary character, and they
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." GIBBON
observed of himself--"Perhaps the golden mediocrity of my fortune has
contributed to fortify my application."

The state of poverty, then, desirable in the domestic life of genius, is
one in which the cares of property never intrude, and the want of wealth
is never perceived. This is not indigence; that state which, however
dignified the man of genius himself may be, must inevitably degrade! for
the heartless will gibe, and even the compassionate turn aside in
contempt. This literary outcast 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 Egestas
  Terribiles visu formæ.

Not that in this history of men of genius we are without illustrious
examples of those who have even _learnt to want,_ that they might
emancipate their 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
BARRRY, who finding himself too constant a haunter of taverns, imagined
that this expenditure of time was occasioned 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,[A] and one of the noblest inventions
in his art--a great poem in a picture--with no other resource than what
he found by secret labours through the night, in furnishing the shops with
those slight and saleable sketches which secured uninterrupted mornings
for his genius. SPINOSA, a name as celebrated, and perhaps as calumniated,
as Epicurus, lived in all sorts of abstinence, even of honours, of
pensions, and of presents; which, however disguised by kindness, he would
not accept, so fearful was this philosopher of a chain! Lodging in a
cottage, and obtaining a livelihood by polishing optical glasses, he
declared he had never spent more than he earned, and certainly thought
there was such a thing as superfluous earnings. At his death, his small
accounts showed how he had subsisted on a few pence a-day, and

  Enjoy'd, spare feast! a radish and an egg.

[Footnote A: His series of pictures for the walls of the meeting-room of
the Society of Arts in the Adelphi.--ED.]

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, ANQUETIL DE PERRON, is a recent example of the literary
character carrying his indifference to privations to the very cynicism of
poverty; and he seems to exult over his destitution with the same pride as
others would expatiate over their possessions. Yet we must not forget, to
use the words of Lord Bacon, that "judging that means were to be spent
upon learning, and not learning to be applied to means," DE PERRON refused
the offer of thirty thousand livres for his copy of the "Zend-avesta."
Writing to some Bramins, 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 of probity. In a perpetual
war with my senses, I triumph over the attractions of the world or I
contemn them."

This ascetic existence is not singular. PARINI, a great 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, non nato a percotere
  Le dure illustri porte,
  Nudo accorra, ma libero
  Il regno della morte.

Naked, but free! A life of hard deprivations was long that of the
illustrious LINNÆUS. Without fortune, to that great mind it never seemed
necessary to acquire any. Perigrinating on foot with 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
perpetual want--that of completing his Flors. Not that LINNÆUS was
insensible to his situation, for he gave his name to a little flower in
Lapland--the _Linnæa Borealis,_ from the fanciful analogy he discovered
between its character and his own early fate, "a little northern plant
flowering early, depressed, 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 genius 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 their
minds.[A]

Yes! Genius, undegraded and unexhausted, may indeed even in a garret glow
in its career; but it must be on the principle which induced ROUSSEAU
solemnly to renounce writing "_par métier_." This in the _Journal de
Sçavans_ he once attempted, but found himself quite inadequate to "the
profession."[B] In a garret, the author of the "Studies of Nature," as he
exultingly tells us, 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. But there I enjoyed the most
exquisite pleasures of my life, amid profound solitude and an enchanting
horizon. There I put the finishing hand to my 'Studies of Nature,' and
there I published them." Pope, one day taking his usual walk with Harte
in the Haymarket, desired him to enter a little shop, where going up three
pair of stairs into a small room, Pope said, "In this garret AUDISON
wrote his 'Campaign!'" To the feelings of the poet this garret had become
a consecrated spot; Genius seemed more itself, placed in contrast with its
miserable locality!

[Footnote A: Spagnoletto, while sign-painting at Rome, attracted by his
ability the notice of a cardinal, who ultimately gave him a home in his
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.]

[Footnote B: Twice he repeated this resolution. See his Works, vol. xxxi,
p. 283; vol. xxxii. p. 90.]

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 literary character was as deeply associated with his feelings, and the
"reverence thyself" as present to his mind, when doomed to be one of the
_Helots_ of literature, by Osborn, Cave, and Miller, as when, in the
honest triumph of Genius, he repelled a tardy adulation of the lordly
Chesterfield. Destitute of this ennobling principle, the author sinks into
the tribe of those rabid adventurers of the pen who have masked the
degraded form of the literary character under the assumed title of
"authors by profession"[A]--the GUTHRIES, the RALPHS, and the AMHURSTS[B].
"There are worse evils for the literary man," says a living author, who
himself is the true model of the great literary character, "than neglect,
poverty, imprisonment, 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.

[Footnote A: From 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 unblushingly avowed, required the sanction of a
respectable designation. I have preserved it in "Calamities of Authors."]

[Footnote B: For some account of these men, see "Calamities of Authors."]

In substituting fortune for the object of his designs, the man of genius
deprives himself of those heats of inspiration reserved for him who lives
for himself; the _mollia tempora fandi_ of Art. If 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 subjects, 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 thirst 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 sonnets he pathetically
laments this compulsion of his necessities which forced him to the trade
of pleasing the public; and he illustrates this degradation by a novel
image. "Chide Fortune," cries the bard,--

  The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds,
  That did not better for my life provide
  Than public means which public manners breeds;
  Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
  _And almost thence my nature is subdued
  To what it works in_, LIKE THE DYER'S HAND.

Such is the fate of that author, who, in his variety of task-works, blue,
yellow, and red, lives without ever having shown his own natural
complexion. 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 itself, like a hart to the
waterbrooks; in the other, it pursues its miserable way, panting and
jaded, with the dogs of hunger and necessity behind."[A] We trace the fate
of all task-work in the history of POUSSIN, when called on to reside at
the French court. Labouring without intermission, sometimes on one thing
and sometimes on another, and hurried on in things which required both
time and thought, he saw too clearly the fatal tendency of such a life,
and exclaimed, with 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 regain the possession of his own thoughts.

[Footnote A: _Quarterly Review_, vol. viii. p. 538.]

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 suspicious
in its character, were it less interested in one of its prevalent motives?
Some noble self-denials of this kind are recorded. The principle of
emolument will produce the industry which furnishes works for popular
demand; but it is only the principle of honour which can produce the
lasting works 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 Cicero to the world, requiring no other remuneration than
its glory. MILTON did not compose his immortal work for his trivial
copyright;[A] and LINNÆUS sold his labours for a single ducat. The Abbé
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 pay it. The property of a book, therefore,
represents to the literary candidate the collective force of the thousands
of voters on whose favour his claims can only exist. This change in the
affairs of the literary republic in our country was felt by GIBBON, who
has fixed on "the patronage 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 philosopher 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 perhaps in Europe,
we cannot refrain from thinking that the "patronage of booksellers" is
frequently injurious to the great interests of literature.

[Footnote A: The agreement made with Simmons, the publisher, was 5_l_.
down, and 5_l_. 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 Dawson
Turner.--ED.]

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 interest excited by its
productions within the last century, it has not essentially altered their
situation 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
inevitable fate of the material and the manufacturer. An eleemosynary fund
can provide no permanent relief for the age and sorrows of the unhappy men
of science and literature; and an author may even have composed a work
which shall be read by the next generation as well as the present, and
still be 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 that genius had to alleviate the forlorn
state of the literary character.[A]

[Footnote A: It was the late Sir WALTER SCOTT--if I could assign the
_date_ of this conversation, it would throw some light on what might be
then passing in his own mind.]

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 talents was that of a _public
or a private teacher_, or by communicating to other people the various and
useful knowledge 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
insensible 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, but its
annihilation. His friends Hume and Robertson must have turned from this
page humiliated and indignant. They could have supplied Adam Smith with a
truer conception of the literary character, of its independence, 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 practicable, as I
believe it to be, that authors and men of letters could themselves 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 trade, and that the great capitalists in
the book business have not been men of literature. But this plan is not
suggested for accumulating a great fortune, or for the purpose of raising
up a new class of tradesmen. It is not designed to make authors wealthy,
for that would inevitably 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 elegant editions which issued from his 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 expatriated literary men flew to the shores of England, and the
free provinces of Holland; and it was in Holland that this colony of
_littérateurs_ 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 that
memorable period in our own history, when two thousand nonconformists 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 compelled to look
to some profitable occupation, and for the greater part they fixed on
trades connected with literature; some became eminent booksellers, and
continued to be voluminous writers, without finding their studies
interrupted by; their commercial arrangements. The details 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
booksellers.

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 opinions 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 class of literature in which he deals, will himself
be not the least eminent member.




CHAPTER XVIII.

The matrimonial state of literature.--Matrimony said not to be well suited
to the domestic life of genius.--Celibacy a concealed cause of the early
querulousness 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.


Matrimony has often been considered as a condition not well suited to the
domestic life of genius, accompanied as it must 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 sufficient 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 Paradise, remain." The three
Caraccis refused the conjugal bond on the same principle, dreading the
interruptions of domestic life. Their crayons and paper were always on
their dining-table. Careless of fortune, they determined 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 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 married 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 espoused 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 single 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 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 experience told him,

  "Never durst poet touch 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 usually been the
concealed cause of the querulous melancholy of the literary character.

Such was the real occasion 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 years. 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 songs and elegies flowed from
no fictitious source. "It is long since," said he, "I have considered
myself as _undone_. The world will not perhaps consider me in that light
entirely till I have married my maid."[A]

[Footnote A: The melancholy tale of Shenstone's life is narrated in the
third volume "Curiosities of Literature,"--ED.]

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 made little acquainted with this part of the history of the poet of
the "Seasons," I shall give his own description of those deep feelings
from a manuscript letter written to Mallet. "To turn my eyes a softer way,
to you know who--absence sighs it to me. What is my heart made of? a soft
system of low nerves, too sensible for my quiet--capable 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, but she
dwells upon my thought in a mingled sentiment, which is the sweetest, the
most intimately pleasing the soul can receive, and which I would wish
never to want towards some dear object or another. To have always some
secret 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
of. 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;" and, as Johnson observed,
"polluted his will with female resentment." 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." Even in his 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
the polar sun--too far removed to warm us. Those who have eluded the
individual tenderness of the female, are 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 with a lover's care;
    Though the pride of my desire
  Asks 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;
  Yet at the eve my lonely breast
  _Seeks in vain for 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
republicanism, 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 witness
to the self-tormentor who had trodden down the natural bonds of domestic
life. Hence the deep "dejection of his spirits;" those incessant cries,
that he has "no one to advise, assist, or cherish those magnanimous
pursuits 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 interest 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 to sustain, in _body 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!
  Thy joys no glittering female meets,
  No hive hast thou of hoarded 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 demonstrate 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 occasion to
deduce her husband's versatility. If she become as jealous of his books as
other wives might be of his mistresses, she may act the virago even over
his innocent papers. 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 magnificent edition of St. Chrysostom, led a very uneasy
life between the saint and her ladyship. What with her tenderness for him,
and her own want of amusement, Saint 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 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
afflicted that great artist with many sorrows. He had married a beauty of
high birth and extreme 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 to provide and dress his own food. It is
believed that he died of poison. What a picture has Passeri left of the
domestic interior of this great artist! _Così fra mille crepacuori mori
uno de' più eccellenti artefici del mundo; che oltre al suo valore
pittorìco avrebbe più d'ogni altri maritato di viver sempre per l'onestà
personale._ "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 the 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 made as ill choices in their wives, were for
divorcing as fast as they had been for marrying, calling themselves
_Miltonists_.

When we find that MOLIÈRE, so skilful in human life, married a girl from
his own troop, who made him experience all those bitter disgusts and
ridiculous embarrassments which he himself played off 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 character 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.[A] 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 would have
more closely united us in retirement. We should not then have felt the
intolerable tedium of a tête-à-tête; 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.

[Footnote A: See "Curiosities of Literature," for anecdotes of "Literary
Wives."]

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 peasant. 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
spreading their family honours into more ages than perhaps 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 declamatory 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 overcame the orgasm of the German bard,
merely by persisting in her admiration and her patience. When the burst
was over, Wieland himself was so charmed by her docility, 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 prospect of a
bishopric opened on him, "more servants, more entertainments, a better
table, &c.," it became necessary to look out for "some clever, sensible
woman to be his wife, who would lay out his money to the best advantage,
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 discover a constitutional
faculty of docility 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 equally objects of attainment to their delightful
susceptibility. Love has the fancied transparency of the cameleon. When
the art of government directed the feelings of a woman, 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 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 literary 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 imagination; 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 Hollers, the wife of Klopstock, 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 at the birth of the young verses, which begin by fragments, 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 sometimes 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 descended to us, touched
by the domestic pencil of genius, in the susceptible CALPHUENIA, 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 gradually impairs, but my reputation and my
glory, of which she is enamoured."

I have been told that BUFFON, notwithstanding his favourite seclusion of
his old tower in his garden, acknowledged 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 disappointment, 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 history 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
favourite arts, drawing, painting, etching, and poetry, his wife would
often reanimate 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 with the most feeling imagination. This forms the
rareness 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 _la librairie_.[A] Her correspondence with her son, a young
artist travelling for his studies, opens what an old poet comprehensively
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.

[Footnote A: Gesner's father was a bookseller of Zurich; descended from a
family of men learned in the exact sciences, he was apprenticed to a
bookseller at Berlin, and afterwards entered into his father's business.
The best edition of his "Idylls" is that published by himself, in two
volumes, 4to, illustrated by his own engravings.--ED.]

To know this incomparable woman we must hear her. "Consider your father's
precepts as oracles of wisdom; 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 employments
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 constant 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 frequently remarked, with some regret,
the excessive attachment 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; but in an
artist, who has a great object in view, and whose country is the whole
world, this disposition seems to be 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 superiority 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 send 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 confidence 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 mind, while yet young and flexible, may
receive whatever impressions you wish. Be careful that your abilities do
not inspire in you too much confidence, lest it should happen to you as it
has to many others, that they have never possessed any greater merit than
that of having good abilities."

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

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




CHAPTER XIX.

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


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

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

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

A beautiful picture of such a friendship among men of genius offers itself
in the history of MIGNARD, the great French painter, and DU FRESNOY, the
great critic of the art itself. DU FRESNOY, abandoned in utter scorn
by his stern father, an apothecary, for his entire devotion to his
seductive art, lived at Rome in voluntary poverty, till MIGNARD, his old
fellow-student, arrived, when they became known by the name of "the
inseparables." The talents of the friends were different, but their
studios 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 sheltered them, and one table supplied their sober meal. Light were
the slumbers which closed each day, each the pleasing image of the former.
But this remarkable friendship was not a simple sentiment which limited
the views of "the Inseparables," for with them it was a perpetual source
of mutual usefulness. They gave accounts to each other of whatever they
observed, and carefully noted their own defects. DU FRESNOY, so critical
in the theory of the art, was unsuccessful in the practical parts. His
delight in poetical composition had retarded the progress of his pictorial
powers. Not having been taught the handling of his pencil, he worked with
difficulty; but MIGNARD succeeded in giving him a freer command and a more
skilful touch; while DU FRESNOY, who was the more literary man, enriched
the invention of MIGNARD by reading to him an Ode of Anacreon or Horace, a
passage from the Iliad or Odyssey, or the Æneid, or the Jerusalem
Delivered, which offered subjects for the artist's invention, who would
throw out five or six different sketches on the same subject; a habit
which so highly improved the inventive powers of MIGNARD, that he could
compose a fine picture with playful facility. Thus they lived-together,
mutually enlightening each other. MIGNARD supplied DU FRESNOY with all
that fortune had refused him; and, when he was no more, perpetuated his
fame, which he felt was a portion of his own celebrity, by publishing his
posthumous poem, _De Arts Graphica;_[A] a poem, which Mason has made
readable by his versification, and Reynolds even interesting by his
invaluable commentary.

[Footnote A: La Vie de Pierre Mignard, par L'Abbé de Monville, the work of
an amateur.]

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

  Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights!
  How oft unwearied have we spent the nights,
  Till the Ledæan stars, so famed for love,
  Wonder'd at us from above.
  We spent them not in toys, in lust, or wine;
    But search of deep philosophy,
    Wit, eloquence, and poetry;
  Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine.

Touched by a personal knowledge of this union of genius and affection,
even MALONE commemorates, with unusual warmth, the literary friendships of
Sir Joshua Reynolds; and with a felicity of fancy, not often indulged, has
raised an unforced parallel between the bland wisdom of Sir Joshua and the
"mitis sapientia Laeli." "What the illustrious Scipio was to Laelius was
the all-knowing and all-accomplished BURKE to REYNOLDS;" and what the
elegant Laelius was to his master Panaetius, whom he gratefully protected,
and to his companion the poet Lucilius, whom he patronised, was REYNOLDS
to JOHNSON, of whom he was the scholar and friend, and to GOLDSMITH, whom
he loved and aided[A].

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

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
tears in this sad duty of scattering flowers on his tomb; but the shade of
my extinct friend warns me not to be satisfied with dropping flowers and
tears--they are useless; and I would rather accomplish his wishes, in
making known the author and his works."

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

Such friendship can never be the lot of men of the world; for the source
of these lies in the interior affections and the intellectual feelings.
FONTENELLE describes with characteristic delicacy the conversations of
such literary friends: "Our days passed like moments; thanks to those
pleasures, which, however, are not included in those which are commonly
called pleasures." The friendships of the men of society move on the
principle of personal interest, but interest can easily separate the
interested; or they are cherished to relieve themselves from the
listlessness of existence; but, as weariness is contagious, the contact of
the propagator is watched. Men of the world may look on each other with
the same countenances, but not with the same hearts. In the common mart of
life intimacies may be found which terminate in complaint and contempt;
the more they know one another, the less is their mutual esteem: the
feeble mind quarrels with one still more imbecile than itself; the
dissolute riot with the dissolute, and they despise their companions,
while they too have themselves become despicable.

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

  The wise new wisdom from the wise acquire.

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

Politics once divided Boccaccio and Petrarch. The poet of Valchiusa had
never forgiven the Florentines for their persecution of his father. By the
mediation of BOCCACCIO they now offered to reinstate PETRARCH in his
patrimony and his honours. Won over by the tender solicitude of his
friend, 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 promises seduced PETRARCH to
their court; a court, the avowed enemy of Florence. BOCCACCIO, for the
honour of literature, 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 momentary 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 country, when he thus vehemently addressed
his brother-genius:--

"I would be silent, but I cannot: my reverence commands silence, but my
indignation speaks. How has it happened that Silvanus (under this name he
conceals Petrarch) 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 Silvanus, who once branded _Il Visconti_ as the Cruel, a Polyphemus, a
Cyclop, has avowed himself his friend, and placed his neck under the yoke
of him whose audacity, 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? Am I to conclude that you accepted
this favour from a disdain of your fellow-citizens, who once indeed
scorned you, but who have reinstated you in the paternal patrimony of
which you have been deprived? I do not disapprove of a just indignation;
but I take Heaven to witness 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 him by your arm, nor by your counsel; yet how
can you avoid rejoicing with him, when you bear of the ruins, the
conflagrations, the imprisonments, 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 patriotism:
and it is worthy of our notice that PETRARCH, whose personal injuries from
an ungenerous republic were rankling in his mind, and whom even the
eloquence of Boccaccio could not disunite from his protector Visconti, yet
received the ardent reproaches of his friend without anger, though not
without maintaining the freedom of his own opinions. PETRARCH replied,
that the anxiety of BOCCACCIO for the liberty of his friend was a thought
most grateful to him; but he assured Boccaccio that he preserved 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, a tyrant
like Visconti, or with Boccaccio, a people of tyrants[A].

[Footnote A: These interesting letters are preserved in Count Baldelli's
"Life of Boccaccio," p. 115.]

The unity of feeling is displayed in such memorable associates as BEAUMONT
and FLETCHER; whose labours are so combined, that no critic can detect the
mingled production 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 CHARRON, in the eyes of posterity, are rivals; but such
literary 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 Charrot 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 Moro mihi 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 generous, when CHARLES
COTTON continued the feelings, rather than the little work of Walton.
METASTASIO and FARINELLI called each other _il Gemello_, the Twin: and
both delighted to trace the resemblance of their lives and fates, and 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 physiognomy,
natural magic, the cryptical arts of writing, and projected many curious
inventions which astonished his age, and which we have carried to
perfection. This extraordinary 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 disturbed him; and Peiresc, in an
interesting account of a visit to this celebrated Neapolitan, observed,
that though now aged and grey-haired, he treated his younger brother as a
son. These single-hearted brothers, who would not marry that they might
never be 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 disorder, which
Fugere had watched by his side, in silent despair. The sight 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[A]. The Abbé de St. Pierre gave an interesting proof
of literary friendship for Varignon, the geometrician. They were of
congenial dispositions, and St. Pierre, when 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, was 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 not give it
you," said St. Pierre, "as a salary but as an annuity, that you may be
independent, and quit me when you dislike me." The same circumstance
occurred 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 literary friend
attacked, although not in the habit of composition, he published a defence
of his poetical and philosophical 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 patron's name should be inscribed by the side of the literary
character: for the public incurs an obligation whenever a man of genius is
protected.

[Footnote A: This event is thus told by Southey: "The news of Churchill's
death was somewhat abruptly announced to Lloyd as he sat at dinner; he was
seized with a sudden sickness, and saying, 'I shall follow poor Charles,'
took to his bed, from which he never 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, and genius, and to have been betrothed to Lloyd, attended him
during his illness, and, sinking under the double loss, soon followed her
brother and her lover to the grave."--ED.]

The statesman Fouquet, deserted by all others, witnessed 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 sneaking train,
  And all the obliged desert, and all the vain,
  They wait, or to the scaffold, or the cell,
  When the last lingering friend has bid farewell.

Literary friendship is a sympathy not of manners, but of feelings. The
personal character may happen to be very opposite: the vivacious may be
loved by the melancholic, 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 bond
of union. POMPONIUS LAETUS, so called from his natural good-humour, was
the personal friend of HERMOLATTS BARBABUS, whose saturnine and melancholy
disposition he often exhilarated; the warm, impetuous LUTHER, was the
beloved friend of the mild and amiable MELANCTHON; the caustic BOILEAU was
the companion of RACINE and MOLIERE; 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 WARBURTON[A]. No men could be more
opposite in personal character than the careless, gay, and hasty STEELE,
and the cautious, serious, and the elegant ADDISON; yet no literary
friendship was more fortunate than their union.

[Footnote A: For a full account of their literary career see the first
article in "Quarrels of Authors."]

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 characters; but too true
it is, that they have not always contributed 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 Klopstock; 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 tenderness in the reproach!
What self-accusation in its modesty!




CHAPTER XX.

The 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
appearances 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 discoverable 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-homme" has not left on record a
single ingenious amour of his own. The Queen of NAVARRE'S Tales are
gross imitations 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. FORTIGUERRA, the author of
the Ricciardetto, abounds with loose and licentious descriptions, and yet
neither his manners nor his personal character were stained by the
offending freedom of his inventions. SMOLLETT'S character is immaculate;
yet he has described two scenes which offend even in the license of
imagination. COWLEY, who boasts with such gaiety of the versatility of his
passion among so many mistresses, wanted even the confidence to address
one. Thus, licentious writers may be very chaste persons. The imagination
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 spoilers 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 observation of
Plutarch. LUCIAN, 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, offer 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
persecutor, 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 head, but never reached his heart[A]. Cardinal
RICHELIEU wrote "The Perfection of a Christian, or the Life of a
Christian;" yet was he an utter stranger to Gospel maxims; 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 himself realising
the political monster of Machiavel!

[Footnote A: See what is said on this subject in the article on Sterne in
the "Literary Miscellanies," of the present volume.]

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 that HORACE was a happy man because his verses were
cheerful, any more than he could think POPE so, because the poet is
continually informing us of it. It surprised Spence when Pope told him
that ROWE, 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 he had nothing
of that peculiarity in his character. YOUNG, 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, who greatly
admired his sublime poetry, expressing her surprise at his social
converse, he replied, "Madam, there is much difference between writing and
talking."

MOLIERE, on the contrary, whose humour is so perfectly comic, and
even ludicrous, was thoughtful and serious, and even melancholy. His
strongly-featured physiognomy exhibits the face of a great tragic, rather
than of a great comic, poet. Boileau called Molière "The Contemplative
Man." Those who make the world laugh often themselves laugh the least. A
famous and witty harlequin of France was overcome with hypochondriasm, and
consulted a physician, who, after inquiring about his malady, 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 of "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.[A]

[Footnote A: It is reported of him that his only mode of alleviating his
melancholy was by walking from his college at Oxford to the bridge, to
listen to the rough jokes of the bargemen.]

Could one have imagined that the brilliant wit, the luxuriant raillery,
and the fine and deep sense of PASCAL, could have combined with the most
opposite qualities--the hypochondriasm and bigotry of an ascetic?
ROCHEFOUCAULD, 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 contrast to the Cardinal de Retz, who has presumed
to censure 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 impassioned character, the son amply showed that
his father was by 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. 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
heroes should be lovers; Corneille had nobly 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; but he was a subtle and
epigrammatic observer, before whom his convivial friends 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 so little into his habitual feelings, that, 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 formidable, 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 lion. Men of genius frequently substitute 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 personal 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, 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;"[A] while Sir GEORGE
MACKENZIE, who had been continually in the bustle 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; but this
retired philosopher was a friend to the freedom of his country; he
participated in none of the crimes he had recorded, but 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 temper, and has
been thus characterised:--

  Testie Drummond could not speak for fretting.

[Footnote A: Since this was written the correspondence of EVELYN has
appeared, by which we find that he apologised to Cowley for having
published this very treatise, which seemed to condemn that life of study
and 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 suppose its principles formed his private opinions. Thus
LEIBNITZ, we are told, laughed at the fanciful system revealed in his
_Theodicée_, 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 proof of the force of imagination.]

Thus authors and artists may yield no certain indication of their personal
characters in their works. Inconstant 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 extraordinary
sentiments which they put into the mouths of their dramatic personages are
maliciously to be applied to themselves. EURIPIDES was accused of atheism
when he introduced a denier of the gods on the stage. MILTON has been
censured by CLARKE for the impiety of Satan; and an enemy of SHAKSPEARE
might have reproached him for his perfect delineation of the accomplished
villain Iago, as it was said that Dr. MOORE was hurt in the opinions 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 existing between the literary and personal
dispositions of an author. CREBILLON, who exulted, on his entrance into
the French Academy, that he had never tinged his pen with the gall of
satire, delighted to strike on the most harrowing string of the tragic
lyre. In his _Atreus_ the father drinks the blood of his son; in his
_Rhadamistus_ 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:--"Car j'ai une singulière curiosité de connaître
l'âme et les naïfs jugemens de mes auteurs. Il faut bien juger leur
suffisance, mais non pas leurs moeurs, ni eux, par cette montre de leurs
écrits qu'ils étalent au théatre 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 not of their manners, nor
of themselves, by that show of their writings which they display on the
theatre of the world." This is very just; are we yet sure, however, that
the 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
was not quite so open in respect to those simple details which he imagined
might diminish his personal importance 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 attendant of an independent gentleman, and
lives in an old family château; when the fact was, that his whole revenue
did not exceed six thousand livres, a state beneath mediocrity. He is also
equally careful not to drop any mention of his having a _clerk with a
bag_; 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 resigned it to _Marshal_ Matignon. Could he have
discovered 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, particular 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 instant; 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 infallible church! The mass was performed in his
chamber, 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 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 honourable 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 genius 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 completed 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 difficult. 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.

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 conviction than
their misconceptions, in our own consciousness, which for ever assures us,
that deep feelings and elevated 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 habits of the mind.[A] The influence of their studies over
men of genius is limited. Out of the ideal world, man is reduced to be the
active creature of sensation. An author 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 character. We see men of
polished manners and bland affections, who, in grasping a pen, are
thrusting a poniard; while others in domestic life with the simplicity of
children and the feebleness of nervous affections, can shake the senate or
the bar with the vehemence of their eloquence and the intrepidity of their
spirit. The writings 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 be the habit of the constitution.

[Footnote A: Nothing is more delightful to me in my researches on the
literary character than when I find in persons of unquestionable and high
genius the results of my own discoveries. This circumstance has frequently
happened to confirm my principles. Long after this was published, Madame
de Staël made this important confession in her recent work, "Dix Années
d'Exil," p. 154. "Je ne pouvais me dissimuler que je n'étais pas une
persoune courageuse; j'ai de la hardiesse dans _l'imagination,_ mais de la
timidité dans la _caractère_."]

However the personal character may contrast with that of their genius,
still are the works themselves genuine, 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 convert 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 that the phlegmatic can
excite himself into wit, and the cheerful man delight in "Night Thoughts."
SALLUST, the corrupt Sallust, might retain the most sublime conceptions of
the virtues which were to save the Republic; and STERNE, whose heart was
not so susceptible in ordinary occurrences, 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 virtue they
contemplated, mortified at their own infirmity. Thus, though there may be
no identity between the book and the man, still for us an author is ever
an abstract being, and, as one of the Fathers said--"A dead man may sin
dead, leaving books that make others sin." An author's wisdom or his folly
does not die with him. The volume, not the author, is our companion, and
is for us a real personage, performing before us whatever it inspires--"He
being dead, yet speaketh." Such is the vitality of a book!




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 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 OF LETTERS--a title which,
with us, has 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 distinguished 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, appears 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 epicurean selfishness, and
amidst his incessant avocations he himself 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 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 curiosity 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 restricted to particular subjects.
His tastes are tinctured by their colouring, his 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 maturity of
composition, and still the ambition of authorship torments its victim
alike in disappointment or in possession.

But soothing is the solitude of the MAN OF LETTERS! View the busied
inhabitant of the library surrounded by the objects of his love! He
possesses them--and they possess him! These volumes--images of our mind
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 requires, 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 seems revealed as in a vision. Often his library
is contiguous to his chamber,[A] and this domain "_parva sed apta_," this
contracted space, has often marked the boundary of the existence of the
opulent owner, who lives where he will die, contracting his days into
hours; and a whole life thus passed is found too short to close its
designs. Such are the men who have not been unhappily described by the
Hollanders as _lief-hebbers_, lovers or fanciers, and their collection as
_lief-hebbery_, things of their love. The Dutch call everything for which
they are impassioned _lief-hebbery_; but their feeling being much stronger
than their delicacy, they apply the term to everything, 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 indiscriminate notion which most persons associate with that of
_collectors_.

[Footnote A: The contiguity of the CHAMBER to the LIBRARY 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 _amateurs_, who had
bounded their lives by the circle of their collections, and were rarely
seen out of them. The late Duke of ROXBURGH once expressed his delight to
a literary friend of mine, that he had only to step from his sleeping
apartment into his fine library; so that he could command, at all moments,
the gratification of pursuing his researches while he indulged his
reveries. The Chevalier VERHULST, of Bruxelles, of whom 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 years; where, however, he kept up a courteous intercourse with the
lovers of art and literature. He was an enthusiastic votary of Rubens, of
whom he has written a copious life in Dutch, the only work he appears to
have composed.]

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 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 artists, 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 discovered a new-found world. Fox's favourite line, which
he often repeated, was--

  How various his employments whom the world
  Calls idle!

De Sacy, one of the Port-Royalists, was fond of repeating 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 interrupted without inconvenience, and resumed without
effort; yet if the painful realities of life break into this visionary
world of literature and art, there is an atmosphere of taste about him
which will be dissolved, and harmonious 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; everything which surrounds them becomes endeared by habit,
and by some higher associations. Men of letters have died with grief from
having been forcibly deprived of the use of their libraries. DE THOU, with
all a brother's sympathy, in his great history, has recorded the sad fates
of several who had witnessed 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 locked up my library from
me," was his lament.

If this passion 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 balance in the scales the treasures of literature and art,
though imperial magnificence once was ambitious to outweigh 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 collection,
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 diamonds. Our
_lief-hebber_ 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 formed, and
compared with which gold, pearls, and diamonds, afforded but a mean, an
unequal, and a barbarous barter.

If the man of letters be less dependent on others for the very perception
of his own existence than men of the world are, his solitude, however, is
not that of a desert: for all there tends to keep alive those concentrated
feelings which cannot be indulged with security, or even without ridicule
in general society. Like the Lucullus of Plutarch, he would not only live
among the votaries of literature, but would live for them; he throws open
his library, his gallery, and his cabinet, to all the Grecians. Such men
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 institutions,
where they have poured out the philanthropy of their hearts in that world
which they appear to have forsaken. 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, Florence, and Copenhagen, Oxford, and London, attest the
existence of their labours. Our BODLEYS and our HARLEYS, our COTTONS and
our SLOANES, our CRACHERODES, our TOWNLEYS, and our BANKS, were of this
race![A] 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 acquisitions of a solitary man of letters during
half a century have become public endowments. A generous enthusiasm
inspired these intrepid labours, and their voluntary privations of what
the world calls its pleasures and its honours, would form an interesting
history not yet written; their due, yet undischarged.

[Footnote A: Sir Thomas Bodley, in 1602, first brought the old libraries
at Oxford 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 Sloane's collections may be said to be the foundation of the British
Museum, and were purchased by Government for 20,000_l_., after his death,
in 1749. Of Cracherode and Townley some notice will be found on p. 2 of
the present volume. Sir Joseph Banks and his sister made large bequests to
the same national establishment.--ED.]

But "men of the world," as they are emphatically distinguished, 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 genius."[A]

[Footnote A: "Quarterly Review," No. xxxiii. p. 145.]

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, prefer
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 future.
"Everything," says the lively Burnet, "must be brought to the nature of
tinder or gunpowder, ready for a spark to set it on fire," before they
discover it. The man of letters indeed is accused of a cold indifference
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 celebrity
for a passion 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 blameable, induced you to adopt
an honourable leisure; _honestum otium_."[A] These motives appear in the
interesting memoirs of this man of letters; a contempt of political
intrigues combined with a desire to escape from the splendid bustle of
Rome to the learned leisure of Athens. He wished to dismiss a pompous
train of slaves for the delight of assembling under his roof a literary
society of readers and transcribers. And having collected under that roof
the portraits or busts of the illustrious 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 economy enabled him to be profuse,
and a moderate expenditure allowed him to be generous.

[Footnote A: "Ad Atticum," Lib. i. Ep. 17.]

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

Yet such a character as ATTICUS could not escape censure from "men of the
world." They want the heart and the imagination to conceive something
better than themselves. The happy indifference, perhaps the contempt
of our ATTICUS for rival factions, they have stigmatised as a cold
neutrality, a timid pusillanimous hypocrisy. Yet ATTICUS could not have
been 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 fierceness of two heroes, Pompey and Cæsar,
could even temper the rivalry of genius in the orators Hortensius and
Cicero. A great man of our own country widely differed from the accusers
of Atticus. Sir MATTHEW HALE lived in distracted times, and took the
character of our man of letters for his model, adopting two principles in
the conduct of the Roman. He engaged himself with no party business, and
afforded a constant relief to the unfortunate, of whatever party. He was
thus preserved amidst the contests of the times.

If the personal interests 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
calamities of the community: the politician becomes great by hatching
an intrigue; the lawyer, in counting his briefs; the physician, his
sick-list. The soldier is clamorous 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, recovering their senses, discover that "knowledge is
power." BURKE, whose ample mind took in every conception of the literary
character, has finely touched on the distinction between this 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 beautiful to alter--"If you are not
called to exert your great talents, and employ your great acquisitions in
the transitory service of your country, which is done in active life, you
will continue to do it that permanent service which it receives from the
labours of those who know how to make the silence of closets more
beneficial to the world than all the noise and bustle of courts, senates,
and camps."

A moving picture of the literary life of a man of letters who was no
author, would have been lost to us, had not PEIRESC found in GASSENDI a
twin spirit. So intimate was the biographer with the very thoughts, so
closely united in the same pursuits, and so perpetual an observer of the
remarkable man whom he has immortalised, that when employed on this
elaborate resemblance of his friend, he was only painting himself with all
the identifying strokes of self-love[A].

[Footnote A: "I suppose," writes EVELYN, that most agreeable enthusiast of
literature, to a travelling friend, "that you carry the life of that
incomparable virtuoso always about you in your motions, not only because
it is portable, but for that it is written by the pen of the great
Gassendus."]

It was in the vast library of PINELLI, the founder of the most magnificent
one in Europe, that PEIRESC, then a youth, felt the remote hope of
emulating the man of letters before his eyes. His life was not without
preparation, 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 precocity, 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 erudition; or by the opened
cabinet of the antiquary, deciphering obscure inscriptions, and explaining
medals. In the galleries of the curious in art, among their marbles, their
pictures, and their prints, PEIRESC has often 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 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.
Considering 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 universal mind busied
itself in every part of the habitable globe. He kept up a noble traffic
with all travellers, supplying them with philosophical instruments and
recent inventions, by which he facilitated their discoveries, and secured
their reception even in barbarous realms. In return he claimed, at his own
cost, for he was "born rather to give than to receive," says Gassendi,
fresh importations of Oriental literature, curious antiquities, or botanic
rarities; and it was the curiosity of PEIRESC which first embellished his
own garden, and thence the gardens of Europe, with a rich variety of
exotic flowers and fruits.[A] 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 their mutual passion, and sustained the general cause of
science. The correspondence of PEIRESC branched out to the farthest bounds
of Ethiopia, connected both Americas, and had touched the newly-discovered
extremities of the universe, when this intrepid mind closed in a premature
death.

[Footnote A: On this subject see "Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii. p.
151; and for some further account of Peiresc and his labours, vol. iii. p.
409, of the same work.--ED.]

I have drawn this imperfect view of PEIRESC'S character, that men of
letters may be reminded of the capacities 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 of mind, and the great
objects which were the result, PEIRESC replied, that "a small matter
suffices for the natural wants of a literary man, whose true wealth
consists in the monuments of arts, the treasures of his library, and the
brotherly affections of the ingenious." PEIRESC was a French judge, but he
supported his 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 portraits of his literary friends; and
in the unadorned simplicity of his study, his books, his papers, and his
letters were scattered about him on the tables, the seats, and the floor.
There, stealing from the world, he would sometimes admit to his spare
supper his friend Gassendi, "content," says that amiable philosopher, "to
have me for his guest."

PEIRESC, like PINELLI, never published any work. These men of letters
derived their pleasure, and perhaps their pride, from those vast strata of
knowledge which their curiosity had heaped together in their mighty
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 attributed to a thirst of learning, which the very means
to allay can only inflame. From all sides they are gathering information;
and that knowledge seems never perfect to which every day brings new
acquisitions. With these men, to 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 history of Provence; 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 midwife'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 are constantly offering to authors
and to artists, flows from their silent 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 admirers had nearly
lost his popular productions, had not a fortunate introduction to Dr.
BIRCH enabled him to open the clasped books, and to drink of the sealed
fountains. ROBERTSON has confessed his inadequate knowledge, and his
overflowing gratitude, in letters which I have elsewhere printed. A
suggestion by a man of letters has opened the career of 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, Hearne, and Middleton. The concealed aid which men of letters
afford authors, may be compared to those subterraneous streams, which,
flowing into spacious lakes, are, though unobserved, enlarging the waters
which attract the public eye.

Count DE CAYLUS, celebrated for his collections, and for his generous
patronage of artists, has 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 sensible
pleasure to labour in hopes of being useful to those who pursue the same
course of studies, while there are so great a number who die without
discharging the debt which they incur to society."

Such a man of letters appears to have been the late Lord WOODHOUSELEE. Mr.
Mackenzie, returning from his lordship's literary retirement, meeting Mr.
Alison, finely said, that "he hoped he was going to Woodhouselee; 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 literary men forms a
useful, as well as a select order in 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 LETTERS 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
communication written by this MAN OF LETTERS, 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 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.


The old age of the literary character retains its enjoyments, and usually
its powers--a happiness which accompanies no other. The old age of
coquetry witnesses its own extinct beauty; that 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 ripe fruit, and is valued when no longer on
the tree.

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. ANCORA IMPARO!--"Even
yet I am learning!" was the concise inscription on an ingenious device of
an old man placed in a child's go-cart, with an hour-glass upon it, which,
it is said, Michael Angelo applied to his own vast genius in his ninetieth
year. Painters 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 discovery 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 years of his life, that with the finest poetical
invention, he painted the allegorical pictures of the Seasons. A man of
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 proportion, the general mass of my
knowledge will greatly accumulate. If we are not deprived by nature or
misfortune of the means to pursue this perpetual augmentation of
knowledge, I do not see but we may be still fully occupied and deeply
interested even to the last day of our earthly term." 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 perfectibility of the
human mind, the animating theory of the eloquent De Staël, consists in the
mass of our ideas, to which every age will now add, by means unknown to
preceding generations. Imagination was born at once perfect, and her arts
find a term to their progress; but there is no boundary 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. Pull of learned studies
and versatile curiosity, he annually projected a summer-tour on the
Continent to some remarkable spot. The local associations were an
unfailing source of agreeable impressions to a mind so well prepared, and
he presented his friends with a "Voyage Littéraire," 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 are dying so many years.

Active enjoyments in the decline of life, then, constitute the happiness
of literary men. The study of the arts and literature 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."

The opening of one of LA MOTHE LE VAYER'S Treatises is striking: "I
should but ill return the favours God has granted me in the eightieth year
of my age, should I allow myself to give way to that shameless want of
occupation which all my life I have condemned;" and the old man proceeds
with his "Observations on the Composition 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 together ere I leave the
world," wrote VARBO, in opening his curious treatise _de Re Rustica_,
which the sage lived to finish, and which, after nearly two thousand
years, the world possesses. "My works are many, and I am old; 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 poetical 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.[A]

[Footnote A: See "Curiosities of Literature," on "The progress of old age
in new studies."]

But the delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading,
imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age. The revolutions
of modern chemistry kindled the curiosity of Dr. Reid to his latest days,
and he studied by various means to prevent the decay of his faculties, and
to remedy the deficiencies 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--literature, art, and science, formed his daily
inquiries; and this venerable genius, prompt to receive each novel
impression, was a companion for the youthful, and a communicator of
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 Professor 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."

  Dans ses veines toujours un jeune sang bouillone,
  Et Sophocle à cent ans peint encore Antigone.

The calm philosophic Hume found that death only could 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
writings of Plato." Lord WOODHOUSELEE found the recomposition of his
"Lectures on History" so fascinating in the last period 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
delight of returning again to the studies of their youth, and of feeling
under the snows of age the cheerful memories of their spring."[A]

[Footnote A: There is an interesting chapter on Favourite Authors in
"Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii., to which the reader may be referred
for other examples.--ED.]

Not without a sense of exultation has the literary character felt this
peculiar happiness, in the unbroken chain of his habits and his feelings.
HOBBES exulted that he had outlived his enemies, and was still the same
Hobbes; and to demonstrate the reality of this existence, published, in
the eighty-seventh year of his age, his version of the _Odyssey_, and the
following year his _Iliad_. Of the happy results of literary habits in
advanced life, the Count DE TRESSAN, the elegant abridger of the old
French romances, in his "Literary Advice to his Children" has drawn
a most pleasing picture. With a taste for study, which he found rather
inconvenient in the moveable existence of a man of the world, and a
military wanderer, he had, however, contrived to reserve an hour or two
every day for literary pursuits. The men of science, with whom he had
chiefly associated, appear to have turned his passion to observation and
knowledge rather than towards imagination and feeling; the combination
formed a wreath for his grey hairs. When Count De Tressan retired from a
brilliant to an affectionate circle, amidst his family, he pursued his
literary tastes with the vivacity of a young author inspired by the
illusion of fame. At the age of seventy-five, with the imagination
of a poet, he abridged, he translated, he recomposed his old Chivalric
Romances, and his reanimated fancy struck fire in the veins of the
old man. Among the first designs of his retirement was a singular
philosophical legacy for his children. It was a view of the history and
progress of the human mind--of its principles, its errors, and its
advantages, as these were reflected in himself; in the dawnings of his
taste, and the secret inclinations of his mind, which the men of genius of
the age with whom he associated had developed. Expatiating on their
memory, he calls on his children to witness the happiness of study, so
evident in those pleasures which were soothing and adorning his old
age. "Without knowledge, without literature," exclaims the venerable
enthusiast, "in whatever rank we are born, we can only resemble the
vulgar." To the centenary FONTENELLE the Count DE TRESSAN was chiefly
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 _éloge_ 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 something 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.[A]

[Footnote A: "Spurinna, or the Comforts of Old Age," by the late Sir
Thomas Bernard, was written a year or two before he died.]

When the literary character shall discover himself to be like a stranger
in a new world, when all that he loved has not life, and all that lives
has no love for old age: when his ear has ceased to listen, and nature has
locked up the man within 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 the last momenta 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 pleasures as they were in
my youth." Petrarch was found lying on a folio in his library, from which
volume he had been busied making extracts for the biography of his
countrymen. His domestics having often observed him studying in that
reclining posture for days together, it was long before 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 studying the
style of that political romance as a model for his intended history of the
House of Brunswick. The literary death of BARTHELEMY affords a remarkable
proof of the force of uninterrupted habits of study. He had been slightly
looking over the newspaper, when suddenly 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 without 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 only in a single art.


The ancients addicted themselves to one species of 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. Their artists worked
on the same principle; and from Pliny's 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 cultivated 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 characteristics 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 disgraced by a human form of inferior beauty to his animals.
Alluding to the devotion of an ancient sculptor to his labours, Madame de
Staël 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. Dryden imagined that Virgil could have written satire
equally with Juvenal, and some have hardily 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 knowledge,
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 his genius." As a universalist, VOLTAIRE remains unparalleled
in ancient or in modern times. This voluminous idol of our neighbours
stands without a rival in literature; but an exception, even if this were
one, cannot overturn a fundamental principle, for we draw our conclusions
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 his
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 creating a supplement to the
genius which had preceded him; and without Corneille, Racine, and Ariosto,
it would be difficult to conjecture what sort of a poet Voltaire could
have been. He was master, too, of a secret in composition, 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." Voltaire's
impulse was of a higher flight, "proper thoughts on proper subjects."
Swift's idea was that of a grammarian. 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 to the
distinctive character of his genius, by a versatility which, however
apparently successful, is always subordinate to the great character on
which his fame rests. It is only that character which bears the raciness
of the 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 he
mimetic, the ingenious writer may remain absolutely destitute of every
claim to genius. DU CLOS has been refused 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 contemporaries are continually disputing on the merits of their
versatile productions, and the most contrary opinions are even formed by
their admirers; but their great individual 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, mistake the
true work of genius.

And if it be true that the primary qualities of the mind are so different
in men of genius as to render them more apt for one class than for
another, it would seem that whenever a pre-eminent 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.
RICHARDSON and FIELDING could not have written each other's works. Could
BUTLER, who excelled in wit and satire, 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 DRYDEN equally prove that he was not
blest with a dramatic genius. CIBBER, 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 descriptive 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 Anacreontic in his epic. With the fine arts
the same occurrence 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 expression 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 flexibility 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 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 numerous 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 conceptions.
Such instances abound, and demonstrate an important 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 multiplying 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 historical painter, or the
sweetness of the _Paysagiste_. Is it not evident that men of genius
_excel_ only in one department of their art, and that whatever they do
with the utmost original perfection, cannot be equally done by another 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.




CHAPTER XXIV.

Literature an avenue to glory.--An intellectual nobility not chimerical,
but created by public opinion.--Literary honours of various nations.--
Local 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
nothing to his ancestors, _videtur ex se natus_, these seem self-born; and
in the baptism of fame, they have given themselves their name. Bruyère 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 lameness reminded him of the
fall of one of his father's cleavers; PRIOR, the son of a vintner, could
not endure to be reminded, though by his favourite Horace, that "the cask
retains its flavour;" like VOITURE, another descendant of a _marchand de
vin_, whose heart sickened over that which exhilarates all other hearts,
whenever his opinion of its _quality_ was maliciously consulted. All these
instances too evidently prove that genius is subject to the most vulgar
infirmities.

But some have thought more courageously. The amiable ROLLIN was the son of
a cutler, but the historian of nations never felt his dignity compromised
by his 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-year's gift, "informing his friend, that 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 began to
direct my footsteps towards Parnassus." The great political negotiator,
Cardinal D'OSSAT, was elevated by his genius from an orphan state of
indigence, and was alike destitute of ancestry, of titles, even of
parents. On the day of his creation, when others of noble extraction
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 majestic of the poets, and the most graceful of the
satirists of antiquity; Demosthenes, Virgil, and Horace. The eloquent
Massillon, the brilliant Fléchier, Rousseau, and Diderot; Johnson,
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 Æsop, 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 derives 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 influence 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 intellectual
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 Corioli.
Were men of genius, as such, to have armorial bearings they might consist,
not of imaginary things, of griffins and chimeras, but of deeds performed
and of public works in existence. When DONDI raised the great astronomical
clock at the University of Padua, which was 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
bearings? 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 inscribed on his tomb; and I
have heard of a Dutch mathematician, who had a calculation for his
epitaph.

We who were reproached for a coldness in our national character, have
caught the inspiration 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 unusual with foreign painters; but it was not
deemed prudent 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 novelty. This shows that the profound feeling of art
is still confined 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 literary
nobility those distinctions which the public voice has attached to some
authors; _Æschylus_ Potter, _Athenian_ Stuart, and _Anacreon_ Moore.
BUTLER, in his own day, was more generally known by the single and
singular name of _Hudibras_, 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
appears, 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
chivalrous 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 conferred on an
author. It is not an honour derived from birth nor creation, 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 becoming 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 Raley that the Duke of Tuscany had
become jealous 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 candour, a fact in his life
which confirms this jealousy 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 unworthy of my reputation,
and the public began to esteem me, _my reception with the great was
discouraging, and I experienced innumerable mortifications."_ Montesquieu
subjoins a reflection sufficiently humiliating for the mere nobleman: "The
great, inwardly 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 unquestionably prevailed in
the late Lord ORFORD, a wit, a man of the world, and a man of rank; but
while he considered 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.[A]

[Footnote A: "Calamities of Authors." I printed, in 1812, extracts from
Walpole'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 proclaim to
the world what 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, criticism, and wit of
the most original and brilliant composition." This was published several
years before the recent collection of his letters.]

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?[A] "I value myself," says Swift,
"upon making the ministry desire to be acquainted with PARNELL, and not
Parnell with the ministry." PIRON would not suffer the literary character
to be lowered in his presence. Entering the apartment of a nobleman, who
was conducting 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, refused 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 elsewhere." He flew back to
his beloved Florence, to proceed with that celebrated cartoon which
afterwards became 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, apologising 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, observing,
"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.

[Footnote A: Johnson had originally submitted the plan of his
"Dictionary" to Lord Chesterfield, but received no mark of interest or
sympathy during its weary progress; when the moment of publication
approached, his lordship, perhaps in the hope of earning a dedication,
published in _The World_ two letters commending Johnson and his labours.
It was this notice that produced Johnson's celebrated letter, in which he
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 delayed till I am indifferent
and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am
known, and do not want it."--ED.]

"I can make lords of you every day, but I cannot create a Titian," said
the Emperor Charles V. to his courtiers, 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 asserted by De Harlay, a great French statesman; for when the
Academy was once not received with royal honours, he complained to the
French monarch, observing, 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 is something more than an ingenious
thought, when Fontenelle, in his _éloge_ on LEIBNITZ, alluding to the
death of Queen Anne, adds of her successor, that "The Elector of Hanover
united under his dominion an electorate, the three kingdoms of Great
Britain, and LEIBNITZ and NEWTON."[A]

[Footnote A: This greatness of intellect that glorifies a court, however
small, is well instanced in that at Weimar, where 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 many 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 assisted in the councils, and adorned the court of Weimar.--Ed.]

If 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. FONTENELLE was never more gratified than
when a Swede, arriving at the gates of Paris, inquired of the custom-house
officers where Fontenelle resided, and expressed his indignation that not
one of them had ever heard of his name. HOBBES expresses his proud delight
that his portrait 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
sufferings. 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 RAYNAL in the House of Commons, the Speaker was requested to suspend
the debate till that illustrious foreigner, who had written on the English
parliament, was accommodated with a seat. SPINOSA, when he gained an
humble livelihood by grinding optical glasses, at an obscure village in
Holland, was visited by the first general in Europe, who, for the sake of
this philosophical conference, 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 individual 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:[A] everything excellent was called a Lope. Italy would furnish a
volume of the public honours decreed to literary men; nor is that spirit
extinct, 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 Linnet, in the
public walk of Zurich, the monument of GESNER, erected by the votes of his
fellow-citizens attests their sensibility; and a solemn funeral honoured
the remains of KLOPSTOCK, led by the senate of Hamburgh, with fifty
thousand votaries, so penetrated by one universal sentiment, that this
multitude preserved a mournful 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 neighbours of the influence even of the sight of the statue of a
man of genius. Travellers never fail to mention ERASMUS 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 people. 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.[B] This is worthy of the country which privileged the family of LA
FONTAINE to be for ever exempt from taxes, and decreed that "the
productions of the mind were not seizable," when the creditors of
CREBILLON would have attached the produce of his tragedies.

[Footnote A: Lope de Vega.]

[Footnote B: We cannot bury the fame of our English worthies--that exists
before us, independent of ourselves; but we bury the influence of their
inspiring 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 have recent evidence of a
more noble acknowledgment of our great men. The statue of Dr. Jenner is
placed in Trafalgar Square; and Grantham has now a noble work to
commemorate its great townsman, Sir Isaac Newton.]]

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 author, when resident in
Holland, in a civil sense was dead. In the Parliament of Toulouse the
judge decided that learned men are free in all countries: that he who had
sought in a foreign land an asylum from his love of letters, 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 foreigner."

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 has vanished. The enthusiasts of genius still wander on the hills of
Pausilippo, 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 CAMOENS there
passed many days in composing his Lusiad. When PETRARCH 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.[A]

[Footnote A: On this passage I find a remarkable manuscript note by Lord
Byron:--"It would have pained me more that 'the proprietor' should have
'often wished to make alterations, than it could give pleasure that the
rest of Arezzo rose against his _right_ (for _right_ he had); the
depreciation of the lowest of mankind is more painful than the applause of
the highest is pleasing; the sting of a scorpion is more in torture than
the possession of anything could be in rapture."]

In the village of Certaldo is still shown the house of BOCCACCIO; and on a
turret are seen the arms of the Medici, which they had sculptured there,
with 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 "Ludovico Ariosto in this apartment wrote." Two hundred 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 maintained."[A] "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 the house which VOLTAIRE inhabited, and
at Ferney his study, are both preserved inviolate. In the study of
MONTESQUIEU at La Brede, near Bordeaux, the proprietor has preserved all
the furniture, without altering anything, that the apartment where this
great man meditated on his immortal work should want for nothing to assist
the reveries of the spectator; and on the side of the chimney is still
seen a place which while writing he was accustomed to rub his feet
against, as they rested on it. In a keep or dungeon of this feudal
_château_, the local association suggested to the philosopher his chapter
on "The Liberty of the Citizen." It is the second chapter of the twelfth
book, of which the close is remarkable.

[Footnote A: A public subscription secured the house in which Shakspeare
was born at Stratford-on-Avon. Durer's house, at Nuremberg, is still
religiously preserved, and its features are unaltered. The house in which
Michael Angelo 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.]

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 Shakspeare. The
very apartment of a man of genius, the chair he studied in, the table he
wrote on, are contemplated with curiosity; the spot is full of local
impressions. And all this happens from an 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 features we so often dwell. Even the rage of the
military spirit has taught itself to respect the abode of genius; and
Cæsar and Sylla, who never spared the blood of their own Rome, alike felt
their spirit rebuked, and alike saved the literary city of Athens.
Antiquity has preserved a beautiful incident of this nature, in the noble
reply of the artist PROTOGENES. When the city of Rhodes was taken by
Demetrius, the man of genius was discovered in his garden, tranquilly
finishing a picture. "How is it that you do not participate in the general
alarm?" asked the conqueror. "Demetrius, you war against the Rhodians, but
not against the fine arts," replied the man of genius. Demetrius had
already shown this by his conduct, for he forbade firing that part of the
city where the artist resided.

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"
château was preserved from this elevated feeling by Prince Schwartzenberg,
as our MARLBOROUGH had performed the same glorious office in guarding the
hallowed asylum of FENELON.[A] 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--.

[Footnote A: 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 were stationed in its courtyard. See
"Curiosities of Literature," vol. i. p. 77, _note_.--ED.]

And the meanest things, the very household stuff, associated 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 communicated some
of the raptures to which he was liable who had sat in that chair.
RABEIAIS, amongst his drollest inventions, could not have imagined that
his old cloak would have been preserved in the university of Montpelier
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 involuntary tribute to genius which forms 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 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 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 Authors.--The immortality of thought.--The
Family of Genius illustrated 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 the wants and
attentions of men, than the occupations of LITERARY CHARACTERS, 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 distinguish 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
incapacitated even by situation from the enjoyments of those beautiful
arts which have not yet travelled to us--as if Nature herself 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 discoveries 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 with 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
the same _national literary character_ had predominated, we should have
stood on the same eminence 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 Grecian city, while the other, at the revival of letters, beheld
every polished European crowding to its little court.

In closing this imperfect work by 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 they
mutually betray for the master-writers of each other, is an important
circumstance to the philosophical observer. These national tastes
originate in modes of feeling, in customs, in idioms, and all the 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 standard, 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 literature 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 imagination 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
modifications 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 another. The _concetti_ of the Italian, the
figurative style of the Persian, the swelling grandeur of the Spaniard,
the 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 understandings 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 CALDEBON, 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 in his
genius as his own countrymen were in their customs, 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 favourite 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 precede 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 bandtiti? 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 scandalous lives of
the monks engaged public attention. This we may now regret; but the court
of Rome felt the concealed satire, and that luxurious and numerous class
in society never recovered from the chastisement.

MONTAIGNE has been censured for his universal scepticism, and for the
unsettled notions he drew out on his motley page, which has been
attributed to his incapacity of forming decisive opinions. "Que sçais-je?"
was his motto, The same accusation may reach the gentle ERASMUS, who alike
offended the old catholics and the new 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 the intelligence of its own age genius is
but progressive. In nature all is continuous; she makes no starts and
leaps. Genius is said to soar, but we should rather say that genius
climbs. Did the great VERULAM, or RAWLEIGH, or Dr. MORE, emancipate
themselves from all the dreams of their age, from 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 commercial nation, in the maturity of
time, opened all the sources of wealth to the contemplation of ADAM SMITH.
That extensive system of what is called political economy 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 sort
of science had made were only partial and preparatory. If the principle of
Adam Smith's great work seems to confound the happiness of a nation with
its wealth, we can scarcely reproach the man of genius, who we shall find
is always reflecting back the feelings of his own nation, even in his most
original speculations.

In works of pure imagination we trace the same march of the human
intellect; and we discover in those inventions, which appear sealed by
their originality, how much has been derived from the age and 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. The _Inferno_
of DANTE was caught from the popular superstitions of the age, and had
been preceded by the gross visions which the monks had forged, usually for
their own purposes. "La Cittá dolente," and "la perduta gente," were
familiar 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.[A] 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 romancer. 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.

[Footnote A: 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 monkish imagination had
invented was apparently inflicted on real persons, whose shrieks and
groans gave fearful reality to the appalling scene.--ED.]

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. Theoretical 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 Holland and Flanders of
admirable artists. We have teen outrageously calumniated. So far from 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 purchaser in Europe, for he raised their value, but
he likewise possessed the taste and the science of the connoisseur.
Something, indeed, had occurred to our national genius, which had thrown
it into a stupifying state, from which it is yet hardly aroused. 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 Catholicism. Had this glorious plan been realized, the golden
age of English art might have arisen. Every artist would have invented a
subject most congenial to his powers. REYNOLDS would have emulated Raphael
in the Virgin and Child in the manger, WEST had fixed on Christ raising
the young man from the dead, BARRY had profoundly meditated on the Jews
rejecting Jesus. Thus did an age of genius perish before its birth! It was
on the occasion of this frustrated 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 said, the French
government under Buonaparte offered ten thousand pounds.

Thus also it has happened, that 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 mutilated, as the original
model bears witness to the world. That great occasion served this noble
architect to multiply 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
England.

The fate of INIGO JONES is as remarkable as that of WREN. Whitehall
afforded 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 wars suppress a Whitehall. Such circumstances in the
history of art among nations have not always been developed 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 lies neglected. A close observer of this age pointed out to me that
the military genius of that great French captain, who so long appeared to
have conquered Europe, was derived from his applying the new principles of
war discovered by FOLARD and GUIBERT. The genius of FOLARD observed that,
among the changes of military discipline in the practice of war among
European nations since the introduction of gunpowder, one of the ancient
methods of the Romans had been improperly neglected, and, in his
Commentaries on Polybius, Folard revived this forgotten mode of warfare.
GUIBERT, in his great work, "Histoire de la Milice Française," 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 military; and the boldness of
his pen, with the high confidence 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, GUIBEBT
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 discover all that he performed 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 particular 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 preceded a RAPHAEL and a MICHAEL
ANGELO.

Even the writings of such extravagant geniuses as BRUNO and CAEDAN gave
indications of the progress of the human mind; and had RAMUS not shaken
the authority of the _Organon_ of Aristotle we might not have had the
_Novum Organon_ of BACON. 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 vibrations. The learning of one man makes others learned, and the
influence of genius is in nothing more remarkable than in its effects on
its brothers. SELDEN'S treatise on the Syrian and Arabian Deities enabled
MILTON to comprise, in one hundred and thirty beautiful lines, the two
large and learned syntagma which Selden had composed on that abstract
subject. LELAND, the father of British antiquities, impelled STOWE to work
on his "Survey of London;" and Stowe's "London" inspired CAMDEN'S
stupendous "Britannia." Herodotus produced Thucydides, and Thucydides
Xenophon. With us HUME, ROBERTSON, and GIBBON rose almost simultaneously
by mutual inspiration. There exists a perpetual action and reaction in the
history of the human mind. It has frequently been inquired why certain
periods seem to have been more favourable to a particular class of genius
than another; or, in other words, why men of genius appear in clusters. 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 mechanical
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
often undervalued by their own generation.

The influence of authors is so great, while the author himself is so
inconsiderable, that to some the cause may not appear commensurate to its
effect. When EPICURUS published his doctrines, men immediately began to
express 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 mathematics, 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 discoveries, by disclosing them to the people. "Could I,"
exclaims MONTESQUIEU, whose heart was beating with the feelings of a great
author, "could I but afford new reasons 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 characterises 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 human nature, the impolicy as well as the inhumanity of
religious 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 our 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 imperfections 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 principle as sure in its operation as
any in mechanics. BACON'S influence over philosophy, and GROTICS'S over
the political 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 founders 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 discovered.

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 ages; and in councils
and debates are of greater authority than those of the persons who are
present."

But politicians affect to disbelieve that abstract principles 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 philosophy should disturb their fireside! But it is in leisure, when
they are not wanted, that the speculative part of mankind create them, and
when they are wanted they are already prepared for the active multitude,
who come, like a phalanx, pressing each other with a unity of feeling and
an integrity of force. PALEY would not close his eyes on what was passing
before him; for, he has observed, that during the convulsions at Geneva,
the political theory of ROUSSEAU was prevalent in their contests; while,
in the political disputes of our country, the ideas of civil authority
displayed in the works of LOCKE recurred in every form. The character of a
great author 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 consequence than the propagation of their opinions. Politicians
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 II. trembled 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
Telemachus," says Madame de Staël, "was a courageous action." To insist
with such ardour on the duties of a sovereign, 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 Carême_ 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 editions
of this book were repeatedly printed and circulated through the kingdom.
In such moments it is that a people find and know the value of a great
author, whose work is the mighty organ which convoys 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 depraved notions are, as long as these opinions
maintain their force, accepted as immutable truths; and the mistakes of
one man become the crimes of a whole people.

Authors stand between the governors and the governed, 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 commercial 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 agricultural pursuits; 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 extravagances, operated a complete revolution in modern Europe,
by communicating a bolder spirit to education, and improving 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 humanity
against the prejudices of many centuries in his small volume on "Crimes
and Punishments," and at length abolished torture; while the French
advocates 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. In
all such cases the authors were themselves entirely unconnected with their
subjects, except as speculative writers.

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 novelty
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 instruction, become unquestionable
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 judgment, 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 great 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 discovery for us! that never has there been
anything important in the active world but what is reflected in the
literary--books contain everything, even the falsehoods and the crimes
which have been only projected by men! This solitary man of genius is
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 they dared not utter, facts they dared not
discover. View him in the stillness of meditation, his eager spirit busied
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
meditation has often required a whole century to be understood and to be
adopted. The ideas of Bishop BERKELEY, in his "Theory of Vision," were
condemned as a philosophical romance, and now form an essential part of
every treatise of optics; and "The History of Oracles," by FONTENELLE,
says La Harpe, which, in his youth, was censured for its impiety, the
centenarian lived to see regarded as a proof of his respect for religion.

"But what influence 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
practising on the infantine simplicity which marks his character, and that
frequent abstraction from what is passing under his own eyes?"

This solitary man of genius is stamping his own character on the minds of
his own people. Take one instance, from others far more splendid, in the
contrast presented by FRANKLIN and Sir WILLIAM JONES. The parsimonious
habits, the money-getting precepts, the wary 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 inspire the servants of a commercial corporation to open new
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 nature.

FRANKLIN, with that calm good sense which is freed from the passion of
imagination, has himself declared this important truth relating to the
literary character:--"I have always thought that one man of tolerable
abilities may work great changes and accomplish great affairs among
mankind, if he first forms a good plan; and cutting 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 sufficient 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, philosopher,
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 age. DESCARTES, it has
been observed, accomplished a change in the taste of his age by the
perspicacity and method for which he was indebted 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 by its own single effort. When an
author writes on a national subject, 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 morning 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
advantages, without remembering or knowing its benefactors. ROLLIN 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 communication
between two spots, which, though close to each other, were long separated
--the closet and the world! The ADDISONS, the FONTENELLES, and the
FEYJOOS, 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 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 application, 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 domiciliated 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 pleasing idea
of his own works and their design. He first taught his countrymen how to
plant, then to build: and having 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 plantations 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 life--in all these changes of a studious life, the
better part of his history has not yet been told. While Britain retains
her awful 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 by 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.[A]

[Footnote A: Since this was first printed, the "Diary" of EVELYN has
appeared; and although it could not add to his general 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 business of life.]

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 silkworms. 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 Agricultural 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 genius which is carried
on through all ages, and will for ever connect the nations of the earth.
THE IMMORTALITY OF THOUGHT EXISTS FOR 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 right motion of the blood: CÆSALPINUS admits a circulation
without comprehending its consequences; at length our HARVEY, by
patient meditation and penetrating sagacity, 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 the idea of his
"Idle and Industrious Apprentice," from the old comedy of _Eastward Hoe_,
we easily conceive that some of the most original inventions of genius,
whether the more profound or the more agreeable, may thus be tracked in
the snow of time.

In the history of genius therefore there is no chronology, for to its
votaries everything it has done is PRESENT--the earliest attempt stands
connected with the most recent. This continuity of ideas characterizes 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 be 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 ARIOSTO
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, ALDROVANDUS, 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. ARISTOPHANES, MOLIERE,
and FOOTE, are brothers of the family of national wits; the wit of
Aristophanes was a part of the common property, and Molière and Foote were
Aristophanic. 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 Plutarch were credulous, La Mothe Le Vayer sceptical, and Bayle
philosophical, all that can be 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 what PAUSANIAS had done
for the Greeks, and MONTFAUCON for the French, and CAMDEN for ourselves.

My learned and reflecting friend, whose original researches have enriched
our national history, has this observation on the character of WICKLIFFE:
--"To complete our idea of the importance of Wickliffe, it is only
necessary to add, that as his writings made John Huss the reformer of
Bohemia, so the writings of John Huss led Martin Luther to be the reformer
of Germany; so extensive and so incalculable are the consequences which
sometimes follow from human actions."[A] 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 character! 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 operating 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 AUTHORS!--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!

[Footnote A: Turner's "History of England," vol. ii. p. 432.]




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
grammarians and conjectural critics, than of that more elegant philosophy
which has, within our own time, been introduced into literature,
and which, by its graces and investigation, augment the beauties of
original genius. This delightful province has been termed in Germany the
_Æsthetic_, from a Greek term signifying sentiment or feeling. Æsthetic
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 Æsthetic critics.
The critics of the adverse school always look for a precedent, and if none
is found, woe to the originality 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
Æsthetic faculty. Warburton 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 reasoning are more
fatal to the works of imagination than had ever been suspected.

By one of these learned critics was Montaigne, the venerable father of
modern Miscellanies, called "a bold ignorant fellow." To thinking readers,
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 consists
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 generally proved the absence of the higher faculties.
When a more adventurous spirit of this herd attempts some novel discovery,
often men of taste behold, with indignation, 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 arrogance of the
scholar, or they did not believe what they told the public; the one in his
extraordinary invention of an interpolating editor, 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 apparent vanity, in making himself
the idol of his lucubrations. If he had not done this, he had not
performed the promise he makes at the commencement of his preface. An
engaging tenderness prevails in these _naïve_ expressions which shall not
be injured by a version. "Je l'ay voué à la commodité particulière de mes
parens et amis; à ce que m'ayans perdu (ce qu'ils out à faire bientost)
ils y puissent retrouver quelques traicts de mes humeurs, et que par ce
moyen ils nourrissent plus entière et plus vifue la conoissance qu'ils out
eu de moi."

Those authors who appear sometimes to forget they are writers, and
remember 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 distant day.
"Why," says Boileau, "are my verses read by all? it is only because they
speak truths, and 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 humours, 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
conversations. Montaigne preferred 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 with 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.

Sterne perhaps derives a portion of his celebrity from the same influence;
he interests us in his minutest motions, for he tells us all he feels.
Richardson was sensible of the power with which these minute strokes of
description enter the heart, and which are so many fastenings to which the
imagination clings. He says, "If I give speeches and conversations, I
ought to give them justly; for the humours and characters of persons
cannot be known, unless I repeat _what_ they say, and their _manner_ 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 employments, and having passed
five years without going to town, where, by the way, "he had a large house
always 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
notices, than by any biographical account which can now be given of this
man of genius.

From this agreeable mode of writing, a species of compositions may be
discriminated, which seems above all others to identify the reader with
the writer; compositions 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 literature, but is a voluntary effusion,
warm with all the sensations of a pathetic writer. In a word, they
are the compositions 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 began. Among
such works may be placed the exiled Bolingbroke's "Reflections upon
Exile;" the retired 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 liberal
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 cabinet of the man of taste.

It should, indeed, be the characteristic of good Miscellanies, to be
multifarious and concise. Usbek, the Persian of Montesquieu, is one of the
profoundest philosophers, his letters are, however, but concise pages.
Rochefoucault and La Bruyère are not superficial observers of human
nature, although they have only written sentences. Of 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
connexion." La Fontaine agreeably applauds short compositions:

  Les longs ouvrages me font peur;
  Loin d'épuiser une matière,
  On n'en doit prendre que la fleur;

and Old Francis Osborne has a coarse and ludicrous image in favour of such
opuscula; he says, "Huge volumes, like the ox roasted whole at Bartholomew
fair, may proclaim plenty of labour and invention, but afford less of what
is delicate, savoury, and well concocted, than _smaller pieces_." To quote
so light a genius as the enchanting 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 called 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 returning. At
those moments miscellanists are conformable 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 in our listless
hours.

The ancients were great admirers of miscellanies; Aulus 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 mantle;" and "a variegated meadow." Such a miscellanist as was
the admirable Erasmus deserves the happy description which Plutarch with
an elegant enthusiasm bestows on Menander: he calls him the delight of
philosophers fatigued with study; that they have recourse to his works as
to a meadow enamelled with flowers, where the sense is delighted by a
purer air; and very elegantly adds, that Menander has a salt peculiar to
himself, drawn from the same waters that gave birth to Venus.

The Troubadours, Conteurs, and Jongleurs, practised what is yet called in
the southern parts of France, _Le guay Saber,_ or the gay science. I
consider these as the Miscellanists of their day; they had their grave
moralities, 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 ambulatory poets, and the feudal hypochondriac
listened to their solemn instruction and their airy fancy. I would
call miscellaneous composition LE GUAY SABER, 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, my mind is enchanted, as if it were placed among the landscapes
of Valais, which Rousseau has described with such picturesque 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 gaze 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 service of the Goddess VARIETY.

       *       *       *       *       *

PREFACES.


I declare myself infinitely delighted by a preface. Is it exquisitely
written? no literary morsel is more delicious. 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 preface unread;
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 itself; I mean a
preface." Spence, in the preface to his "Polymetis," informs us, that
"there is not any sort of writing which he sits down to with so much
unwillingness 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." Pelisson 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 investigation 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 Emperor 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 extravagant panegyric, do considerable injury to the cause
of taste, we discover that some accidental occurrence has occasioned this
vehement affection for the author, and which, like that of another kind of
love, makes one commit so many extravagances.

Prefaces are indeed rarely sincere. It is justly observed by Shenstone, in
his prefatory Essay to the "Elegies," that "discourses prefixed to poetry
inculcate such tenets as may exhibit the performance to the greatest
advantage. The fabric is first raised, and the measures by which we
are to judge of it are afterwards adjusted." 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 subordinate 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 Dryden, 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
Aldus, quickened the sale of his Aristophanes. This ingenious invention of
the prefacer of Aristophanes at length was detected by Menage.

The insincerity of prefaces arises whenever an author would disguise his
solicitude for his work, by appearing negligent, and even undesirous of
its success. A writer will rarely conclude such a preface without
betraying himself. 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 parental fondness." But in his conclusion he tells us, "I
dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from
censure or from praise." I deny the doctor's "frigidity." 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, notwithstanding,
literary opuscula in which the author is materially concerned. A work
with a poor preface, like a person who comes 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 booksellers, 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 are treated with contempt when an author professes to publish
his puerilities. This Warburton did, in his pompous edition of Shakspeare.
In the preface he informed the public, that his notes "were among his
_younger amusements,_ when he turned over these _sort of writers._" This
ungracious compliment to Shakspeare and the public, merited that perfect
scourging which our haughty commentator received from the sarcastic
"Canons of Criticism."[A] 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
conclude 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 intelligible, and Machiavel is frequently obscure." I have seen
in the play-bills of strollers, a very pompous description 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 pregonado vino,
venden vinagre:_ "Having cried up their wine, they sell us vinegar."

[Footnote A: See the essay on Warburton and his disputes in "Quarrels of
Authors,"--ED.]

A ridiculous humility in a preface is not less despicable. 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 Roman History, intercedes for pardon
for his numerous blunders of phraseology; observing that they were the
more excusable, 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 mollified; 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 à genoux dans une humble préface
  Au lecteur qu'il ennuie a beau demander grace;
  Il ne gagnera rien sur ce juge irrité,
  Qui lui fait son procès de pleine autorité.

  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 capriciousness 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 wholly out of the 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 difficult 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 contempt of egotism. After a writer 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 conveyed 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 contemplate 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 he 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. This,
perhaps, will be best obtained 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.[A]

[Footnote A: See "Curiosities of Literature," vol. i., for an article on
Prefaces.]

       *       *       *       *       *

STYLE.


Every period of literature has its peculiar style, derived 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
grammatical accuracy, Johnson probably alluded to the happy 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
1736, when the "Inquiry into the Life of Homer" was published. 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 considered 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 colloquial inelegances; the
greatest characters are levelled by the poverty of his 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 contortions and re-echoing the sonorous nothings of our
great lexicographer; the novelist of domestic life, or the agriculturist
in a treatise on turnips, alike aimed at the polysyllabic 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
sufficiently 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 beautiful 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 foundation 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, in the development of ideas, is reserved only for writers of
fine taste. There are several modes of presenting an idea; vulgar readers
are only susceptible of the strong and palpable stroke: but there are many
shades of sentiment, which to seize on and to paint is the pride and the
labour of a skilful writer. A beautiful 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 philosopher 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. Shenstone has hit the truth; for
fine writing he defines to be generally the effect 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."

Mannerists 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 sincerity, 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 these 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 magnificence
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 attempt 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 exactness by middling
writers, who, although their own natural manner had nothing interesting,
have attracted notice by such imitations. We may apply to some monotonous
mannerists these verses of Boileau:

  Voulez-vous du public mériter les amours?
  Sans cesse en écrivant variez vos discours.
  On lit peu ces auteurs nés pour nous ennuier,
  Qui toujours sur un ton semblent psalmodier.

  Would you the public's envied favours gain?
  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 information, may be seized by
all, but an author's diction cannot 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 faculties. These are the
true prompters of those felicitous expressions 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 artist can value the ceaseless
inquietudes of arduous perfection; can trace the remote possibilities
combined in a close union; the happy arrangement and the novel variation?
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 marble
basins. He might have considered that he had embellished 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 representations 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 critics have believed, that in this age comedy requires
more genius than tragedy; and with his audience he might have infinitely
more esteemed his own original humour, than Johnson's rhetorical
declamation. 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 eloquence, which prevail in the operose labours of Johnson.
No one might be more sensible than himself, that he, according to the
happy expression of Johnson (when his rival was in his grave), "tetigit et
ornavit." Goldsmith, 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 considered, he has come 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 concealed 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 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 Colley Cibber are a fine picture of the self-painter. We have
some other pieces of self-biography, precious to the philosopher.[A]

[Footnote A: One of the most interesting is that of Grifford, appended to
his translation of Juvenal; it is a most remarkable record of the
struggles of its author in early life, told with candour and simplicity.--
ED.]

The other species of minor biography, that of portraying 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
collection of these self-portraits in two bulky volumes. The brilliant
Fléchier, and the refined St. Evremond, have framed and glazed their
portraits. Every writer then considered his character as necessary as his
preface. The fashion seems to have passed over to our country; Farquhar
has drawn his character in a letter to a lady; and others of our writers
have given us their own miniatures.

There was, as a book in my possession will testify, a certain verse-maker
of the name of Cantenac, who, in 1662, published in the city of Paris a
volume, containing some thousands of verses, which were, as his countrymen
express it, _de sa façon,_ 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
thought a large man." This atom in creation then describes his oval and
full face; his fiery and eloquent eyes: his vermil lips; his robust
constitution, and his effervescent passions. He appears to have been a
most petulant, honest, and diminutive being.

The description of his intellect is the object of our curiosity. "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
implacable 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 manner in turning a thought
which is quite my own. I am agreeable in conversation, though 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 have some reading, and a copious memory, I am fond of showing
whatever I know. My judgment is not so solid as my wit is lively. I am
often melancholy and unhappy; and this sombrous disposition proceeds from
my numerous disappointments 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 suffer an entire year, to taste the pleasures of one
day."

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 character 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 example for certain
volatile and fervent spirits, who, by becoming authors, either submit
their felicity to the caprices 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 disappointments." Happy, however, if the obscure, yet too
sensible writer, can suffer an entire year, for the enjoyment of a single
day! But for this, a man must have been born in France.

       *       *       *       *       *

ON READING.


Writing is justly denominated an art; I think that reading claims the same
distinction. To adorn ideas with elegance is an act of the mind superior
to that of receiving them; but to receive them with a happy discrimination
is the effect of a practised taste.

Yet it will be found that taste alone is not sufficient to obtain the
proper end of reading. Two persons of equal taste rise from the perusal of
the same book with very different notions: the one will have the ideas of
the author at command, and find a new train of sentiment awakened; while
the other quits his author in a pleasing distraction, but of the pleasures
of reading nothing remains but tumultuous sensations.

To account for these different effects, we must have recourse 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 impression
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 perceptions, 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 exertion 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 augmenting intellectual opulence.
Some our own ingenuity must form, and perhaps every student has peculiar
habits of study, as, in sort-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 experience in the art of reading), that
there was no book so bad but which contained something good. To read every
book would, however, be fatal to the interest of most readers; but it is
not 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
some of their portions. Of the little supplement at the close of a volume,
few readers conceive the utility; but some of the most eminent writers in
Europe 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
the human body, or to that unknown 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 said, "he knows how to read better than any
one; 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 much as of our thoughts. The
perusal of a particular work gives birth perhaps to ideas unconnected 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 mechanical 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 reperuse, the time he
had read it, with a concise decision on its merits; "that," says 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, books have been found in his
library which had long resisted the power of closing: a mode more easy
than useful; 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 minute 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 Lucilius, 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 have 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]

[Footnote A: The account of Oldys and his manuscripts, in the third volume
of the "Curiosities of Literature," will furnish abundant proof of the
value of such _disfigurations_ when the work of certain hands.--ED.]

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
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 triumphal 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 to 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 infirm dispositions to the book,
and an author has not only his own defects to account for, but also those
of his reader. There is something in composition 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 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 divisions; 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
prejudicial 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 instruction, 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 complained 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. Congreve 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 composition 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 which the reader may be more injured than
the author: others not only read the book, but would also read the man; by
which the most ingenious author may be injured by the most impertinent
reader.

       *       *       *       *       *

ON HABITUATING OURSELVES TO AN INDIVIDUAL 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 of 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, therefore, 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 manufacturing of pins to the
construction of philosophical systems. Every individual can exert that
quantity of mind necessary 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 gradations 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 gratification 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 he 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 philosopher
who gives his entire years to the elevated pursuits of mind, is never
unhappy because he is not in possession 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 philosophers call the
associating or suggesting idea is ever busied, and in its beautiful
effects genius is most deeply concerned; for besides those trains of
thought the great artist falls into during his actual composition, a
distinct 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 apparently trivial or unconnected towards itself, making what it
wills its own, while instinctively it seems inattentive to whatever has no
tendency to its own purposes.

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 perfect
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
happiness; 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 of
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 attention magnifies like a microscope; but it is
possible to apologise for their apparent extravagance from the
consideration, that they really observe combinations not perceived by
others of inferior application. That this passion has been carried to a
curious violence of affection, literary history affords numerous
instances. In reading Dr. Burney's "Musical Travels," it would seem that
music was the prime object of human life; Richardson, the painter, in his
treatise on his beloved art, closes all by affirming, that "_Raphael_ is
not only _equal_, but _superior_ to a _Virgil_, or a _Livy_, or a
_Thucydides_, or a _Homer_!" and that painting can reform our manners,
increase our opulence, honour, and power. Denina, in his "Revolutions of
Literature," tells us that to excel in historical composition requires
more ability than is exercised by the excelling masters of any other art;
because it requires not only the same erudition, genius, imagination, and
taste, necessary for a poet, a painter, or a philosopher, but the
historian must also have some peculiar qualifications; this served as a
prelude to his own history.[A] Helvetius, an enthusiast in the fine arts
and polite literature, has composed a poem on Happiness; and imagines that
it consists in an exclusive love 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.

[Footnote A: 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 necessary for an
editor of a Collection of Ancient Ballads."--ED.]

       *       *       *       *       *

ON NOVELTY IN LITERATURE.


"All is said," exclaims the lively La Bruyère; 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 that "of books there is no end,"
has been transcribed in many books. He who has critically examined any
branch of literature has discovered how little of original invention 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 novelty 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 performances have been
borrowed; and that the thoughts of the most admired compositions are not
wonderful discoveries, but only truths, which the ingenuity of the author,
by arranging the intermediate and accessary 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, but ne'er so well express'd.

Novelty, in its rigid acceptation, will not be found in any judicious
production.

Voltaire looked on everything as imitation. He observes 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 compositions to the fountainhead; 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 Plato and Cicero. The
Æneid 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, and 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 paradise of fools is a wild flower, transplanted from the
wilderness of Ariosto. The rich poetry of Gray is a wonderful tissue,
woven on the frames, and composed with the gold threads, of others. To
Cervantes we owe Butler; and the united abilities of three great wits, in
their _Martinus Scriblerus_, could find no other mode of conveying
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 "Travels of Gulliver" to the "Voyages
of Cyrano de Bergerac to the Sun and Moon;" a writer, who, without the
acuteness of Swift, has wilder flashes of fancy; Joseph Warton 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 too numerous
here to mention. Wotton observed, justly, that in many places the author's
wit is not his own. Dr. Ferriar's "Essay on the Imitations of Sterne"
might be considerably augmented. Such are the writers, however, who
imitate, but remain inimitable!

Montaigne, with honest naïveté, 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 tender 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. Boiardo 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 _Æneid_. 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." Molière and La Fontaine are considered to
possess as much originality as any of the French writers; yet the learned
Ménage calls Molière "un grand et habile picoreur;" and Boileau tells us
that La Fontaine borrowed 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 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 _Facezie_ 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 Bruyère incorporates whole
passages of Publius Syrus in his work, as the translator of the latter
abundantly shows. To the "Turkish Spy" was Montesquieu beholden 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 SOCIÉTÉ


Pliny, in an epistle to Tuscus, 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 language 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 entertained and
enlivened by these little poetical compositions, as they turn upon
subjects of gallantry, satire, tenderness, politeness, and everything, in
short, that concerns life, and the affairs of the world."

This species of poetry has been carried to its utmost perfection by the
French. It has been discriminated by them, from the mass of poetry,
under the apt title of "_Poésies légères,"_ and sometimes it has been
significantly called "_Vers de Société_." 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 "_Poésies légères_" 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 pleasure, not
for his glory; and he charms his readers, because he seems careless of
their approbation.

Every delicacy of sentiment must find its delicacy of expression, and
every tenderness of thought must be softened by the tenderest tones.
Nothing trite or 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 under the feigned character he assumes; here alone 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 compliment 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 objects 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 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 methinks may pass the stream,
  So little distant dangers seem;
  So we mistake the future's face,
  Eyed 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 call them, as a fine sonnet has been
called, a difficult 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 perfection, 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 a
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 considered as unworthy rivals of
Chaulieu and Bernard, of Voltaire and Gresset.

All the minor odes of Horace, and the entire Anacreon, are compositions of
this kind; effusions of the heart, and pictures of the imagination, which
were produced in the convivial, the amatory, and 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 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
translations, and some plagiarisms; but some of his verses to Chloe are
eminently airy and pleasing. A diligent selection from our fugitive poetry
might perhaps present us with many of these minor poems; but the "_Vers de
Société_" form a species of poetical composition which may still be
employed with great success.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE GENIUS OF MOLIÈRE.


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 modern writers of those rich sources of
invention when persons living more isolated, society was less monotonous;
and Jonson and Shadwell gave us what they called "_the humours_,"--that
is, the individual or particular characteristics of men.[A]

[Footnote A: Aubrey has noted this habit of our two greatest dramatists,
when speaking of Shakspeare he says--"The humour of the constable in _A
Midsummer Night's Dream_, he happened to take at Grendon in Bucks; which
is the roade from London to Stratford; and there was living that constable
in 1642, when I first came to Oxon. Ben Jonson and he did gather humours
of men dayly, wherever they came." Shadwell, whose best plays were
produced in the reign of Charles II., was a professed imitator of the
style of Jonson; and so closely described the manners of his day that he
was frequently accused of direct personalities, and obliged to alter one
of his plays, _The Humorists_, to avoid an outcry raised against him. Sir
Walter Scott has recorded, in the Preface to his "Fortunes of Nigel," the
obligation he was under to Shadwell's comedy, _The Squire of Alsatia_, for
the vivid description it enabled him to give of the lawless denizens of
the old Sanctuary of Whitefriars.--ED.]

But however tastes and modes of thinking may be inconstant, and customs
and manners alter, at bottom the groundwork is Nature's, in every
production of comic genius. A creative genius, guided by an unerring
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.

MOLIÈRE was a creator in the _art of comedy_; and although his personages
were the contemporaries of Louis the Fourteenth, and his manners, in the
critical acceptation 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 MOLIÈRE.

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
Molière had not yet acquired his art to the glorious days when 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 incurred, 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 Molière to experience that restless importunity of
genius which feeds on itself, till it discovers the pabulum it seeks.
Molière not only suffered 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 himself created; with
no better models of composition than the Italian farces _all' improvista_,
and whose fantastic gaiety he, to the last, loved too well; becomes the
personal favourite of the most magnificent monarch, and the intimate of
the most refined circles. Thoughtful observer of these new scenes and new
personages, he sports with the affected _précieuses_ and the flattering
_marquises_ as with the _naïve_ ridiculousness of the _bourgeois,_ and the
wild pride and egotism of the _parvenus_; and with more profound designs
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 moral satirist. Molière 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 generations 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 family to his
favourite recreations. The actors were usually more excellent than their
pieces; some had carried the mimetic art to the perfection of eloquent
gesticulation. In these loose scenes of inartificial and burlesque pieces
was the genius of Molière cradled and nursed. The changeful scenes of the
_Théâtre de Bourgogne_ 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 consigned, as "un mauvais sujet" (so his
father qualified him), to a college of the Jesuits at Paris, where the
author of the "Tartuffe" 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 intimate
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 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 dissipated, and even of the unfortunate in society.
The youthful adventurer affectionately offered a free admission to the
dear Pocquelins. They rejected their _entrées_ 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 parental upholsterers
Pocquelin concealed himself under the immortal name of Molière.

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 temporary
novelties. Boileau regretted the loss of one, _Le Docteur Amoureux;_ and
in others we detect the abortive conceptions of some of his future pieces.
The severe judgment of Molière suffered his skeletons to perish; but, when
he had discovered the art of comic writing, with equal discernment he
resuscitated them.

Not only had Molière 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 Racine, a youth, offered
him a very unactable tragedy,[A] Molière presented him with his own:
--"Take this, for I am convinced that the subject is highly tragic,
notwithstanding my failure." The great dramatic poet of France opened his
career by recomposing the condemned tragedy of the comic wit in _La
Thébaïde._ In the illusion 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 announcement. 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.

[Footnote A: The tragedy written by Racine was called _Théagenè et
Chariclée_, and founded on the tale by Heliodorus. It was the first
attempt of its author, and submitted by him to Molière, while director of
the Theatre of the Palais Royal; the latter had no favourable impression
of its success if produced, but suggested _La Thébaïde_ 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.]

It is a remarkable feature, though not perhaps a singular 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 "Molière
hypochondre." Boileau, who knew him intimately, happily characterised
Molière as _le Contemplateur_. This deep pensiveness is revealed in his
physiognomy.

The genius of Molière, 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 prodigality of invention. His two first
comedies, _L'Etourdi_ and _Le Dépit Amoureux_, which he had only ventured
to bring out in a provincial theatre, were grafted on Italian and Spanish
comedy. Nothing more original offered 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 scapegrace, 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 insensibly to himself he had fallen into some
scenes of natural simplicity. In _L'Etourdi,_ Mascarille, "le roi des
serviteurs," which Molière 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 delights by the fertility of his expedients and his perpetual and
vigorous gaiety. In _Le Dépit Amoureux_ is the exquisite 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, _Donec
gratus eram tibi_, Molière 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 representation at Paris; their
success was decisive. This was an evidence of public favour which did
not accompany Molière's more finished productions, which were so far
unfortunate that they were more intelligible to the few; in fact, the
first comedies of Molière were not written above the popular taste; the
spirit of true comedy, in a profound knowledge of the heart of man, and in
the delicate discriminations of individual character, was yet unknown.
Molière was satisfied to excel his predecessors, but he had not yet
learned his art.

The rising poet was now earnestly sought after; a more extended circle of
society now engaged his contemplative 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 depend on its conventional
grotesque personages and its forced incidents; he aspired to please a more
critical audience by making his dialogue the conversation of society, and
his characters its portraits.

Introduced to the literary coterie of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, 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 hôtel of the Marchioness of Rambouillet, was
to give a higher tone to all France, by the cultivation of the language,
the intellectual refinement 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 hôtel.

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 Hôtel de Rambouillet,
by its ingenious 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 between
the mind and the heart, which could not always 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 Hôtel 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 hôtel was feminine, though the most glorious men
of the literature of France were among its votaries. The great magnet was
the famed Mademoiselle 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 metaphysical "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 etiquette. Their baptismal names were to them profane, and
their assumed ones were drawn from the folio romances--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
_Introducers to Ruelles_.

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
magnificently arranged. The space between the bed and the wall was called
the _Ruelle_[A], the diminutive of _la Rue_; and in this narrow street, or
"Fop's alley," walked the favoured. But the chevalier who was graced by
the honorary title of _l'Alcoviste,_ was at once master of the household
and master of the ceremonies. His character is pointedly defined by St.
Evremond, as "a lover whom the _Précieuse_ is to love without enjoyment,
and to enjoy in good earnest her husband with aversion." The scene offered
no indecency to such delicate minds, and much less the impassioned style
which passed between _les chères_, 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 Alcoviste duke gratefully
took up the remains of her beauty.

[Footnote A: 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 great Henry IV., with the carved recess, and the _ruelle_, as
described above: it is a most interesting fragment of regal domestic
life.--ED.]

Their more curious project was the reform of the style of conversation, to
purify its grossness, and invent novel terms for familiar objects. Ménage
drew up a "Petition of the Dictionaries," which, by their severity of
taste, had nearly become superannuated. They succeeded better with the
_marchandes des modes_ and the jewellers, furnishing a vocabulary
excessively _précieuse_, 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, however, worth observation,
that the orthography invented by the _précieuses_--who, for their
convenience, rejected all the redundant letters in words--was adopted, and
is now used; and their pride of exclusiveness in society introduced the
singular term _s'encanailler,_ to describe a person who haunted low
company, while their morbid purity had ever on their lips the word
_obscénité_, terms which Molière ridicules, but whose expressiveness has
preserved them in the language.

Ridiculous as some of these extravagances now appear to us, they had been
so closely interwoven with the elegance of the higher ranks, and so
intimately associated with genius and literature, that the veil of fashion
consecrated 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
illustrious friends--to strike, but not to wound? A provincial poet and
actor to enter hostilely into the sacred precincts of these Exclusives?
Tormented by his genius Molière produced _Les Précieuses Ridicules_, but
admirably parried, in his preface, any application to them, by averring
that it was aimed at their imitators--their spurious mimics in the
country. The _Précieuses Ridicules_ was acted in the presence of the
assembled Hôtel de Rambouillet 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, Molière, this is true comedy." The
learned Ménage 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 remote allusion to the fate of idolatry
and the introduction of Christianity) to the poetical pedant, Chapelain,
"follow the counsel which St. Rémi gave to Clovis--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 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
rodomontade.

At this universal reception of the _Précieuses Ridicules_, Molière, 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 _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, and others. The _Précieuses
Ridicules_ was the germ of his more elaborate _Femmes Savantes_, which was
not produced till after an interval of twelve years.

Molière 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. _L'Ecole 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 somewhat 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! Molière 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 Molière resolved to compose an heroic
drama on the passion of jealousy--a favourite one on which he was
incessantly ruminating. _Don Garcie de Navarre, ou Le Prince Jaloux_, the
hero personated by himself, terminated by the hisses of the audience.

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 précieuses, and recently the bourgeois, who were sore from
_Sganarelle, ou Le Cocu Imaginaire_, were up in arms; and the rival
theatre maliciously raised the halloo, flattering themselves that the
comic genius of their dreaded rival would be extinguished by the ludicrous
convulsed hiccough to which Molière was liable in his tragic tones, but
which he adroitly managed in his comic parts.

But the genius of Molière was not to be daunted by cabals, nor even
injured by his own imprudence. _Le Prince Jaloux_ was condemned in
February, 1661, and the same year produced _L'Ecole des Maris_ and _Les
Fâcheux_. The happy genius of the poet opened on his Zoiluses a series of
dramatic triumphs.

Foreign critics--Tiraboschi and Schlegel--have depreciated the Frenchman's
invention, by insinuating that were all that Molière 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 Molière, and
the distinct classes of his comedies. Molière had the art of amalgamating
many distinct inventions of others into a single inimitable 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 Molière, 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 truth is, that few of his comedies 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 Fâcheux_, an admirable series of scenes, in three acts, and in
verse, was "planned, written, rehearsed, and represented in a single
fortnight." Many of his dramatic effusions were precipitated on the stage;
the humorous scenes of _Monsieur de Pourceaugnac_ were thrown out to
enliven a royal fête.

This versatility and felicity of composition made everything with Molière
a subject for comedy. He invented two novelties, such as the stage had
never before witnessed. Instead of a grave defence from the malice of his
critics, and the flying gossip of the court circle, Molière 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 collecting whatever had been alleged to depreciate
it; and _La Critique de L'Ecole des Femmes_ is still a delightful
production. 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 embarrassments to furnish
dramatic novelties as expeditiously as the king required. Louis XIV. was
himself no indifferent critic, and more than once suggested an incident or
a character to his favourite poet. In _L'Impromptu de Versailles_, Molière
appears in his own person, and in the midst of his whole company, with all
the irritable impatience of a manager who had no piece ready. Amidst this
green-room bustle Molière is advising, reprimanding, and imploring, his
"ladies and gentlemen." The characters in this piece are, in fact, the
actors themselves, who appear under their own names; and Molière 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 himself
subsequently adopted, and others have been followed up by some dramatists
without rivalling Molière. The _Figaro_ of Beaumarchais is a descendant of
the _Mascarille_ of Molière; but the glory of rivalling Molière was
reserved for our own stage. Sheridan's _Critic, or a Tragedy Rehearsed,_
is a congenial dramatic satire with these two pieces of Molière.

The genius of Molière had now stepped out of the restricted limits of the
old comedy; he now looked on the moving world with other eyes, and he
pursued the ridiculous in society. These fresher studies were going on at
all hours, and 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 the uneducated
noblemen devoted to the chase. The memorable scene between Trissotin and
Vadius, their mutual compliments terminating in their mutual contempt, had
been rehearsed by their respective authors--the Abbé Cottin and Ménage.
The stultified booby of Limoges, _Monsieur de Pourceaugnac_, and the
mystified millionaire, _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_, were copied after life,
as was _Sganarelle_, in _Le Médecin malgré lui_. The portraits in that
gallery of dramatic paintings, _Le Misanthrope_, have names inscribed
under them; and the immortal _Tartuffe_ was a certain bishop of Autun. No
dramatist has conceived with greater variety the female character; the
women of Molière have a distinctness of feature, and are touched with a
freshness of feeling. Molière 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 Molière is
this close attention to nature, wherein he greatly resembles our
Shakspeare, for all springs from its source. His unobtrusive genius never
occurs to us in following up his characters, and a whole scene leaves on
our mind a complete but imperceptible effect.

The style of Molière has often been censured by the fastidiousness of his
native critics, as _bas_ and _du style familier_. This does not offend the
foreigner, who is often struck by its simplicity and vigour. Molière
preferred the most popular and naïve 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 remonstrances; and whenever Molière 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 imagine that they were his more elevated comedies,
on his old maid-servant. This maid, probably, had a keen relish for comic
humour, for once when Molière 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, too, 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 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_. Molière 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 imagine
Shakspeare thus addressing his company, had the poet been also the
manager.

A remarkable incident in the history of the genius of Molière 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 sometimes appears in agony, but often
scorns to make its "trifles light as air," only ridiculous as a source of
consolation. Was _Le Contemplateur_ comic in his melancholy, 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 domestic life of Molière was itself
very dramatic; it afforded Goldoni a comedy of five acts, to reveal the
secrets of the family circle of Molière; and l'Abbate Chiari, an Italian
novelist and playwright, has taken for a comic subject, _Molière, the
Jealous Husband_.

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 _Suspicious Husband_. Molière, while his
own heart was the victim, conformed to the national taste, by often
placing the object on its comic side. Domestic jealousy is a passion which
admits of a great diversity of subjects, from the tragic or the pathetic,
to the absurd and the ludicrous. We have them all in Molière. Molière
often was himself "Le Cocu Imaginaire;" he had been in the position of the
guardian in _L'Ecole des Maris_. Like Arnolphe in _L'Ecole des Femmes_, 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 Celimène is "une des plus fortes qui existant au théâtre," 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 Prince_.

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, could
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 Béjard,
boasted that, with the exception of the poet, she had never dispensed her
personal favours but to the aristocracy. The constancy of Molière was
interrupted by another actress, Du Parc; beautiful but insensible, she
only tormented the poet, and furnished him with some severe lessons for
the coquetry of his Celimène, in _Le Misanthrope_. The facility of the
transition of the tender passion had more closely united the susceptible
poet to Mademoiselle de Brie. But Madame Béjard, not content to be the
chief actress, and to hold her partnership 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 Béjard soon attracted the paternal attentions of the
poet. She became the secret idol of his retired moments, while he fondly
thought that he could mould a young mind, in its innocence, to his own
sympathies. The mother and the daughter never agreed. Armande sought his
protection; and one day rushing into his study, declared that she would
marry her friend. The elder Béjard 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 Molière
meditating scenes of feminine jealousies.

Molière was fascinated by his youthful wife; her lighter follies charmed:
two years riveted the connubial chains. Molière was a husband who was
always a lover. The actor on the stage was the very man he personated.
Mademoiselle Molière, as she was called by the public, was the Lucile in
_Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_. With what fervour the poet feels her neglect!
with what eagerness 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 Molière that he was only his own
"cocu imaginaire;" but these domestic embarrassments multiplied.
Mademoiselle, reckless of the distinguished name she bore, while she
gratified her personal vanity by a lavish expenditure, practised that
artful coquetry which attracted a crowd of loungers. Molière found no
repose in his own house, and retreated to a country-house, where, however,
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 confinement. To prevent a public rupture, Molière consented to
live under the same roof, and only to meet at the theatre. Weak only in
love, however divided from his wife, Molière remained her perpetual lover.
He said, in confidence, "I am born with every disposition to tenderness.
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 compassion
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 Molière. With strong passions in a feeble frame, he
had duped his imagination that, like another Pygmalion, he would create a
woman by his own art. 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 dissipation. He
was a domestic man, of a pensive and even melancholy temperament. Silent
and reserved, unless in conversation with that more intimate circle whose
literature aided his genius, or whose friendship consoled for his domestic
disturbances, his habits were minutely methodical; 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 Molière, could conjecture, that one skilled in
the workings of our nature would have ventured on the perilous experiment
of equalizing sixteen years against forty--weighing roses against grey
locks--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 rites of
sepulture to the corpse of Molière THE ACTOR, it was her voice which
reminded the world of Molière 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 delightful 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 sensibility even to its infirmity, the
tears which would cover his face, and the agony in his heart, were perhaps
national. But if this sensibility produced at times the 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 performance at St. Cyr, the youthful 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 tears himself. "I do not hesitate," says Louis
Racine, "to relate such minute circumstances, because this facility of
shedding tears shows the goodness of the heart, according to the
observation of the ancients--

      [Greek:] "agathohi d aridakryes andres."

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 be still better, and how distant we
are still from perfection, 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 always occasioned me more vexation than all the praise I received
could give me pleasure." And, again, he endeavours to impress on him that
the favour he received from the world he owed not to his verses. "Do not
imagine that they are my verses that 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 themselves. 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 Boileau. It was Racine's excessive sensibility
which made him the finest dramatic reciter. The celebrated actress,
Mademoiselle Champmeslé,[A] the heroine of his tragedies, had no genius
whatever for the stage, but she had beauty, voice, and memory. Racine
taught her first to comprehend 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, faithful to her lessons, though a
mere actress of art, on the stage seemed inspired by passion; and as she,
thus formed and fashioned, naturally only played thus effectively in the
dramas of her preceptor, it was supposed that love for the poet inspired
the actress.

[Footnote A: Racine first met this actress at the Marquis de Sevigné's
_petit soupers_; so much lamented by his more famous mother in one of her
admirable letters, who speaks of "the Racines and the Despreaux's" who
assisted his prodigality. In one of Madame de Sevigné's letters, dated in
1672, she somewhat rashly declares, "Racine now writes his dramas, not for
posterity, but for Mademoiselle Champmeslé:" she had then forsaken the
marquis for the poet, who wrote _Roxane_ in _Bajazet_ expressly for her.
--ED.]

When Racine read aloud he diffused his own enthusiasm once with 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 OEdipus, the
French poet became so deeply imbued with the Greek tragedian, that his
auditors caught all the emotions of terror and pity. "I have seen," says
one of those auditors, "our best pieces represented by our best actors,
but never anything approached the agitation which then came over us; and
to this distant day I have never lost the recollection of Racine, with the
volume in his hand, full of emotion, and we all 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 pride, and his property. His education had been a
religious one, in the Port-Royal;[A] but when Nicole, one of that
illustrious fraternity, with undistinguishing 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.[B] He determined to enter into the
austere 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 domestic
occupations would withdraw him from the passion he seemed most to dread,
that of writing verses.

[Footnote A: For an account of this very celebrated religious foundation,
its fortunes and misfortunes, see the "Curiosities of Literature," vol. i.
p. 94.--ED.]

[Footnote B: Racine 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 princess,
who selected his _Andromaque_ for the subject, perhaps out of compliment
to the poet, whose first visit became in consequence his last.--ED.]

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 insensible of her sex; and the properest person in the world to
mortify the passion of literary glory, and the momentary exultation of
literary vanity.[A] 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
rendered 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 Boileau 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 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 children are those of a father and
a friend; kind exhortations, or pathetic reprimands; he enters into the
most domestic detail, while he does not conceal from them the mediocrity
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."

[Footnote A: The lady he chose was one Catherine de Romanet, whose family
was of great respectability but of small fortune. She is not described as
possessing any marked personal attractions.--ED.]

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 ad_
_versos rerum exitus 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 that
enthusiasm peculiar to himself. Madame de Maintenon 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 passed, and declined to
receive his visits for the present. Racine was shortly after attacked with
violent fever. In the languor of recovery he addressed Madame de Maintenon
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 imagination, exclaim, with his good
sense, of the court:--

  Quel séjour étranger, et pour vous et pour moi!

Racine afterwards saw Madame de Maintenon walking in the gardens of
Versailles; she drew aside into a retired allée to meet him; she exhorted
him to exert his 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
in quite a different manner. That pious woman every day implores God to
bestow 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 coming!" said Madame de Maintenon; "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 studious 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 was performed by the young scholars of St. Cyr, and
received it so coldly that Racine was astonished and disgusted.[A]
He earnestly requested Boileau's opinion, who maintained it was his
capital work. "I understand these things," said he, "and the public _y
reviendra_." The prediction was a true one, but it was accomplished too
late, long after the death of the author; it was never appreciated till it
was publicly performed.

[Footnote A: They were written at the request 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
_Andromaque_, 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 again," 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 his _Esther_,
making that character a flattering reflection of Maintenon's career.--ED.]

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 leur Apollon aux gages d'un
libraire_, and he declared that he had only inserted these verses,

  Je sai qu'un noble esprit peut sans honte et sans crime
  Tirer de son travail un tribut légitime,

to console Racine, who had received some profits from the printing of his
tragedies. Those profits were, however, 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 give him the means of continuing his studies of the
belles-lettres_. He received, by an account found among his papers, above
forty thousand 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 brought by the hand
of the first valet-de-chambre, or to exult in the tribute offered 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 design 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 off 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 invention, and
with a cast of genius made for all times, delighted his contemporaries and
charms his posterity. He looked 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 translations, 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 in 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 unhappily Sterne
undertook to satirise false erudition, which requires the knowledge of the
true. Though the _Papemanes_, on whom Rabelais has exhausted his grotesque
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 literary antiquaries. The day
has passed when a gay dissolute abbe could obtain a 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.[A]

[Footnote A: 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 important
negotiations; and it is recorded of him that he refused a scholar
admittance to his table because he had not read his works. This
familiarity with his grotesque romance was also shared by Cardinal Duprat,
who is said to have always carried a copy of it with him, as if it was his
breviary. The anecdote of the priest who obtained promotion from a
knowledge of his works is given in the "Curiosities of Literature," vol.
ii. p. 10.--ED.]

In my youth the world doted on Sterne! Martin Sherlock 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 lose 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."[A]
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 discover a word which exactly
corresponds with our term _humour_ in any language, ancient or modern.
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's page; and both are distinct from the
broader and stronger humour of Sterne.

[Footnote A: This friend, it now appears, was Dr. King, of Oxford, whose
anecdotes have recently been published. This curious fact is given in 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!]

The result of Dr. Cheyne's honest confession was experienced 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 it. Take,
for instance, two very opposite effects produced by "Tristram Shandy" on a
man of strong original humour himself, and a wit who had more delicacy and
sarcasm than force and originality. The Rev. Philip Skelton declared that
"after reading 'Tristram Shandy,' he could not for two or three days
attend seriously to his devotion, 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 utterly depraved? Some anecdotes which one of his companions[A]
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 generally 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." Warburtou declared that "he was an
irrecoverable scoundrel." Authenticated facts are, however, wanting for a
judicious summary of the real character of the founder of sentimental
writing. An impenetrable mystery hangs over his family conduct; he has
thrown many sweet domestic touches in his own memoirs and letters
addressed to his daughter: but it would seem that he was often parted from
his family. After he had earnestly solicited the return of his wife from
France, though she did return, he was suffered to die in utter neglect.

[Footnote A: Caleb Whitefoord, the wit once famed for his invention of
cross-readings, which, appeared under the name of "Papirius Cursor."]

His sermons have been observed to be characterised by an air of levity; he
attempted this unusual manner. It was probably a caprice which induced him
to introduce one of his sermons in "Tristram Shandy;" it was fixing a
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 spirits, complaining to Caleb Whitefoord of the state of his finances,
Caleb asked him, "if he had no sermons like the one in 'Tristram Shandy?'"
But Sterne had no notion that "sermons" were saleable, for two preceding
ones had passed unnoticed. "If you could hit on a striking title, take my
word for it that they would go down." The next day Sterne made his
appearance in raptures. "I have it!" he cried: "Dramatic Sermons by
Torick." With great difficulty he was persuaded to drop this allusion to
the church and the playhouse![A]

[Footnote A: He published these two volumes of discourses under the title
of "Yorick's Sermons," because, as he stated in his preface, it would
"best serve the booksellers' purpose, as Yorick's name is possibly of the
two the more known;" but, fearing the censure of the world, he added a
second title-page with his own name, "to ease the minds of those who see a
jest, and the danger which lurks under it, where no jest is meant." All
this did not free Sterne from much severe criticism.--ED.]

We are told in the short addition to his own memoirs, that "he submitted
to fate on the 18th day of March, 1768, at his lodgings in Bond-street."
But it does not appear to have been noticed that Sterne died with
neither friend nor relation by his side! a hired nurse was the sole
companion of the man whose wit found admirers in every street, but
whose heart, it would seem, could not draw one to his death-bed. We
cannot say whether Sterne, who had long been dying, had resolved to
practise his own principle,--when he made the philosopher Shandy, who had
a fine saying for everything, deliver his opinion on death--that "there is
no terror, brother Toby, in its looks, but what it borrows from groan? and
convulsions--and the blowing of noses, and the wiping away of tears with
the bottoms of curtains in a dying man's room. Strip it of these, what is
it?" I find the moment of his death described in a singular book, the
"Life of a Foot-man." I give it with all its particulars. "In the month of
January, 1768, we set off for London. We stopped for some time at Almack's
house in Pall-Mall. My master afterwards took Sir James Gray's house in
Clifford-street, who was going ambassador to Spain. He now began
house-keeping, hired a French cook, a house-maid, and kitchen-maid, and
kept a great deal of the best company. About this time, Mr Sterne, the
celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond-street.
He was sometimes called 'Tristram Shandy,' and sometimes 'Yorick;' a very
great favourite of the gentlemen's. One day my master had company to
dinner who were speaking about him: the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of
March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume,
and Mr. James. 'John,' said my master, 'go and inquire how Mr. Sterne is
to-day.' I went, returned, and said,--I went 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, 'Now it is come!' He put up his hand as if
to stop a blow, and died in a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry,
and lamented him very much[A]."

[Footnote A: "Travels in various parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, during
a series of thirty years and upwards, by John Macdonald, a cadet of the
family of Kippoch, in Invernesshire, who after the ruin of his family, in
1765, was thrown, when a child, on the wide world, &c. Printed for the
author, 1790."--He served a number of noblemen and gentlemen 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.]

Such is the simple narrative of the death of this wit[A]! 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 were the Berangers de Fourmantel,
who during the persecution of the French Protestants by Louis XIV.
emigrated to this country: they were entitled to extensive possessions in
St. Domingo, 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 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;
but that on 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 five 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.

[Footnote A: 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 unsuitable inscription, by a tippling fraternity 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. Yorick, preached before a very mixed society of Jemmies,
Jessamies, Methodists, and Christians, at a nocturnal meeting in Petticoat
Lane; by Christopher Flagellan, A.M." As one of the minor "Curiosities of
Literature" this tract is worth noting; its author, in a preface, says
that "it has been _maliciously_, or rather _stupidly_, reported that the
late Mr. Sterne, alias Yorick, is not dead; but that, on the 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."--ED.]

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 acquaintance 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 published till 1747. Her disordered mind
could not therefore have been occasioned by the _sudden_ marriage of
Sterne. A sentimental intercourse evidently existed between 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 picture of
his life in town in the full flower of his fame eager with hope and
flushed with success.


LETTER I.

"My dear Kitty,--I beg you will accept of the inclosed 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 something of the same kind and gentle
disposition in your heart which I have painted in the prophet's, which has
attached me so much to you and your interests, that I shall live and die

"Your affectionate and faithful servant,

"Laurence Sterne.

"P.S.--If possible, I will see you this afternoon before I go to Mr.
Fothergil's. Adieu, dear friend,--I had the pleasure to drink your health
last night."


LETTER II.

"My dear Kitty,--If this billet catches you in bed, you are a lazy, sleepy
little slut, and I am a giddy, foolish, 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 Matthew 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.

"My dear Kitty,--I have sent you a pot of sweetmeats and a pot of honey
--neither of them half so sweet as yourself--but don't be vain upon this,
or presume to grow sour upon this character of sweetness I give you; for
if you do I shall send you a pot of pickles (by 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
motto, such a one, my dear Kitty,

  "Qui ne changera pas qu'en mourant.

"L.S."


He came up to town in 1760, to publish the two first volumes of 'Shandy,'
of which the first edition had appeared at York the preceding year.


LETTER IV.

"_London, May 8._

"My dear Kitty,--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 Haymarket, 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 return of the post with great
impatience.

"I have the greatest honours paid me, and most civilities shown me 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 honour 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 woman--wherever I am, my heart is warm
towards you, and ever shall be, till it is cold for ever. 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 a guinea for a squeeze of your hand. I send my soul perpetually out
to see what you are a-doing--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."


LETTER V.

"My dear 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.[A]

"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 bye are the genteelest in
town,[B] are full of the greatest company.--I dined these two days with
two ladies of the bedchamber--then with Lord Buckingham, Lord Edgcumb,
Lord Winchelsea, Lord Littleton, a bishop, &c. &c.

"I assure you, my dear Kitty, that Tristram is the fashion.--Pray to God I
may see my dearest girl soon and well.--Adieu.

"Your affectionate friend,

"L. STERNE."

[Footnote A: Can this allude to the death of his wife?--that very year he
tells his daughter he had taken a house at York, "for your mother and
yourself."]

[Footnote B: They were the second house from St. Alban's Street, Pall
Mall.]

       *       *       *       *       *

HUME, ROBERTSON, 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 compilation 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 unsubstantial 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, occupied by
perspective 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 previous studies of half a life; and their speculative or
theoretical histories are of so much the less value whenever they are
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 early
celebrity, and depend more on themselves than on their researches.

In some curious letters to the literary antiquary Dr. Birch, Eobertson
acknowledges "my chief object is to _adorn_, as far as I am capable of
adorning, the history of a period which deserves to be better known," He
probably took his lesson from Voltaire, the reigning author of that day,
and a great favourite with Robertson. Voltaire indeed tells us, that no
writers, but those who have composed tragedies, can throw any interest
into a history; 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 meditation 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
miracles of his art, and enlarges his figures to a colossal dimension.
Such is theoretical history.

The theoretical historian communicates his own character to his history;
and if, like Robertson, he be profound 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 Bothwell, we are often defrauding Robertson of whatever admiration
may be due to such deep policy.

When Hume received from Dr. Birch Forbes's Manuscripts and Murdin's
State-papers, in great haste he writes to his brother historian:--"What I
wrote you 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
matter is put beyond all question. I got these papers during the holidays
by Dr. Birch's means; and as soon as I read them _I ran to Millar_, and
desired him very earnestly to stop the publication of your history till I
should write to you, and give you an opportunity 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
require the cancelling a great many sheets; that there were scattered
_passages 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_! 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 Robertson to pursue this
newly-discovered province of philosophical or theoretical history, he was
long irresolute in his designs, and so unpractised in those researches he
was desirous of attempting, that his admirers would have lost his popular
productions, had not a fortunate introduction to Dr. Birch, whose life had
been spent in historical pursuits, enabled the Scottish historian to open
many a clasped book, and to drink of many a sealed fountain. Robertson was
long undecided whether to write the history of Greece, of Leo X., that of
William III. and Queen Anne, or that of Charles V., and 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
William and Anne; he seemed to have little other knowledge than what he
had taken upon trust. "I painted to him," says Lord Orford, "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 matured 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 knowledge 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 mentioned in any book I happened to read_. Your erudition and
knowledge of hooks is infinitely superior to mine, and I doubt not but you
will 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 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 German emperor, was
somewhat ominous of the nature of the projected history.

Yet Robertson, though he once thus acknowledged, as we see, that he "never
had access to any copious libraries, 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 ostentation, 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 meridian of the court of Madrid, rather than to
the cause of humanity, of truth, and of philosophy. I understand, 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
deceptive catalogue. Birch thought so, and was probably a little disturbed
at the overwhelming success of our eloquent and penetrating historian,
while his own historical labours, the most authentic materials of history,
but not history itself, hardly repaid the printer. Birch's publications
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 historica_.

Birch, however, must have enjoyed many a secret triumph over our popular
historians, who had introduced their beautiful philosophical history into
our literature; the dilemma in which they sometimes found themselves must
have amused him. He has thrown out an oblique stroke at Bobertson's "pomp
of style, and fine eloquence," "which too often tend to disguise the real
state of the facts."[A] 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, "published since Christmas," and a manuscript trial of Mary,
Queen of Scots, in Lord Boyston'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 hear Robertson, who had
projected a history of British America, of which we possess 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!

[Footnote A: See "Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii. p. 387.]

Let it not be for one moment imagined that this article 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 antiquary. For the
satisfaction of the reader, I here preserve these literary relics.


_Letters between Dr. Birch and Dr. W. Robertson, relative to
the Histories of Scotland and of Charles V._


"TO DR. BIRCH.

"_Gladsmuir, 19 Sept. 1757._

"Reverent Sir,--Though I have not the good fortune to be known to you
personally, I am so happy as to be no stranger to your writings, to which
I have been indebted 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 knowledge, I now presume to write to you and to
ask your assistance without any apology.

"I have been engaged for some time in writing the history of Scotland from
the death of James V. to the accession of James VI. to the throne of
England. My chief object is to adorn (as far as I am capable of adorning)
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 where 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 doubt or of controversy, I have therefore taken all the pains in
my power to examine the evidence on both sides with exactness. You know
how copious the _materia, historian_ in this period is. Besides all the
common historians and printed collections of papers, I have consulted
several manuscripts which are to be found in this country. I am persuaded
that there are still many manuscripts 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 Collections 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 'Dépêches
de Beaumont' are in the hands of the same gentleman. But I have no
opportunity of consulting your 'Memoirs' at present, and I cannot remember
whether the 'Dépêches de Fenelon' 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
publish. May I beg the favour of you to let me know whether Fenelon's
papers be yet extant and accessible, and to give me some general 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,
Anderson, &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 esteem 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'd Sir, Y'r m. ob. & m. h. S'r,

"Wm. ROBERTSON."


TO DR. BIRCH.

"_Edinburgh, 1 Jan. 1759._

"Dear 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 disposition, 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
desired Mr. Millar to send you a large paper copy of it in my name, which
I beg you may accept as a testimony of my regard and of my gratitude. He
will likewise transmit to you another copy, which I must entreat you to
present to my Lord Royston, with such acknowledgments 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 inaccuracies in
the press work. Mr. Millar grew impatient 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, Dr. Sir,

"Y'r m. obed't. & rust. o. ser't.,

"WILLIAM ROBERTSON.

"My address is, one of the ministers of Ed."


TO DR. BIRCH.

"_Edinburgh, 13 Dec. 1759._

"Dear Sir,--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 contains the first
establishment of the present political system 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 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. 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 suffer much by this, as the two former languages,
together with the Latin, will supply me with books in abundance. 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 general what it contains. In the catalogue I have inclosed, this
mark × is prefixed to all the books which I can get in this country; if
you yourself, 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 with great gratitude
and return them with much punctuality. I beg leave to offer compliments to
all our common 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 behalf--"


FROM DR. BIRCH TO THE REV. DR. ROBERTSON, AT EDINBURGH.

"_London, 3 Jany. 1760._

"Dear Sir,--Your letter of the 13 Dec'r. was particularly 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 consulted 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'Allemagne' by Father Barre, chancellor of the
University of Paris, published a few years ago in several volumes in 4^to.,
is a work of very good credit, and to be perused by you; as is likewise
the second edition of 'Abrégé chronologique de l'Histoire & du Droit
public d'Allemagne,' just printed at Paris, and formed upon the plan of
President Henault's 'Nouvel Abrégé chronologique de l'Histoire de France,'
in which the reigns of Francis I. and Henry II. will be proper to be seen
by you.

"The 'Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire du Cardinal Granvelle,' by Father
Rosper Levesque, a Benedictin monk, which were printed at Paris in two
vol's. 12^o. 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 of a vast collection, above an hundred
volumes of the Cardinal's original papers, at Besançon. Among these are
the papers of his eminence's father, who was chancellor 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
Heydelberg 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^to.
The writer had been secretary and councillor to the elector.

"Another book which I shall transmit to you is a valuable collection of
state papers, made by Mons'r. Rivier, and printed at Blois, in 1665, in
two vols. f^o. They relate to the reigns of Francis I., Henry II., and
Francis II. of France. The indexes will direct you to such passages as
concern the Emperor.

"As Mons'r. Amelot de la Houssaic, who was extremely conversant in modern
history, has, in the 1st. tome of his 'Mémoires Historiques Politiques et
Littéraires,' from p. 156 to 193, treated of Charles V., I shall add that
book to my parcel.

"Varillas's 'Life of Henry II. 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 Emperor, his contemporary, 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 he was secretary to S'r.
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 'Epîtres des Princes,' translated from the Italian by Belleforest,
will probably supply you with some few things to your purpose.

"Vol. 295 among the Harleian MSS. contains little remarkable except some
letters from Henry VIII's amb'r. 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 VIII., in 1546,
to his amb'r. with the Emperor."


TO DR. BIRCH.

_Extract from a letter of Dr. Robertson, dated College of Edinburgh, Oct.
8, 1765._

" . . . I have met with many interruptions in carrying 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, manners, 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 send me, and shall
return them carefully as soon as my work is done."

       *       *       *       *       *

OF VOLUMINOUS 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 unfinished tasks, where the cook is viewed
in flight, oversetting 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 works, which they call "_ouvrages de
longue haleine_," and it has often happened that the _haleine_ has closed
before the work.

Works of literary history have been particularly subject to this
mortifying check on intellectual enterprise, and human life has not
yielded a sufficient portion for the communication of extensive
acquirement! After 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 forgetfulness of the
nature of all human concerns in the mind of the antiquary, who 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 attachment to study, but by that order and arrangement
which shortens our researches, have sufficed for a MURATORI. With such a
student time was a great capital, which he 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, appears not to
have felt any dread of leaving his voluminous labours unfinished, but
rather of wanting one to begin. This literary Alexander thought he might
want a world to conquer! Muratori 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 him 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 d'Italia_
as an addition to his twenty-nine folios of his _Rerum Italicarum
Scriptores_, and the six folios of the _Antiquitates Medii Ævi_! Yet
these vast edifices of history are not all which this illustrious Italian
has raised for his fatherland. Gibbon in his Miscellaneous Works has drawn
an admirable character of Muratori.

But such a fortunate result has rarely accompanied the labours of the
literary worthies of this order. TIRABOSCHI indeed lived to complete his
great national history 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 a noble but too mighty a project, in which, however, he
considerably advanced. This was an historical and critical account of the
memoirs and the writings of Italian authors; he even commenced the
publication in alphabetical 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 Sçavans 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 gratitude arranged a classified catalogue in thirty-two
folio volumes; it indicated not only what any author had professedly
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 philosophical 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 precious 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 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 conceive.
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 "Bibliothèque Françoise" 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 commenced, 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 Littéraire 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![A]

[Footnote A: This work has been since resumed.]

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 proceed
as far as the letter H! The alphabetical order which some writers have
adopted has often proved a sad memento of human life! The last edition of
our own "Biographia Britannica," feeble, imperfect, and inadequate as the
writers were to the task the booksellers had chosen them to execute,
remains still a monument which every literary Englishman may blush to see
so hopelessly interrupted.

When LE GRAND D'AUSSY, whose "Fabliaux" are so well known, adopted,
in the warmth of antiquarian imagination, the plan suggested by the
Marquis de Paulmy, first sketched in the _Mélanges tirés d'une grande
Bibliothèque_, 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 curiosity: "_le sujet m'en parut neuf, riche et
piquant_." He revelled amid the scenes of their architecture, the interior
decorations 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.
Renouncing all kinds of pleasure, working ten to twelve hours a-day,
extracting, ceaselessly copying; after this sad life I now wished to draw
breath, turn over what I had amassed, and arrange 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 confess 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 recollection of that
moment of alarm without a feeling of involuntary terror._ What a business
is this, good God, of a compiler! In truth, 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 _change my facts as well as my 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 Britannica" 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 combined labours.

One cannot forbear applying to this subject of voluminous 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 calculates 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 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 CONDEMNED.


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 indispensable 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 latter
half century considerably abated; but it proves, as in higher matters,
that some philosophical reflection is required 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 researches, 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, 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.

Forks are an Italian invention; and in England were so perfect a novelty
in the days of Queen Bess, that Fynes 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, _fork."_ This thing was so strange that he found it necessary to
describe it.[A] It is an instrument "to hold the meat while he cuts it;
for they hold it ill-manners that one should touch the meat with his
hands."[B] 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 purify 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.

[Footnote A: Modern research has shown that forks were not so entirely
unknown as was imagined when the above was written. In vol. xxvii. of the
"Archaeologia," published by the Society of Antiquaries, is an engraving
of a fork and spoon of the Anglo-Saxon era; they were found with fragments
of ornaments in silver and brass, all of which had been deposited in a
box, of which there were some decayed remains; together with about seventy
pennies of sovereigns from Coenwolf, King of Mercia (A.D. 796), to
Ethelstan (A.D. 878, 890). The inventories 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 cuiller d'or et une fourchette, et aux
deux fonts deux saphirs;" and in the inventory of Charles V. of France, in
1380, "une cuillier et une fourchette d'or, où il y a ij balays et X
perles." Their use seems to have been a luxurious appendage to the
dessert, to lift fruit, or take sops from wine. Thus Piers Gaveston, 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 (à prendre la soupe où vin). They appear to
have been entirely restricted to this use, and never adopted as now, to
lift meat at ordinary meals. They were carried about the person in
decorated cases, and only used on certain occasions, and then only by the
highest classes; hence their comparative rarity.--Ed.]

[Footnote B: Moryson's "Itinerary," part i, p. 208.]

Fabling Paganism had probably raised into a deity the little man who first
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 unnatural 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.
Maur, and were only used after a protracted struggle between the old
members, zealous for their traditions, and the young reformers, for their
fingers.[A] The allusions to the use of the fork, which we find in all the
dramatic writers through the reigns of James the First and Charles the
First, show that it was still considered as a strange affectation and
novelty. The fork does not appear to have been in general use before the
Restoration! On the introduction of forks there appears to have been some
difficulty in the manner they were to be held and used. In _The Fox_, Sir
Politic Would-be, counselling Peregrine at Venice, observes--

  --Then you must learn the use
  And handling of your silver fork at meals.

[Footnote A: I find this circumstance concerning forks mentioned in the
"Dictionnaire de Trevoux."]

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 l'Angleterre" asserts that "an Englishman may be discovered anywhere,
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 German, 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
Venetians. This implement of cleanliness was, however, doomed to the same
anathema as the fantastical ornament of "the complete Signor," 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 contempt calls

  Thy case of toothpicks and thy silver fork!

Umbrellas, 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
incurring the brand of effeminacy; and they were vulgarly considered as
the characteristics of a person whom the mob then hugely disliked--namely,
a mincing Frenchman. At first a single umbrella seems to have been 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 Wilks' Coffee-house,_
shall the next time be welcome to the maid's _pattens_." An umbrella
carried by a man was obviously then considered an extreme effeminacy. As
late as in 1778, one John Macdonald, a footman, 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 chairmen, joining with the true _esprit
de corps_, were clamorous against this portentous rival. This footman, 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 gentleman, 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. Foreigners began to use theirs, and
then the English. Now it is become a great trade in London."[A] The state
of our population might now, in some degree, be ascertained by the number
of umbrellas.

[Footnote A: Umbrellas are, However, an invention of great antiquity, and
may be seen in the sculptures of ancient Egypt and Assyria. They are also
depicted on early Greek vases. But the most curious fact connected with
their use in this country seems to be the knowledge our Saxon ancestors
had of them; though the use, in accordance with the earliest custom,
appears to have been as a shelter or mark of distinction for royalty. In
Cædmon's "Metrical Paraphrase of Parts of Scripture," now in the British
Museum (Harleian MS. No. 603), an Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the tenth
century, is the drawing of 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 precisely similar to those now in use, though, as noted above,
they were an entire novelty when re-introduced in the last century.--Ed.]

Coaches, on their first invention, offered a fruitful source of
declamation, as an inordinate luxury, particularly 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 height
was this _infernal vice_ got, which has done so much injury to Castile."
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
footmen, 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 Westminster Hall, or jog on with all their gravity on a poor
palfrey. Considerable bodies of men were thrown out of their habitual
employments--the watermen, the hackneymen, and the saddlers. Families
were now jolted, in a heavy wooden machine, into splendour and ruin. The
disturbance and opposition these coaches created we should hardly now have
known, had not Taylor, the Water-poet[A] and man, sent down to us an
invective against coaches, in 1623, dedicated to all who are grieved with
"the world running on wheels."

[Footnote A: Taylor was originally a Thames waterman, hence the term
"Water-poet" given him. His attack upon coaches was published with this
quaint title, "The world runnes on wheeles, or, odds, betwixt carts and
coaches." It is an unsparing satire.--Ed.]

Taylor, a humorist and satirist, as well as waterman, conveys some
information in this rare tract of the period when coaches began to be more
generally used--"Within our memories our nobility and gentry could ride
well-mounted, and sometimes walk on foot gallantly attended with fourscore
brave fellows in blue coats, which was a glory to our nation far greater
than forty of these leathern timbrels. Then the name of a _coach_ was
heathen Greek. Who ever saw, but upon extraordinary occasions, Sir Philip
Sidney and Sir Francis Drake ride in a coach? They made small use of
coaches; there were 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 question whether the devil
brought _tobacco_ into England in _a coach_, for both appeared at the same
time." It appears that families, for the sake of their exterior show,
miserably contracted their domestic establishment; for Taylor, the
Water-poet, complains that when they used formerly to keep from ten to a
hundred proper serving-men, they now made the best shift, and for the sake
of their coach and horses had only "a butterfly page, a trotting footman,
and a stiff-drinking coachman, a cook, a clerk, a steward, and a butler,
which hath forced an army of tall fellows to the gatehouses," or prisons.
Of one of the evil effects of this new fashion of coach-riding this
satirist of the town wittily observes, that, as soon as a man was
knighted, his lady was lamed for ever, and could not on any account be
seen but in a coach. As hitherto our females had been accustomed to robust
exercise, on foot or on horseback, they were now forced to substitute a
domestic artificial exercise in sawing billets, swinging, or rolling the
great roller in the alleys of their garden. In the change of this new
fashion they found out the inconvenience of a sedentary life passed in
their coaches.[A]

[Footnote A: Stow, in his "Chronicles," has preserved the date of the
first introduction of coaches into England, as well as the name of the
first driver, and first English coachmaker. "In the year 1564 Guilliam
Boonen, a Dutchman, became the queen's coachman, and was the first that
brought the use of coaches into England. After a while 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; but then, by little and little, they grew usual
among the nobility and others of sorte, and within twenty years became a
great trade of coachmaking;" and he also notes that in the year of their
introduction to England "Walter Rippon made a _coche_ for the Earl of
Rutland, which was the first _coche_ that was ever made in England."--ED.]

Even at this early period of the introduction of coaches, they were not
only costly in the ornaments--in velvets, damasks, taffetas, silver and
gold lace, fringes of all sorts--but their greatest pains were in matching
their coach-horses. "They must be all of a colour, longitude, latitude,
cressitude, height, 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 apples." This is good natural humour. He proceeds
--"They use more diligence in matching their coach-horses than in the
marriage of their sons and daughters." A great 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 their first
introduction, than since they have become objects of ordinary use.
Notwithstanding this humorous invective on the calamity of coaches, and
that "housekeeping never decayed till coaches came into England; and that
a ten-pound rent now was scarce twenty shillings 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
novelties, 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 without their mackeroones,
Parmisants (macaroni, with Parmesan cheese, I suppose), jellies and
kickshaws, with baked swans, pastries 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 watermen, hackneymen, and other conveyancers of our
loungers, thrown out of employ!

Tobacco.--It was thought, at the time of its introduction, that the
nation would be ruined by the use of tobacco. Like all novel tastes the
newly-imported leaf maddened all ranks among us, "The money spent in 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 his liege children 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." The information was perhaps a pious fraud. This tract, which has
incurred so much ridicule, was, in truth, a meritorious 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 cheapness, 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 constitution 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 discern, and bring
home on their bodies." Evelyn has detailed the gradual destruction it
effects on every article of ornament and price; and "he heard in France,
that those parts lying south-west 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 books exposed to sale on stalls,
however old they might be, retained their freshness, and were in no
instance like our own, corroded and blackened, which our coal-smoke never
fails to produce. There was a proclamation, so far back as Edward the
First, forbidding the use of sea-coal in the suburbs, on a complaint of
the nobility and gentry, that they could not go to London on account of
the noisome smell and thick air. About 1550, Hollingshed 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, by the smell of
his clothes, to have come from coal-fires. 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. But 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 supplies no unimportant number. On the
improvements in anatomy by Malpighi and his followers, the senior
professors 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
conclusions 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. In Spain, to the sixteenth century, they maintained that
when the pain was on the one side they ought to bleed on the other. A
great physician insisted on a contrary 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 court, when the Duke
of Savoy died of a pleurisy, having been legitimately bled. This puzzled
the emperor, 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 prejudices
against dissection; Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood led
to so protracted a controversy, that the great discovery was hardly
admitted even in the latter days of the old man; Lady Wortley Montague's
introduction of the practice of inoculation met the same obstinate
resistance as, more recently, that of vaccination startled the people.
Thus objects of the highest importance to mankind, on their first
appearance, are slighted and contemned. 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 changes in public opinion--the utter annihilation of false
notions, like those of witchcraft, astrology, spectres, and many other
superstitions of no remote date, the hideous progeny of imposture got on
ignorance, and audacity on fear. But 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 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 improved by the wonderful revelations of Swift's
"Directions," 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 and rogues
described and collected together, such a compilation of their artifices
and villanies would serve to put us on our guard. The theorist of
legislation seems often to forget the metaphysical state of man. With the
vitiated mind, that latent sympathy of evil 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 comedy, in twenty-five acts, the _Spanish Bawd_. 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 "Directions":--

"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 masters. The masters
love more themselves than their servants, 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 service, 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
difference 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
Swift and Mandeville. Our latter great cynic has left a frightful picture
of the state of the domestics, when it seems "they had experienced
professors among them, who could instruct the graduates in iniquity seven
hundred illiberal arts how to cheat, impose upon, and find out the blind
side of their masters." The footmen, in Mandeville's day, had entered into
a society together, and made laws to regulate their wages, and not to
carry burdens 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 requiring 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 _les petites 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 menaced by a sort of
servile war. The famous farce of _High Life below 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 unjust claims on the many, in the result
worked the reform they so greatly dreaded.[A] One of the grievances in
society was then an anomalous custom, for it was only practised 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 presenting the visitor with some separate article, of
hat, gloves, coat and cane, claiming their "vails." It would not have been
safe to refuse even those who, with nothing to present, still held out the
hand, for their attentions to the diner-out.[B]

[Footnote A: The farce was produced in 1759, when it was the custom to
admit any servant in livery free to the upper gallery, as they were
supposed to be in attendance on their masters. Their foibles and
dishonesty being so completely hit off in the play incensed them greatly;
and they created such an uproar that it was resolved to exclude them in
future. In Edinburgh the opposition to the play produced still greater
scenes of violence, and the lives of some of the performers were
threatened. It at last became necessary for their masters to stop this
outbreak on the part of their servants; and alter the whole system of the
household economy which led to such results.--ED.]

[Footnote B: These _vails_, 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 mistresses had little
control over them; they are said in some instances to have paid for their
places, as some servants do at inns, where the situation was worth having,
owing to the large parties given, and gaming, then so prevalent, being
well-attended. It was ended by a mutual understanding all over the three
kingdoms, after the riots which resulted from the production of the play
noted above.--ED.]

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 the good servant delights to be useful. The
slave repines, 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 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 be 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 sleeps 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 masters 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 domestics 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 is to be lamented that the
modes of fashionable life demand the most terrible sacrifices 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 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
confidential counsellor--the mirror in which his lordship contemplates 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
affairs 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
attention that was unconnected with the highest orders of society." Such,
in truth, was too long the vicious principle of those monopolists of
personal distinction, the mere men of elevated rank.

Metropolitan servants, trained in depravity, are incapacitated 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 retired
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
endearing term of "our house." We discover this in whole countries where
luxury has not removed the classes of society at too wide distances from
each other, to deaden their sympathies. We behold this in agrestic
Switzerland, among its villages and its pastures; in France, among its
distant provinces; in Italy, in some of its decayed 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 domesticity. It is not unusual in
Holland for servants to call their masters uncle, their mistresses
aunt, and the children of the family their cousins. These domestics
participating 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
individual. Insular situations are usually remarkable for the warm
attachment and devoted fidelity of the domestic, and the personal regard
of families for their servants. This genuine domesticity is strikingly
displayed in the island of Ragusa, 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 were almost
born, when tempted by the stirring spirit of maritime enterprise. They
form a race of men who are much sought after for servants; and the term
applied to them of "Men of the Gulf," is a sure recommendation of
character 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
Voyages," 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 donations
consist of silver, of gowns, of handkerchiefs, and other useful articles
for a young woman. These tributes of friendship are placed beside a silver
basin, which contains the annual wages of the servant; her relatives from
the country come, accompanied by music, carrying baskets covered with
ribbons and loaded with fruits, and other rural delicacies. They are
received by the master himself, who invites them to the feast, where the
company assemble, and particularly the ladies. All the presents 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
affection often fall during this beautiful scene of true domesticity,
which terminates with a ball for the servants, and another for the
superiors. 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 wages, and at a succeeding period of six years another
jubilee 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 inglorious 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 invaders. On this signal
occasion the city decreed a public expression 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 freedom! 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 will quit her side."

Although I have been travelling out of Europe to furnish some striking
illustrations of the powerful emotion of domesticity, it is not that we
are without instances in the private history 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 freedom in the equality of ranks abolished the very designation of
"servant," substituting the fantastic term of "helps." If there be any
meaning left in this barbarous 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 happiness 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 habitual 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 domestic, intimate with our habits, and
patient of our waywardness, 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 require 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. The mutual affections of the master and
the servant have often been exalted into a companionship of feelings.

When Madame de Genlis heard that POPE had raised a monument not only to
his father and to his mother, but also to the faithful servant who had
nursed his earliest years, she was so suddenly struck by the fact, that
she declared that "This monument of gratitude is the more remarkable for
its singularity, as I know of no other instance." Our churchyards would
have afforded her a vast number of tomb-stones erected by grateful masters
to faithful servants;[A] and a closer intimacy with the domestic privacy
of many public characters might have displayed the same splendid examples.
The one which appears 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:--

              To the memory of
                 MARY BEACH,
        who died November 5, 1725, aged 78.
               ALEXANDER POPE,
         whom she nursed in his infancy,
   and constantly attended for thirty-eight years,
             Erected this stone
      In gratitude to a faithful Servant.

[Footnote A: Even our modern cemeteries perpetuate this feeling, and
exhibit many grateful EPITAPHS ON SERVANTS.]

The original portrait of SHENSTONE was the votive gift of a master to his
servant, for, on its back, written by the poet's own hand, is the
following dedication:--"This picture 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 her fidelity.--W.S."
We might refer to many similar evidences of the domestic gratitude of such
masters to old and attached servants. Some of these tributes may be
familiar to most readers. The solemn author of the "Night Thoughts"
inscribed an epitaph over the grave of his man-servant; the caustic
GIFFORD poured forth an effusion to the memory of a female servant,
fraught with a melancholy tenderness which his muse rarely indulged.

The most pathetic, we had nearly said, and had said justly, the most
sublime, development of this devotion of a master to his servant, is a
letter addressed by that powerful genius MICHAEL ANGELO to his friend
Vasari, on the death of Urbino, an old and beloved servant.[A] Published
only in the voluminous collection of the letters of Painters, by Bottari,
it seems to have escaped general notice. We venture to translate it in
despair: for we feel that we must weaken its masculine yet tender
eloquence.

[Footnote A: It is delightful to note the warm affection displayed by the
great sculptor toward his old servant on his death-bed. The man who would
beard princes and the pope himself, when he felt it necessary to assert
his independent character as an artist, and through life evinced a
somewhat hard exterior, was soft as a child in affectionate attention to
his dying domestic, anticipating all his wants by a personal attendance at
his bedside. This was no light service on the part of Michael Angelo, who
was himself at the time eighty-two years of age.--ED.]


MICHAEL ANGELO TO VASARI.

"My Dear 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 and infinite the grief. The grace was that when he lived he kept
me living; and in dying he has taught me to die, not in sorrow and with
regret, but with a fervent desire of death. Twenty and six years had he
served me, and I found him a most rare and faithful man; and now that I
had made him rich, and expected to lean on him as the staff and the repose
of my old age, he is taken from me, and no other hope remains than that of
seeing him again in Paradise. A sign of 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 better 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 St. 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 GASCOIGNE,
            Servant to the Princess Amelia;
                   and this stone
  to be inscribed in testimony of his grateful sense
        of the faithful services and attachment
            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 modern Europe; it is not the charity
of Christianity alone which has hallowed this sensibility, and confessed
this equality of affection, which the domestic may participate: monumental
inscriptions, raised by grateful masters to the merits of their slaves,
have been preserved in the great collections of Graevius and Gruter.[A]

[Footnote A: There are several instances of Roman heads of houses who
consecrate "to themselves and their servants" the sepulchres they erect in
their own lifetime, as if in death they had no desire to be divided from
those who had served them faithfully. An instance of affectionate regard
to the memory of a deceased servant occurs in the collection at Nismes; it
is an inscription by one Sextus Arius Varcis, to Hermes, "his best
servant" (servo optimo). Fabretti has preserved an inscription which
records the death of a child, T. Alfacius Scantianius, by one Alfacius
Severus, his master, by which it appears he was the child of an old
servant, who was honoured by bearing the prenomen of the master, and
who is also styled in the epitaph "his sweetest freedman" (liberto
dulcissimo).--ED.]

       *       *       *       *       *

PRINTED LETTERS IN THE VERNACULAR IDIOM.


Printed Letters, without any attention to the selection, is so great a
literary evil, that it has excited my curiosity 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 unblushing Pietro Aretino could have adventured
on this project; 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 letters 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
indeed impossible to translate into Protestant English the multiplied
nomenclature of offices which involve human life in never-ceasing service.
As I know not where we can find so clear a perspective of this amazing
contrivance to fetter with religious ceremonies the freedom of the human
mind, I present the reader with an accurate translation of it:--

  "_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
conscience to the minds and hearts of Englishmen and taken deceitful
heresy away from them, but on bringing 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 Cæsars with visible effect showed it in their very
statues; meanwhile the pure mind of his most blessed Holiness canonizes
you, and marks 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 hospitals; to virgins, of monasteries; to fathers, of
convents; to the clergy, of orders; to the defunct, of obsequies; to
tierces, noons, vespers, complins, ave-maries, and matins, the privileges
of daily and nightly bells."

The fortunate temerity of Aretino gave birth to subsequent publications by
more skilful writers. Nicolo Franco closely followed, who had at first
been the amanuensis of Aretino, then his rival, and concluded his literary
adventures by being hanged at Rome; a circumstance which at the time must
have occasioned regret that Franco had not, in this respect also, been an
imitator 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 by 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 posterity but as letter-writers. We have the
too-elaborate epistles of BEMBO, secretary to Leo X., and the more elegant
correspondence of ANNIBAL CARO; a work which, though posthumous, and
published by an affectionate nephew, and therefore too undiscerning a
publisher, is a model of familiar letters.

These collections, being found agreeable to the taste of their readers,
novelty was courted by composing letters 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 personages had already, without being sensible
of the ridiculous, languished through tedious odes and starch sonnets.
DONI, a bold literary projector, who invented a literary review both of
printed and manuscript works, 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 Pistole were
designed to be 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 altar of the Graces; PARABOSCO, who in six
books of "Lettere 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. Partial to the Italian literature, Denina considers this author
as having given birth to those _novels_ in the form of _letters_, with
which modern Europe has been inundated; and he refers the curious in
literary researches, for the precursors of these _epistolary novels_, to
the works 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 collections 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 da Principi a
Principi, o ragionano di Principi;" Tenezia, 1581, in 3 vols. quarto.

But a treasure of this kind, peculiarly interesting to the artist, has
appeared in mere 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 relative 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 peculiar 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 Epistolæ bears his
name, takes a wider circumference in "Familiar Letters, domestic and
foreign, historical, political, and philosophical, upon emergent
occasions." 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 cabinet. His letters are still published.
The taste which had now arisen for collecting letters, induced Sir Tobie
Mathews, in 1660, to form a volume, of which many, if not all, are genuine
productions of their different writers.

The dissipated elegance of Charles II. 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 minds. Katherine
Philips, in the masquerade-dress of "The Matchless Orinda," addressed Sir
Charles Cottrel, her grave "Poliarchus;" while Mrs. Behn, in her loose
dress, assuming the nymph-like form of "Astræa," 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, "From the Dead to the
Living," 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
chests the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who long remained the
model of letter-writing. The letters of Hughes and Shenstone, of Gray,
Cowper, Walpole, and others, self-painters, whose indelible colours have
given an imperishable 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

                               INTO THE

                   LITERARY AND POLITICAL CHARACTER OF
                           JAMES THE FIRST;

                     INCLUDING A SKETCH OF HIS AGE.


"The whole reign of James I. has been represented by a late celebrated pen
(Burnet) to have been a continued course of mean practices; and others,
who have professedly given an account of it, have filled their works with
_libel_ and _invective_, instead of _history_. Both King James and his
ministers have met with a treatment from posterity highly unworthy of
them, 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."

"Il y auroit un excellent livre à faire sur les INJUSTICES, les OUBLIS, et
les CALOMNIES HISTORIQUES."--MADAME DE GENLIS.


ADVERTISEMENT.

       *       *       *       *       *

The present inquiry originates in an affair of literary conscience. Many
years ago I set off in the world with 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 decision, 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 publications, might be arranged in a sort of chronological
conviction.[A]

[Footnote A: I have described the progress of my opinions in "Curiosities
of Literature," vol. i. p. 467, last edition.]

It would be a cowardly silence to shrink from encountering 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 connexion 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 which have never been 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
hereafter 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.




                              AN INQUIRY

                               INTO THE

                   LITERARY AND POLITICAL CHARACTER OF
                           JAMES THE FIRST;

                     INCLUDING A SKETCH OF HIS AGE.

       *       *       *       *       *

If sometimes the learned entertain false opinions and traditionary
prejudices, as well as the people, they however preserve among themselves
a paramount love of truth, and the means to remove errors, which have
escaped 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 literary character has suffered has
been inflicted by more recent hands; 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. 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 _Fainéants_, as a whole race of ciphers in succession on
the throne of France were denominated, 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 who has 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
literature, and for that elegant testimony of his devotion to study
expressed by the device on his banner of _an open book_, 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 character 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
familiar 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 numerous and
even interesting, although not those which make so much noise and show in
the popular page of history, and escape us in its general views. The want
of this sort of knowledge has proved to be one great source of the false
judgments passed on this monarch. Surely it is not philosophical to decide
of another age by the changes and the feelings through which our own has
passed. There is a chronology of human opinions which, not observing, an
indiscreet philosopher may commit an anachronism in reasoning.

When the Stuarts became the objects of popular indignation, a peculiar
race of libels was eagerly dragged into light, assuming the imposing form
of history; many of these state-libels did not even pass through the
press, and may occasionally be discovered in their MS. state. Yet these
publications cast no shade on the _talents_ of James the First. His
literary attainments were yet undisputed; 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.


Burnet, the ardent champion of a party so deeply concerned to oppose as
well the persons as the principles of the Stuarts, levelled the father of
the race; we read with delight pages which warm and hurry us on, mingling
truths with rumours, and known with suggested events, with all the spirit
of secret history. But the character of James I. was to pass through the
lengthened inquisitorial tortures of the sullen sectarianism of Harris.[A]
It was branded by the fierce, remorseless republican Catharine Macaulay,
and flouted by the light, sparkling Whig, Horace Walpole.[B] A senseless
cry of pedantry 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!
  Some gentle James to bless the land again;
  To stick 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!

                  _Dunciad_, book iv. ver. 175.

[Footnote A: The historical works of Dr. William Harris have been recently
republished in a collected form, and they may now be considered as
entering into our historical stores.

HARRIS is a curious researcher; but what appears more striking in his
historical character, is the impartiality with which he quotes authorities
which make against his own opinions and statements. Yet is Harris a writer
likely to impose on many readers. He announces in his title-pages that his
works are "after the manner of Mr. Bayle." This is but a literary
imposition, for Harris is perhaps the meanest writer in our language both
for style and philosophical thinking. The extraordinary impartiality he
displays in his faithful quotations from writers on opposite sides is only
the more likely to deceive us; for by that unalterable party feeling,
which never forsakes him, the facts against him he studiously weakens by
doubts, surmises, and suggestions; a character sinks to the level of his
notions by a single 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
friendly aid. "It is possible for an ingenious man to be of a _party_
without being _partial_" says Rushworth; an airy clench on the lips of a
sober matter-of-fact man looks suspicions, and betrays the weak pang of a
half-conscience.]

[Footnote B: Horace 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
maliciously criticised. In his account of Sidney he had silently passed
over the "Defence of Poetry;" 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 high a character as he
acquired." 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 disposition, 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 criticisms on
the works of James I.; yet it appears to me that he had never opened that
folio 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
Office," were genuine productions of James I. The truth is, they are both
nothing more than extracts printed with those separate titles, drawn from
the King's "Basilicon Doron." He had probably neither read the extracts
nor the original. Thus singularity of opinion, vivacity of ridicule, and
polished epigrams 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 the reader to
those extracts from his MS. letters which are in "Calamities of Authors,"
where he has made his literary confessions, and performs his act of
penance.]

       *       *       *       *       *

THE PEDANTRY OF JAMES THE FIRST.


Few of my readers, I suspect, but have long been persuaded that James I.
was a mere college pedant, and that all his works, whatever they maybe,
are monstrous pedantic labours. Yet this monarch of all things detested
pedantry, either as it shows itself in the mere form of Greek and Latin,
or in ostentatious book-learning, 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 unsettled opinions and
contested principles; an age, in which authority was considered as
stronger than opinion; but the vigour of that age of genius was infused
into their writings, and those citers, who thus perpetually 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 pointedly said of James I. that "his pedantry was too much even for
the age in which he lived." His lordship knew little of that glorious age
when the founders of our literature flourished. It had been over-clouded
by the French 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 had established. It was
easy to ridicule what they did not always understand, and very rarely met
with. But men of far higher genius than this monarch, 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 fancies, which he indulged in his speeches and proclamations.
These loud accusers of the pedantry of James were little aware that the
king has expressed himself with energy and distinctness on this very
topic. His majesty cautions Prince Henry against the use of any "corrupt
leide, as _book-language_, and _pen-and-inkhorn termes_, and, least of
all, nignard and effeminate ones." One passage may be given entire as
completely refuting a charge so general, yet so unfounded. "I would also
advise you to write in _your own language_, for there is _nothing left to
be said in Greek and Latine already_; and, ynewe (enough) of poore
schollers would match 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 taste could
have dared so complete an emancipation from ancient, yet not obsolete
prejudices, 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 artificial labour of the idiom of ancient Rome. Bacon had
even his own domestic Essays translated into Latin; and the king found a
courtier-bishop to perform the same 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 intending to rule "senates and courts" by "turning
the council to a grammar-school."

       *       *       *       *       *

HIS POLEMICAL STUDIES.


 This censure of the pedantry of James is also connected with those
studies of polemical divinity, for which the king has incurred much
ridicule from one party, who were not his contemporaries; and such
vehement invective from another, who were; who, to their utter dismay,
discovered their monarch descending into their theological gymnasium to
encounter them with their own weapons.

The affairs of religion and politics in the reign of James I., as in the
preceding one of Elizabeth,[A] were identified together; nor yet have the
same causes in Europe ceased to act, however changed or modified. The
government of James was imperfectly established while his subjects were
wrestling with two great factions to obtain 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 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 power, it changes itself into a
political one; the chiefs are flattered by their strength and stimulated
by their ambition; 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 Arminius, 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
Contra-Remonstrants. The ostensible subjects were religious doctrines, but
the concealed one was a struggle between Pensionary Barnevelt, 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.[B]

[Footnote A: I have more largely entered into the history of the party who
attempted to subvert the government in the reign of Elizabeth, and who
published their works under the assumed name of Martin Mar-prelate, than
had hitherto been done. In our domestic annals that event and those
personages are of some importance and curiosity; but were imperfectly
known to the popular writers of our history.--See "Quarrels of Authors,"
p. 296, _et seq_.]

[Footnote B: Pensionary Barnevelt, in his seventy-second year, was at
length brought to the block. Diodati, a divine of Geneva, made a miserable
pun the occasion; he said that "the _Canons_ 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 injurious 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 what appeared
in it. It is in Lord Hardwicke's preface to Sir Dudley Carleton's
"Letters" that his lordship has made this important discovery.]

What was 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 Catholics and
the Nonconformists,[A]--to play them one against another; but there was a
distinct end in their views. "James I.," says Barnet, "continued always
writing and talking against Popery, but acting for it." The King and the
bishops were probably more tolerant to monarchists and prelatists, than to
republicans and presbyters. When 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.[B] Yet what could
the King expect from the party of the Puritans, and their "conceited
parity," as he called it, should he once throw himself into their hands,
but the fate his son received from them?

[Footnote A: James did all he could to weaken the Catholic party
by dividing them in opinion. When Dr. Reynolds, the head of the
Nonconformists, 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, "Doctor," added the king, "you are a better
clergyman than statesman."--Neale's "History of the Puritans," vol. i. p.
416, 4to.]

[Footnote B: The character and demeanour of the celebrated Guy or Guido
Fawkes, 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 Edmondes, our ambassador at the court of
Brussels--dated 19th November, 1605. "One Johnson was found in the vault
where the Gunpowder Plot was discovered. 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 answered, that he could bear it as well. When Johnson was brought to
the king's presence, the king asked him how he could conspire so hideous a
treason against his children and so many innocent souls who had never
offended him? He answered, that dangerous diseases required a desperate
remedy; and he told some of the Scots that his intent was to have blown
them back again into Scotland!"--Mordacious Guy Fawkes!]

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
impolitical impatience of the court of Rome, who, jealous of the
tranquillity of Elizabeth, hoped to weaken her government by disunion;[A]
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 foreign despotism of the Roman Tiara, or that of
the republican rabble of the Presbytery of Geneva?

[Footnote A: Sir Edward Coke, attorney-general, in the trial of Garnet the
Jesuit, says, "There were no Recusants in England--all came to church
howsoever Popishly inclined, till the Bull of Pius V. excommunicated and
deposed Elizabeth. On this the Papists refused to join in the public
service."--"State Trials," vol. i. p. 242.

The Pope imagined, by false impressions he had received, that the Catholic
party was strong enough to prevail against Elizabeth. Afterwards, when he
found his error, a dispensation was granted by himself and his successor,
that all Catholics might show outward obedience to Elizabeth till a
happier opportunity. Such are Catholic politics and Catholic faith!]


       *       *       *       *       *

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 affected more learning than became
a king, which he broached on every occasion in such a manner as would
have misbecome a schoolmaster." Would the politician then require a
half-learned king, or a king without any learning at all? Our eloquent
sophist appears not to have recollected that polemical studies had long
with us been considered as royal ones; and that from a slender volume of
the sort our sovereigns still derive the regal distinction of "Defenders
of 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 conflicting parties; and none but a learned king could have exerted
the industry or attained to the skill. In the famous 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
hereafter their great ones; were cloaking their republicanism by their
theology, and, like all other politicians, that their ostensible were not
their real motives.[A] Harris and Neale, the organs of the Nonconformists,
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 conference "in haste to show his parts."
Thus a man of genius substitutes suggestion and assertion 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,"[B] 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 importunities, when some more private course might have
been taken for their satisfaction."

[Footnote A: In political history we usually find that the heads of a
party are much wiser than the party themselves, so that, whatever they
intend to acquire, their first demands are small; but the honest souls who
are only stirred by their own innocent zeal, are sure to complain that
their business is done negligently. Should the party at first succeed,
then the bolder spirit, which they have disguised or suppressed through
policy, is left to itself; it starts unbridled and at full gallop. All
this occurred in the case of the Puritans. We find that some of the rigid
Nonconformists 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 nomination or judgment_; they
insisted that these delegates should declare at once against the whole
church establishment, &c., and model the government to each particular
man's notions! But these delegates prudently refused to acquaint the king
with the conflicting opinions of their constituents.--_Lansdowne MSS_.
1056, 51.

This confession of the Nonconformists is also acknowledged by their
historian Neale, vol. ii. p. 419, 4to edit.]

[Footnote B: The petition is given at length in Collier's "Eccles. Hist.,"
vol. ii. p. 672. At this time also the Lay Catholics of England printed
at Donay, "A Petition Apologetical," to James I. Their language is
remarkable; they complained they were excluded "that supreme court of
parliament first founded by and for Catholike 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 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 course of this conference we obtain a familiar intercourse 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 knowledge 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 _naïveté_.

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 mind to go bare-foot?"
Reynolds objected to the words used in matrimony, "with my body I thee
worship." The king said the phrase was an usual English term, as a
_gentleman of worship_, &c., 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 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
Barlow's narrative we find that on this his majesty heartily laughed--a
laugh easily caught up by the lords; but the king nevertheless
condescended to reply sensibly to the weak objection.

"What speak you of the pope's authority here? _Habemus jure quod habemus_;
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 king is more particularly vivacious when
he alludes to the occurrences 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 argue that point with you, but answer as
kings in parliament, _Le Roy s'avisera"_

When they hinted at a Scottish Presbytery the king was somewhat stirred,
yet what is admirable in him (says Barlow) without a show of passion. The
king had lived among the republican saints, and had been, as he said, "A
king without state, without honour, without order, where beardless boys
would brave us to our face; and, like the Saviour of the world, though he
lived among them, he was not of them." On this occasion, although the king
may not have "shown his passion," he broke out, however, with a _naïve_
effusion, remarkable for painting 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 Fuller. 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, and Will, and Dick, shall meet, and
at their pleasure 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, but we will have it thus. And therefore here I must once more
reiterate my former speech, _Le Roy s'avisera._ 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,

"I 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 long, till, 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."

This 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 the 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
corruptions of the church, and the practices of the prelates, insomuch
that Dr. Andrews, then dean of the chapel, said that his majesty did that
day wonderfully play the Puritan.[A] The king, indeed, was seriously
inclined to an union of parties. More than once he silenced the angry
tongue of Bancroft, and tempered 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 for them, full of
seditious conceits; 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
conference: "Such is the desultory levity of some people, that they are
always languishing after change and novelty, insomuch that were they
humoured in their inconstancy, 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.

[Footnote A: The bishops of James I. were, as Fuller calls one of them,
"potent courtiers," and too worldly-minded men. Bancroft was a man of
vehement zeal, but of the most grasping avarice, as appears by an
epigrammatic epitaph on his death in Arthur Wilson--

  "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
conference. When Ellesmere, Lord Chancellor, observed that "livings rather
want learned men, than learned men livings, many in the universities
pining for want of places. I wish therefore some may have _single coats_
(one living) before others have _doublets_ (pluralities), and this method
I have observed in bestowing the king's benefices." Bancroft 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 pluralities. Another, Neile, Bishop
of Lincoln, when any one preached who was remarkable for his piety,
desirous of withdrawing the king's attention 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 tell those near
him, that he could not hear the preacher for the old--bishop;
prefixing an epithet explicit of the character 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 "History of England," ii. 729.]

These studies of polemical divinity, like those of the ancient
scholastics, were not to be obtained without a robust intellectual
exercise. James instructed his son Charles,[A] who excelled in them; and
to those studies Whitelocke attributes that aptitude of Charles I. which
made him so skilful a summer-up of arguments, and endowed him with so
clear a perception in giving his decisions.


[Footnote A: That the clergy were somewhat jealous of their sovereign's
interference 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 extraordinary 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 episcopacy in England, that his death, which soon followed, is
attributed to the deep vexation of this discomfiture. The veteran, who had
succeeded 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 du corps_, honestly
tells us, that "some thought the king had been better able to _protect_
the Church, if he had not _disputed_ 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 excellent, and repress the dissolute and the
intolerant.]

       *       *       *       *       *

THE WORKS OF JAMES THE FIRST.


We now turn to the writings of James the First. He composed a treatise on
demoniacs and witches; those dramatic personages in courts of law. James
and his council never suspected that those ancient foes to mankind
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.[A] His majesty terrified "the
tobacconists," as the patriarchs of smoking-clubs were called, and who
were selling their very lands and houses in an epidemical madness for "a
stinking weed," by discovering that "they were making a sooty kitchen in
their inward parts."[B] And the king gained a point with the great
majority of his subjects, when he demonstrated to their satisfaction that
the pope was antichrist. Ridiculous as these topics are to us, the works
themselves were formed on what modern philosophers affect to term the
principle of utility; a principle which, with them indeed, includes
everything they approve of, and nothing they dislike.

[Footnote A: Not long before James composed his treatise on "Dæmonologie,"
the learned Wierus had published an elaborate work on the subject.
"_De præstigiis Dæmonum et incantationibus et Veneficiis_," &c., 1568.
He advanced one step in philosophy by discovering that many of the
supposed cases of incantation originated in the imagination of these
sorcerers--but he advanced no farther, for he acknowledges the real
diabolical presence. The physician, who pretended to cure the disease, was
himself irrecoverably infected. Yet even this single step of Wierus was
strenuously resisted by the learned Bodin, who, in his amusing volume of
"Demonomanie des Sorciers," 1593, 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 "Dæmonologie,"
first published in 1597. To the honour of England, a single individual,
Reginald Scot, with a genius far advanced beyond his age, denied the very
existence of those witches and demons in the curious volume of his
"Discovery of Witchcraft," 1584. His books were burned! and the author was
himself not quite out of danger; and Voetius, says Bayle, complains that
when the work was translated into Dutch, it raised up a number of
libertines who laughed at all the operations and the apparitions of
devils. Casaubon and Glanvil, who wrote so much later, treat Scot with
profound contempt, assuring us his reasonings are childish, and his
philosophy absurd! Such was the reward of a man of genius combating with
popular prejudices! Even so late as 1687, these popular superstitions were
confirmed by the narrations and the philosophy of Glanvil, Dr. More, &c.
The subject enters into the "Commentaries on the Laws of England." An
edict of Louis XIV, and a statute by George II, made an end of the whole
_Diablerie_. Had James I. adopted the system of Reginald Scot, the king
had probably been branded as an atheist king!]

[Footnote B: Harris, with systematic ingenuity against James I., after
abusing this tract as a wretched performance, though himself probably had
written a meaner one--quotes the curious information the king gives of the
enormous abuse to which the practice of smoking was carried, expressing
his astonishment at it. Yet, that James may not escape bitter censure, he
abuses the king for levying a heavy tax on it to prevent this ruinous
consumption, and his silly policy in discouraging such a branch of our
revenues, and an article so valuable to our plantations, &c. As if James
I. could possibly incur 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.]

It was a prompt honesty of intention to benefit his people, which seems to
have been the urgent motive that induced this monarch to become an author,
more than any literary 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
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 numerous impostures and illusions which he had often
referred to as authorities, he grew suspicious of the whole system
of "Dæmonologie," and at length recanted it entirely. With the same
conscientious zeal James had written the book, the king condemned it; and
the sovereign separated 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 appearance 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 written on 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 "day-fatality," 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, however, 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
Symouds 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 affairs.

All 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 to decide
between the two opinions; and Rushworth, who wrote long afterwards,
carefully chronicles both.

The truth is, the greatest geniuses of the age of James I. were as deeply
concerned in these investigations as his Majesty. Had the great Verulam
emancipated himself from all the dreams of his age? He speaks indeed
cautiously of witchcraft, but does not deny its occult agency; and of
astrology he is rather for the improvement than the rejection. The bold
spirit of Rawleigh contended with the superstitions of the times; but 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 perceived how much men are formed and changed by _education;_
but, were this principle admitted to its extent, the _stars_ would
lose their influence! In pleading for the free agency of man, he would
escape from the pernicious tendency of predestination, or the astral
influence, which yet he allows. 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 the stars," 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 could have invented. Other great
authors have not less distinguished themselves. When has there appeared a
single genius who at once could free himself of the traditional prejudices
of his contemporaries--nay, of his own party? Genius, in its advancement
beyond the intelligence of its own age, is but progressive; it is
fancifully said to soar, but it only climbs. Yet the minds of some authors
of this age are often discovered to be superior to their work; because the
mind is impelled by its own inherent powers, but the work usually
originates in the age. James I, 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 popular prejudices. We now proceed to
more decisive results of the superior capacity of this much ill-used
monarch.

       *       *       *       *       *

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 for 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. In some princes, the harsh discipline James passed
through has raised a strong aversion 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
shall any more keep me to ancient geography!" exclaimed the Dauphin,
rejoicing 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
Buchanan 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
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 be found in a manuscript letter of that day.[A]

[Footnote A: The learned Mede wrote the present letter soon after another,
which had not been acknowledged, to his friend Sir M. Stuteville; and the
writer is uneasy lest the political secrets of the day might bring the
parties into trouble. It seems he was desirous that letter should be read
and then burnt.

"_March 31, 1622._

"I hope my letter miscarried not; if it did I am in a sweet pickle. I
desired to hear from you of the receipt and extinction of it. Though there
is no danger in my letters whilst report is so rife, yet when it is
forgotten they will not be so safe; but your danger is as great as mine--

"Mr. Downham was with we, now come from 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 he used to
do_; and his Majesty, in his dream, seemed desirous to pacify him, but he,
_turning away with a frowning countenance_, would utter those verses,
which his Majesty, perfectly remembering, repeated the next day, and many
took notice of them. Now, by occasion 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, since, in a
melancholy fit, they were recalled to recollection after an interval of
three years; the verses are lost to us, with the letter which contained
them.]

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
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."[A]

[Footnote A: In this well-known exclamation of James I., a witty allusion
has been probably overlooked. The king had in his mind the then prevalent
custom of securing books by fastening them to the shelves by _chains_ long
enough to reach to the reading-desks under them.]

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 Instructions to his dearest Son Henry the Prince," a work of
which something more than the intention is great; and he directed the
studies of the unfortunate 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 early showed a great and
commanding spirit. Charles 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 COPIOUSNESS OF HIS COMPOSITION.


The mind of James I. had at all times the fulness of a student's,
delighting in the facility and copiousness of composition. The king wrote
in one week one hundred folio pages of a monitory address to the European
sovereigns; 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 celeritate_, 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.[A]

[Footnote A: 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 the smarter one of the critic, tells
us, "James had the good fortune to gain the two points he principally
aimed at in the publication of these _dull 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 explain.
It is in this manner, and by unphilosophical critics, that the literary
reputation of James has been flourished down by modern pens. It was sure
game to attack James I.!]

       *       *       *       *       *

HIS ELOQUENCE.


The eloquence of James is another feature in the literary character of
this monarch. Amid the sycophancy of the court of a learned sovereign some
truths will manifest 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."[A] He would
not have hazarded so peculiar an eulogium, had not the monarch been
distinguished by that talent.

[Footnote A: This funeral sermon, by laying such a stress on the
_eloquence_ of James I., it is said, occasioned the disgrace of the
zealous bishop; perhaps, also, by the arts of the new courtiers practising
on the feelings of the young monarch. It appears that Charles betrayed
frequent symptoms of impatience.

This allusion to the _stammering_ of Moses was most unlucky; for Charles
had this defect in his delivery, which he laboured all his life to
correct. In the first speech from the throne, he alludes to it: "Now,
because _I am unfit for much speaking_, I mean to bring up the fashion of
my predecessors, to have my lord-keeper speak for me in most things." And
he closed a speech to the Scottish parliament by saying, that "he does not
offer to endear himself by words, _which, indeed is not my way_." This,
however, proved to be one of those little circumstances which produce a
more important result than is suspected. By this substitution of a
lord-keeper instead of the sovereign, he failed in exciting the personal
affections of his parliament. Even the most gracious speech from the lips
of a lord-keeper is but formally delivered, and coldly received; and
Charles had not yet learned that there are no deputies for our feelings.]

Hume first observed of James I., that "the speaker of the House of Commons
is usually an eminent man; yet the harangue of his Majesty will always be
found much superior to that of the speaker in every parliament during 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 imperfect scrawls 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 cannot truss my
points,"--this latter person having but one hand! It is evident, since
Lord Conway, the most inefficient secretary ever king had--and I have
myself seen his scrawls--remained many years in office, that James I.
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 intellectual 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 quolibets,--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 witty,
but describes the manner: "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. Methought 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 answers
were ever designed for some place of credit or profit."[A]

[Footnote A: Hacket's curious "Life of the Lord-keeper Williams," p. 38,
Part 11.]

       *       *       *       *       *

SPECIMENS OF HIS HUMOUR, AND OBSERVATIONS ON HUMAN LIFE.


The relics of witticisms and observations on human life, on state affairs,
in literature and history, are scattered among contemporary writers, and
some are even traditional; I regret that I have not preserved many which
occurred in the course of reading. It has happened, however, that a man of
genius has preserved for posterity some memorials of the wit, the
learning, and the sense of the monarch.[A]

[Footnote A: In the Harl. MSS. 7582, Art. 3, one entitled "Crumms fallen
from King James's Table; or his Table-Talk, taken by Sir Thomas Overbury.
The original being in his own handwriting." This MS. has been, perhaps,
imperfectly printed in "The Prince's Cabala, or Mysteries of State," 1715.
This Collection of Sir Thomas Overbury was shortened by his unhappy fate,
since he perished early in the reign.--Another Harl. MS. contains things
"as they were at sundrie times spoken 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 occasionally, and
by the publisher, his quondam servant, carefully received, by B.A. gent.
4^to. in eight leaves, 1643." The collector was Ben'n. Agar, who had
gathered them in his youth; "Witty Apothegmes, delivered at several times
by King James, King Charles, the Marquis of Worcester," &c., 1658.

The collection of Apothegms formed by Lord Bacon offers many instances of
the king's wit and sense. See Lord Bacon's Apothegms new and old; they are
numbered to 275 in the edition 1819. Basil Montague, in his edition, has
separated what he distinguishes as the spurious ones.]

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 purpose, 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,"
delighted 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 censures 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, than of those whom his
displeasure have discontented. _These_ want means to execute their
pleasures, but _those_ have means at pleasure to execute their desires."
--Wilson himself ably develops this important state-observation, 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
arguing, are often carried by the force of words farther asunder 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 nation, 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 employed to stop all new
buildings, and to force persons out of town to reside at their country
mansions. Proclamations warned and exhorted, but the very interference of
prohibition rendered the crowded town more delightful. One of its
attendant calamities was the prevalent one of that day, the plague; and
one of those state libels, which were early suppressed, or never printed,
entitled, "Balaam'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 the king made
that admirable allusion, which has been in our days repeated in the House
of Commons: "Gentlemen 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 insignificant, 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 sagacity;
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 destroyer 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 Anthony Weldon
testifies; who acknowledges that "no prince living knew how to make use of
men better than King James." He certainly foresaw 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 considered
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-interests, projected a crusade against the Turks, he solicited from
James 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
ambassador by observing, that "three thousand Englishmen would do no more
hurt to the Turks than fleas to their skins: 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, cried 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 Germany, seemed
vain of his accoutrements, on which he had spent his all,--the king,
staring at this buckled, belted, sworded, and pistolled, but ruined,
martinet, observed, that "this town was so well fortified, that, were it
victualled, it might be impregnable."

       *       *       *       *       *

EVIDENCES OF HIS SAGACITY IN THE DISCOVERY OF TRUTH.


Possessing the talent of eloquence, the quickness of wit, and the
diversified knowledge which produced his "Table-talk," we find also many
evidences of his sagacity in the discovery of truth, with that patient
zeal so honourable to a monarch. When the shipwrights, jealous of Pett,
our great naval architect, formed a party against him, 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 discovering the gunpowder plot, by
the sagacity and reflection with which he solved the enigmatical and
ungrammatical letter sent on that occasion. The train of his thoughts has
even been preserved to us; and, although a loose passage, in a private
letter of the Earl of Salisbury, contradicted by another passage in the
same letter, would indicate that the earl was the man; yet even Mrs.
Macaulay acknowledges the propriety of attributing the discovery to the
king's sagacity. Several proofs of his zeal and reflection in the
detection of imposture might be adduced; and the reader may, perhaps, be
amused at these.

There existed a conspiracy against the Countess of Exeter by Lady Lake,
and her daughter, Lady Ross. They had contrived to forge a letter in the
Countess's name, in which she confessed all the heavy crimes they accused
her of, which were incest, witchcraft, &c.[A] 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,
near the upper end of the great chamber; and that she (the maid) was hid
beneath the tapestry, where she heard the countess read over the letter
after writing. The king appeared satisfied with this new testimony; but,
unexpectedly, he visited the great chamber at Wimbledon, observed the
distance of the window, placed himself behind 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 tapestry 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!"[B]

[Footnote A: Camden's "Annals of James I., Kennet II., 652."]

[Footnote B: The suit cost Sir Thomas Lake 30,000_l_.; the fines in the
star-chamber were always heavy in all reigns. Harris refers to this cause
as an evidence of the tyrannic conduct of James I., as if the king was
always influenced by personal dislike; but he does not give the story.]

The sullen Osborne reluctantly says, "I must confess he was the promptest
man living in detecting an imposture." 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. Ridiculous as the affair may appear to us, it had
perfectly succeeded with the learned fellows of New College, Oxford, and
afterwards 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 preacher, 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 asleep, to form a discourse on physic. 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
delivered 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 departed without an orderly
text and sermon; at the close of which, groaning and stretching himself,
he pretended to awake, declaring he was unconscious of what had passed.
"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 sermons, and forbade them; and his reasonings, on this
occasion, brought the sleeping preacher on his knees. The king observed,
that things studied in the day-time may be dreamed of in the night, but
always irregularly, without 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 theologically; "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, who, notwithstanding his
pretended inspiration, awoke the sleeping preacher for ever afterwards.

       *       *       *       *       *

BASILICON DORON.


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;[A] but the growth and vigour of the work
comes from the mind of the king himself: he writes for the Prince 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 which it was composed; and by those particular passages
stamped with all the individuality of the king himself. The style is
remarkable for its profuse sprinkling of Scottish and French words, where
the Doric plainness of the one, and the intelligent expression of the
other, offer curious instances of the influence 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.

[Footnote A: 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, _apud_ TUUM _Salustium_.]

This royal manual still interests a philosophical mind; like one of those
antique and curious pictures we sometimes discover in a cabinet,--studied
for the costume; yet where the touches of nature are true, although the
colouring is brown and 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 pleasure. The king tells his son:--

"Sith all people are naturally inclined to follow their prince'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 image what life
they should lead.

"But vnto one faulte is all the common people of this kingdome subject, as
well burgh as land; which is, to judge and speak rashly of their prince,
setting the commonweale vpon foure props, as wee call it; euer wearying 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 suretie and wealth, but be stirred up to open their mouthes in
your iust praise."

       *       *       *       *       *

JAMES THE FIRST'S IDEA OF A TYRANT AND A KING.


The royal author distinguishes a king from a tyrant on their first
entrance into the government:--

"A tyrant will enter like a saint, till he find himself fast under foot,
and then will suffer his unruly affections to burst forth." He advises the
prince to act contrary to Nero, who, at first, "with his tender-hearted
wish, _vellem nescire literas_," appeared to lament that he was to execute
the laws. He, on the contrary, would have the prince early show "the
severitie of justice, which will settle the country, and make them know
that ye can strike: this would be but for a time. If otherwise ye kyth
(show) your clemencie at the first the offences would soon come to such
heapes, and the contempt of you grow so great, that when 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 own
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 countrie, and the loss of my thanks, to be all my
reward."

James, in the course of the work, often instructs the prince by his own
errors and misfortunes; and certainly one of these was an excess of the
kinder impulses in granting favours; there was nothing selfish in his
happiness; James seemed to wish that every one around him should
participate in the fulness of his own enjoyment. His hand was always open
to scatter about him honours and wealth, and not always on unworthy
favourites, but often on learned men whose talents he knew well to
appreciate. There was a warmth in the king's temper which once he himself
well described; he did not like those who pride themselves on their tepid
dispositions. "I love not one that will never be angry, for as he that is
without sorrow is without gladness, so he that is without anger is without
love. Give me the heart of a man, 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 for
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 serving, in
effect, 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 people, chuse
indifferentlie out of all quarters; not respecting other men's appetites,
but their own qualities. For 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 man 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 you according to your own humour, and so have
preferred 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, which only is subject to their sight."

       *       *       *       *       *

THE REVOLUTIONISTS 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 _tribunî 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 calumniated in
their popular sermons, not for any evill or vice in me,[A] but because I
was a king, which they thought the highest evill; and, because they were
ashamed to professe 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 bayards),[B] 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 God, and, since I am here as vpon my testament,
it is no place for me to lie in, that ye shall never find with any
Hie-land, or Border theeves, greater ingratitude, and more lies and vile
perjuries: ye may keep them for trying your patience, as Socrates did an
evill wife."

[Footnote A: The conduct of James I. in Scotland has even extorted praise
from one of his bitterest calumniators; for Mrs. Macaulay has said--"His
conduct, when King of Scotland, was in many points unexceptionable."]

[Footnote B: An old French word, expressing, "A man that gapes or gazes
earnestly at a thing; a fly-catcher; a greedy and unmannerly beholder."--
COTGRAVE.]

       *       *       *       *       *

OF THE NOBILITY OF SCOTLAND.


The king makes three great divisions of the Scottish people: the church,
the nobility, and the burghers.

Of the nobility, the king counsels the prince to check

"A fectless arrogant conceit of their greatness and power, drinking in
with their very nourish-milk. Teach your nobilitie to keep your lawes, as
precisely as the meanest; fear not their orping, or being discontented, as
long as ye rule well: for their pretended reformation 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 shall ye bring to a
measure their monstrous backes. And for their barbarous feîdes (feuds),
put the laws to due execution made by mee there-anent; beginning ever
rathest at him that yee love best, and is oblished vnto you, to make him
an example to the rest. Make all your reformations to begin at your elbow,
and so by degrees to the extremities of the land."

He 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 followeth oftest noble blood: the more 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 embrace the quarrel of the
poor and the sufferer, and to remember the honourable title given to his
grandfather, in being called "The poor man's king."

       *       *       *       *       *

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
semi-civilised Highlanders, and 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 difficultie to danton them; so rooting out, or
transporting the barbarous and stubborn sort, and planting civilised in
their rooms."

This was as wise a scheme as any modern philosopher could have suggested,
and, with the conduct he subsequently pursued in Ireland, may be referred
to as splendid proofs of the kingly duties so zealously performed by this
monarch.

       *       *       *       *       *

OF MERCHANTS.


Of merchants, as this king understood the commercial character, he had no
honourable notion.

He says, "They think the whole commonwealth ordained for raising them up,
and accounting it their lawful 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 dignity of a science; his rude and simple
ideas convey popular truths.

       *       *       *       *       *

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 indifferent 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-occupied
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 dependence 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 otherwaies would
be imputed to you for pride, and breed coldness and disdain in them."

I have noticed his counsel against the pedantry or other affectations of
style in speaking.

He adds, "Let it be plaine, natural, comelie, cleane, short, and
sententious."

In his gestures "he is neither to look sillily, like a stupid pedant; nor
unsettledly, with an uncouth morgue, like a new-come-over cavalier; not
over sparing in your courtesies, for that will be imputed to incivilitie
and arrogance; nor yet over prodigal in jowking or nodding at every step,
for that forme of being popular becometh better aspiring Absaloms than
lawful kings; forming ever your gesture according to your present action;
looking gravely, and with a majestie, 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 countenance 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 practise it; but take no longsome works
in hande, for distracting you from your calling."

He reminds the prince with dignity and truth,

"Your writes (writings) will remain as the true picture of your minde, to
all posterities; if yee would write worthelie, 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 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 taken
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 proceeds touching many curious points concerning the prince's
bodily exercises and "house-pastimes." A genuine picture of the customs
and manners of the age: our royal author had the eye of an 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 precepts; making the wise man's
schoolmaister, which is the example of others, to be your teacher; and not
that overlate 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 disposition of the royal author.

But this monarch has been unfairly reproached both by the political and
religious; as far as these aspersions 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 execration, or the ridicule, even of those
who do not belong to their party. James maintained certain abstract
doctrines of the times, and had written on "The Prerogative Royal," and
"The Trew Laws of Free Monarchies," as he had on witches and devils. All
this verbal despotism is artfully converted into so many acts of despotism
itself; and thus they contrive their dramatic exhibition of a blustering
tyrant, in the person of a father of his people, who exercised his power
without an atom of brutal despotism adhering to it.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE KING'S IDEA OF THE ROYAL PREROGATIVE.


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
Prerogative Royal," James only maintained what Elizabeth and all the
Tudors had, as jealously, but more energetically exercised.[A] 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 notions of his prerogative amazingly great, and
bordering on impiety." It never occurred to his calumniators, who are
always writing, without throwing themselves back into the age of their
inquiries, that all the political reveries, the abstract notions, and the
metaphysical fancies of James I. arose from his studious desire of being
an English sovereign, according to the English constitution--for from
thence he derived those very ideas.

[Footnote A: In Sir Symund D'Ewes's "Journals of the Parliament," and in
Townshend's "Historical Collections," we trace in some degree Elizabeth's
arbitrary power concealed in her prerogative, which she always considered
as the dissolving charm in the magical circle of our constitution. 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, details a curious narrative of a royal interview 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.]

       *       *       *       *       *

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 describe 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 sacredness. A king of England is not subject to death,
since the sovereign is a corporation, expressed by the awful plural the
OUR 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 declares 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.[A] Such was the origin of the theoretical prerogative of an ideal
sovereign which James I. 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 detriment of the subject.

[Footnote A: Such are the descriptions of the British sovereign, to be
found in Cowell's curious 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 Blackstone
sometimes labouring to explain the explanations of his master; so obscure,
so abstract, and so delicate is the phantom which our ancient lawyers
conjured up, and which the moderns cannot lay.]

James I. while he held for his first principle that a sovereign is only
accountable to God for the sins of his government, an harmless and even a
noble principle in a religious prince, at various times acknowledged that
"a king is ordained for procuring the prosperity of 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 contested; involved in contradiction,
in assertion and recantation;[A] and they have been established as much by
the blood as by the ink of our patriots. Some noble spirits in the Commons
were then struggling to fix the vacillating principles of our government;
but often their private passions were 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.

[Footnote A: Cowell, equally learned and honest, involved himself in
contradictory 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; Cowell was compelled to
appeal to one part of his book to save himself from the other.]

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, and he said
he was not defended by the laws, but by God (alluding to his "divine
right"); and sharply reprimanded 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
imminent 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 speaking so in parliament
as tended to stir up the subjects' hearts against their sovereign."[A] Yet
in all this we must not regard James as the despot he is represented: he
acted as Elizabeth would have acted, for the sacredness of his own person,
and the integrity of the constitution. In the same manuscript letter I
find that, when at Theobalds, the king, with his usual openness, was
discoursing how he designed to govern; and as he would sometimes, 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
_common-weal_, but not according to the _common-will!_"

[Footnote A: The following anecdotes of Lord Chief Justice Coke have not
been published. They are extracts from manuscript letters of the times: on
that occasion, at first, the patriot did not conduct himself with the
firmness of a great spirit.

_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 successio non cadunt in fortem et constantem_. I send
you a distich on the Lord Coke--

  "Jus condere Cocus potuit, sed condere jure
  Non potuit; potuit condere jura cocis."

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 that 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 _Edward Coke_, his Majesty answered,
'He knew no such man.' When the Prince interceded by the name of Mr. Coke,
his Majesty still 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 letter, Coke appears with greater dignity. When Lord Arundel
was sent by the king to Coke, a prisoner in the Tower, to inform him that
his Majesty would allow him to consult with eight of the best learned in
the law to advise him 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 he 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 him where
you 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."]

       *       *       *       *       *

THE KING'S ELEVATED CONCEPTION OF THE KINGLY CHARACTER.


But what were the real thoughts and feelings of this presumed 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 roses 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 condemned 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 magnanimous monarch replied:--

"Kings ruled by their laws, as God did by the laws of nature; and ought as
rarely to put in use their supreme 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 monarchies and a period in empires;
and in discriminating between a king and a tyrant, he tells the prince--

"A tyranne's miserable and infamous life armeth in end his own subjects to
become his burreaux; 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 subjects, and smiled at by his neighbours."

And he desires that the prince, his son, should so perform his royal
duties, that, "In case ye fall in the highway, 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 always so, as ever in his sight,
  Who guards the godly, plaguing the prophane.

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 impressive thought on a favourite subject:--

  Crownes have their compasse, length of daies their date,
  Triumphs their tombes, Felicitie her fate;
  Of more than earth, can earth make none partaker;
  But knowledge makes the king most like his Maker.[A]

[Footnote A: "Harl. MSS.," 6824.]

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 answered, 'That he had no cause to fear, having lived so mighty a
king.' 'But, oh!' said he, 'I have lived too like a king.' He should
rather 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 VII. 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
Elizabeth 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 effusions "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 rendering 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 reign; 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 popular recreations on
Sundays and holidays, after the church service. "With our own ears we
heard the general complaint 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 amusements, and thus "turning
the people's hearts." But while they were denied what the king terms
"lawful recreations,"[A] they had substituted more vicious ones: alehouses
were more frequented--drunkenness more general--tale-mongery and sedition,
the vices of sedentary idleness, prevailed--while a fanatical gloom was
spreading over the country.

[Footnote A: These are enumerated to consist of dancing, archery, leaping,
vaulting, May-games, Whitsun-ales, Morris-dances, and the setting up of
May-poles, and other manly sports.]

The king, whose gaiety of temper instantly sympathised with the multitude,
and perhaps alarmed at this new shape which puritanism was assuming,
published what is called "The Book of Sports," and which soon obtained the
contemptuous term of "The Dancing Book."

On this subject our recent principles have governed our decisions:
with our habits formed, and our notions finally adjusted, this singular
state-paper has been reprobated by piety; whose zeal, however, is not
sufficiently historical. 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 daies 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 Maie, and good cheare at Christmas; as also for
convening of neighbours, for entertaining friendship and heartliness, by
honest feasting and merriness; so that the sabbothes 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 reformed themselves, the Sabbath, after
church-service, was a festival-day; and the wise monarch, 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 CONTROVERSY.


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 Sabbath," 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 Christians 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 working day, and that Saturday was the
perpetual Sabbath.[A] 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 strenuous advocates for closely copying the austerity of the
Jewish Sabbath, in all the rigour of the Levitical law; forbidding meat to
be dressed, houses swept, fires kindled, &c.,--the day of rest was to be a
day of mortification. But this spread an alarm, that "the old rotten
ceremonial 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 Sabbath 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.[B]
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."[C]

[Footnote A: Collier's "Ecclesiastical History," vol. ii. p. 758.]

[Footnote B: Fuller's "Church 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 _first_
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 Puritans ever since
Cromwell's time that _Sunday_ has been made in England a day of gravity
and severity: and many a staunch observer of the rites of the Church of
England little suspects that he is conforming to the _Calvinism_ of an
_English Sunday_." It is probable this gave unjust offence to grave heads
unfurnished with their own national history, for in the _second edition_
Warton cancelled the 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 converting the Sabbath-day
into a sullen and gloomy reserve of pharisaical austerity. Adam Smith, and
Paley, in his "Moral and Political Philosophy," vol. ii. p. 73, have taken
more enlightened views on this subject.]

[Footnote C: "Let servants," he says, "whose hands are ever working,
whilst their eyes are waking; let such who all the foregoing week had
their cheeks moistened with sweat, and their hands hardened with labour,
let such have some recreations on the Lord's-day indulged to them; whilst
_persons of quality_, who may be said to keep Sabbath all the week long--I
mean, who rest from hard labour--are concerned in conscience to observe
the Lord's-day with the greater abstinence from recreations."]

One of the chief causes of the civil war is traced to the revival of
this "Book of Sports." Thus it happened that from 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
divinity, 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
invisible threads 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 times, when such matters have been more wisely
established than ever they were discussed.[A]

[Footnote A: It is remarkable of James I. that he never pressed for the
performance of any of his proclamations; and his facile disposition made
him more tolerant than appears in our history. At this very time, the
conduct of a lord mayor of London has been preserved by Wilson, as a proof
of the city magistrate's piety, and, it may be added, of his wisdom. It is
here adduced as an evidence of the king's usual conduct:--

The king's carriages, removing to Theobalds on the Sabbath, occasioned a
great clatter and noise in the time of divine service. The lord-mayor
commanded them to be stopped, and the officers of the carriages, returning
to 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 let them pass, which he obeyed, observing--
"While it was in my power, I did my duty; but that being taken away by a
higher power, it is my duty to obey." The good sense of the lord-mayor so
highly gratified James, that the king complimented him, and thanked him
for it. Of such gentleness was the arbitrary power of James composed!]

       *       *       *       *       *

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, which is produced as an
instance of the effects of sympathy over the infant in the womb from his
mother's terror at the assassination of Rizzio, is probably not true, yet
it serves the purpose of inconsiderate 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
his 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 obtain 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 James had neither to spare), may be
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
in 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 adventurer: 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 thus 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 ingloriously. 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, by
retrenching the dignity of the crown in popular declamations_, and thus he
must buy the soldier's pay, or fear the danger of a mutiny."[A]

[Footnote A: Hacket's "Life of Lord-Keeper Williams," p. 80. The whole is
distinguished by italics, as the king's own words.]

       *       *       *       *       *

JAMES ACKNOWLEDGES HIS 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 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 abuses 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 _malè agendo_; doing nothing, doing
something else, or doing evilly.[A] 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 those 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."[B]

[Footnote A: I find this description in a MS. letter of the times.]

[Footnote B: From a MS. letter of the French ambassador, La Mothe Fenelon,
to Charles IX., then at the court of London, in my possession.]

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 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 debts, of which I find an account in the
Parliamentary History, after a reign of twenty-one years, did not amount
to 200,000_l._[A] This monarch could not have been so wasteful of his
revenues as it is presumed. James I. was always generous, 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 arms 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 have 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 received far less supply than
hath been given to any king since the Conquest."

[Footnote A: "Parliamentary History," vol. v. p. 147.]

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 monarch. They were every day
becoming wealthier by those acts of peace they despised the monarch for
maintaining. "The kingdom, since his reign began, was luxuriant in gold
and silver, far above the scant of our fathers who lived before us," are
the words of a contemporary.[A] All flourished about the king, except the
king himself. James I. discovered how light and hollow was his boasted
"prerogative-royal," which, by its power of dissolving the Parliament,
could only keep silent those who had already refused their aid.

[Footnote A: Hacket's "Life of Lord-Keeper Williams."]

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 addressed James I. by what
the king called a "stinging petition;" or, when the minister, 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 sovereign.

At a late hour, when not a third part of the house remained, 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 ambiguous matter, as the surreptitious means; and it was then, that,
with his own hand, he tore the leaf out of the journal.[A] In the sessions
of 1614 the king was still more 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 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_ Parliament.[B]
Such unhappy proceedings indicated the fatal divisions of the succeeding
reign. A meeting of a different 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 from the Commons. The letter-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 parliament broke up with the cries
of "some tribunitial orators," as James designated the pure and the impure
democratic 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, that cynical republican, declares,
that "there are as few abominable princes as tolerable kings; because
princes must court the public favour before they attain supreme power, and
then change their nature!" Such is the egotism of republicanism!

[Footnote A: "Rushworth," vol. i. p. 54.]

[Footnote B: From a MS. of the times.]

       *       *       *       *       *

SCANDALOUS CHRONICLES.


The character of James I. has always been taken from certain scandalous
chronicles, whose origin requires detection. 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 opposite
parties: the idleness of the pacific court of James I. 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
treason, 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 were dragged from 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: registered for posterity in many a scandalous
chronicle, they have been mistaken for histories; and include so many
truths and falsehoods, that it becomes unsafe for the historian either to
credit or to disbelieve them.[A]

[Footnote A: Most of these 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 they not been recently splendidly reprinted by Sir
Walter Scott. Thus the garbage has been cleanly laid on a fashionable
epergne, and found quite to the taste of certain lovers of authentic
history! Sir Anthony Weldon, clerk of the king's kitchen, in his "Court of
King James" has been reproached for gaining much of his scandalous
chronicle from the purlieus of the 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 500_l_. "The Five
Years of King James," which passes under the name of Sir Fulk Greville,
the dignified friend of the romantic 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 himself the pensioner of a disappointed courtier; yet this
writer never attacks the personal character of the king, though charged
with having scraped up many tales maliciously false. Osborne is a
misanthropical politician, who cuts with the most corroding pen that ever
rottened a man's name. James was very negligent in dress; graceful
appearances did not come into his studies. Weldon tells us how the king
was trussed on horseback, and fixed there like a pedlar's pack 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 monarch allowed his hat to
remain 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 pictures:" and this he
bitterly calls "leaving him dressed for posterity!" 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 "monstrous
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 generation of the people
who, like _moths_, have lurked under the carpets of the council-table, and
even like _fleas_, have leaped into 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."--_Church
History,_ book x. p. 87.]

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 _every hour's
occurrences at court_; and was wont to say that no man could be 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 metropolis and
their country friends: these letters chiefly remain in their MS. state.[A]
Great men then employed a scribe who had a talent this way, and sometimes
a confidential 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 accounts the
lies of the day they sometimes sent down. They have preserved some
fugitive events useful in historical researches, but their pens are
garrulous; and it requires 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 diurnalists; much time
was spent in learning of those at court, who had quarrelled, or were on
the point; who were seen to have bit their lips, and looked downcast; who
was budding, and whose full-blown flower was drooping: then we have the
sudden reconcilement and the anticipated fallings out, with a deal of the
_pourquoi_ of the _pourquoi_.[B]

[Footnote A: Mr. Lodge's "Illustrations of British History" is an eminent
and elegant work of the _minutiæ historicæ_; as are the more recent
volumes of Sir Henry Ellis's valuable collections.]

[Footnote B: Some specimens of this sort of correspondence of the idleness
of the times may amuse. The learned Mede, to his friend Sir Martin
Stuteville, chronicles a fracas:--"I am told of a great falling out
between my Lord Treasurer and my Lord Digby, insomuch that they 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 thought 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 mobile_ of our court (Buckingham), by whose motion
all the other spheres must move, or else stand still: the bright sun of
our firmament, at whose splendour or glooming all our marygolds 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 is almost come to a quarrel; I know not
how true this is, but Sir Thomas Overbury and my Lord of Pembroke have
been long jarring, and therefore the other is likely."

Among the numerous MS. letters of this kind, I have often observed 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 complied with; 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.]

Such was this race of gossipers in the environs of a court, where, steeped
in a supine lethargy of peace, corrupting or corrupted, every man stood
for himself through a reckless scene of expedients and of compromises.

       *       *       *       *       *

A PICTURE OF THE AGE FROM A MS. OF THE TIME.


A long 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 transforming,
in a certain time, the estates of the country gentlemen into skins of
parchment,

  The wax continuing hard, the acres melting.

                                        MASSINGER.

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 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," deserting 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 contemporary manuscript,
one of those spirited remonstrances addressed to the king, which it was
probably thought not prudent to publish, I shall draw some extracts, as a
forcible picture of the manners of the age.[A] Masters of ancient
families, to maintain a mere exterior of magnificence 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, became 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."

[Footnote A: The MS. is entitled "Balaam's Ass, or a True Discoverie
touching 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.]

"Every one strives to be a Diogenes in his house and an emperor in the
streets; not caring 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.

"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 houses, 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 picture 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. The 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;[A] pins and peacock feathers for
lands and tenements; gilded coaches and outlandish hobby-horses for goodly
castles and ancient mansions; their woods are turned into wardrobes, their
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 peek at painted fruits; all outside." The writer
then describes the affected penurious habits of the grave citizens, who
were then preying on the country gentlemen:--"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,
especially 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
_booking_, which they call _forbearing_[B] 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;[C] they pack the cards, and their
confederates, the lords, deal, by which means no other men have ever good
game. They 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.[D]
It is better to be one of their hinds, than your Majesty's gentleman
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."

[Footnote A: Sir Giles Mompesson and Sir James Mitchell had 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 made of it are said
to have rotted the flesh. As soon as the grievance was shown to James, he
expressed his abhorrence of the practice, and even declared that no person
connected with the villanous fraud should escape punishment. The brother
of his favourite, Buckingham, was known to be one, and with Sir Giles
Overreach (as Massinger conceals the name of Mompesson), was compelled to
fly the country. The style of James, in his speech, is indeed different
from kings' speeches in parliament: he speaks as indignantly as any
individual who was 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 have it done
presently. Had these things been complained of to me, before the
parliament, I could have done the office of a just king, and have punished
them; peradventure more than now ye intend to do. No private person
whatsoever, were he ever so dear unto me, shall be 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, where ye find just cause to punish: but remember that laws
have not their eyes in their necks, but in their foreheads."--Rushworth,
vol. i. p. 26.]

[Footnote B: The credit which these knavish traders gave their customers,
who could not conveniently pay their money down, was carried to an
exorbitant charge; since, even in Elizabeth's reign, it was one of the
popular grievances brought into Parliament--it is there called, "A bill
against _Double Payments_ of Book Debts." One of the country members, who
made a speech consisting entirely of proverbs, said, "Pay the reckoning
overnight, and you shall not be troubled in the morning."]

[Footnote C: In the life of a famous usurer of that day, who died worth
400,000_l_., an amazing sum at that period, we find numberless expedients
and contrivances of the money trader, practised on improvident landholders
and careless heirs, to entangle them in his nets. He generally 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.]

[Footnote D: 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.

                                 MASSINGER'S _City Madam_.]

This crushing usury seemed to them a real calamity; for although in the
present extraordinary age of calculations 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 prodigality 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 commons;
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
gentry and the commonalty grew out into a petty rebellion; and it appears
by Peyton that "divers of the people were hanged up."

       *        *        *        *        *

ANECDOTES 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 prodigal 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 many to crowd to the
metropolis to enjoy their airy honour by a substantial ruin; knighthood
had become so common, that some of the most infamous and criminal
characters of this age we find in that rank.[A] The young females, driven
to necessity by the fashionable ostentation of their parents, were brought
to the metropolis as to a market; "where," says a contemporary, "they
obtained pensions, or sometimes 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,[B] "or had handsome nieces or daughters, drew a
great resort to their houses." And it appears that Gondomar, to prevent
these conversaziones from too freely touching on Spanish politics,
sweetened their silence by his presents.[C] The same grossness of manners
was among the higher females of the age; when we see that grave statesman,
Sir Dudley Carleton, narrating the adventures 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.

[Footnote A: A statesman may read with advantage Sir Edward Walker on "The
inconveniences that have attended the 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 families 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; nobility lost its respect, and a parity in
conversation was introduced which in English dispositions begot contempt;
the king could not employ them all; some grew envious, some factious, some
ingrateful, however obliged, by being once denied."--P. 302.]

[Footnote B: One may conjecture, by this expression, that the term of
"wits" was then introduced, in the sense we now use it.]

[Footnote C: Wilson has preserved a characteristic trait of one of the
lady wits. When Gondomar one 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.]

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 _our dearest bedfellow_ to designate the
queen; 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.[A] Are not most of the dramatic works of
that day frequently unreadable from this circumstance? As an historian, it
would be 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, however, extending too far these
self-congratulations.

[Footnote A: Our wonder and surmises have been often 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 _king's beagle_ can hunt by land as
well as he hath done _by water_, we will leave capping of _Jowler_, and
cap the _beagle_." The queen, writing to Buckingham to intercede with the
king for Rawleigh's life, addresses Buckingham by "My kind Dog." James
appears to have been always 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 excel all Europe, as Addison set the model, in the delicacy of
humour; indeed, even so late as Congreve's time, they were discussing its
essential distinction from wit.]

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.[B] 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
"Moon-calf," 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 describes
"the most prodigious birth"--

  He's too much woman and She's too much man.

[Footnote B. The expression of one of these gallants, as preserved by
Wilson, cannot be decently given, but is more expressive, p. 147.]

The trades of foppery, in Spanish fashions, suddenly sprung up in this
reign, and exhibited new names and new things. Now silk and gold-lace
shops first adorned Cheapside, which the continuator of Stowe calls "the
beauty of London;" the extraordinary rise 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 five pounds, were now so rich and
curious as to be cheapened at forty. Stowe has recorded a revolution in
shoe-buckles, portentously closing in shoe-roses, which were puffed knots
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, many 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 contemporary 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."[A] The king also reprobated the finical
embarrassments 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."

[Footnote A: The "Peace-Maker," 1618.]

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
marriage-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." Enormous wealth was often
accumulated. An usurer died worth 400,000_l_.; Sir Thomas Compton, a
citizen, left, it is said, 800,000_l_., 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 dress, equipage, and
magnificence, appeared in all forms of riot and excess; corruption bred
corruption. The industry 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 defend themselves from the
danger of the law."[A] 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.[B] Such were some of the turbulent children of peace, whose
fiery spirits, could they have found their proper vent, had been soldiers
of fortune, as they were younger brothers, distressed often by their own
relatives; and wards ruined by their own guardians;[C] all these were
clamorous for bold piracies 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 plenty
  And fat of peace, our young men ne'er were train'd
  To martial discipline, and our ships unrigg'd
  Rot in the harbour.

                                               MASSINGER.

[Footnote A: "Five Years of King James." Harl. Misc.]

[Footnote B: A. Wilson's "Hist. of James I." p. 28.]

[Footnote C: 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.]

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 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.[A] These two gallant youths had lived as brothers, yet
could resolve not to part without destroying each other; the narrative so
wonderfully composed by Sackville, still 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
language of the poet, _Auroræ filii,_ the sons of the morning,--who often
were drowned in their own blood! But, on a nearer inspection, when we
discover the personal malignity 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
pugnacious. 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-papers;[B] and to remedy it, James, who rarely
consented to shed blood, condemned an irascible lord to suffer the
ignominy of the gallows.

[Footnote A: It may be found in the popular pages of the "Guardian;" there
first printed from a MS. in the library of the Harleys.]

[Footnote B: "A publication of his Majestie's edict and seuere censure
against private combats and combatants, &c." 1613. It is a volume of about
150 pages. As a specimen of the royal style, I transcribe two passages:--

"The pride of humours, the libertie of times, the conniuencie of
magistrates, together with a kind of prescription of impunity, hath bred
ouer all this kingdome, not only an opinion among the weakest, but a
constant beleefe among many that desire to be reputed among the wisest, of
a certain freedome left to all men vpon earth by nature, as their
_birth-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 affection doth suggest, without any further
proofe; so as the challenge be sent in a civil manner, though without
leave demanded of the _sovereign_," &c.

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 forraine mischiefes with home-bred accidents, it will not be
hard to judge into what region this bolde bird of audacious presumption,
in dealing blowes so confidently, will mount, if it bee once let flie,
from the breast wherein it lurkes. And therefore it behoveth justice both
to keep her still in her own close cage, with care that she learn neuer
any other dittie then _Est bene_; but withall, that for preuention of the
worst that may fall out, wee clippe her wings, that they grow not too
fast. For according to that of the proverb, _It is labour lost to lay nets
before the eyes of winged fowles,"_ &c. p. 13.]

But, while extortion and monopoly 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 kingdom 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 all the
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 proclamations 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 certainly became the policy
of a weak and timid government, 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 government 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 housekeeping 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,
however, 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 through a Christmas week, while in London all was exorbitantly
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 multiplied demands, opened a
perpetual market for the country. The money-traders were breeding their
hoards as the graziers their flocks; and while the goldsmiths' shops
blazed in Cheap, the agriculturists beheld double harvests cover the soil.
The innumerable books on agriculture 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 sprung, 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 DISORDERS 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 his later speeches, has expressed a mournful
disappointment:

"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
the 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 plains 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; and 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 own
vine and fig-tree," &c. &c.[A]

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 with
Catharine Macaulay against "the despotism of James," and "the intoxication
of his power?"--a monarch who did not even enforce the proclamations or
edicts his wisdom dictated;[B] and, as Hume has observed, while vaunting
his prerogative, had not a single regiment of guards to maintain it. Must
we agree with Hume, and reproach the king with his indolence and lore of
amusement--"particularly of hunting?"[C]

[Footnote A: Rushworth, vol. i. p. 29; sub anno 1621.]

[Footnote B: James I. said, "I will never offer to bring a new custom upon
my people without the people's consent; like a good physician, tell them
what is amiss, if they will not concur to amend it, yet I have discharged
my part." Among the difficulties of this king was that of being a
foreigner, and amidst the contending factions of that day the "British
Solomon" seems to have been unjustly reproached for his Scottish
partialities.]

[Footnote C: La Boderie, the French Ambassador, complains of the king's
frequent 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 irresolute." James's
cautious neutrality was no merit in the Frenchman's eye.

La Boderie resided at our court from 1606 to 1611, and his "Ambassades,"
in 5 vols., are interesting in English history. The most satirical
accounts of the domestic life of James, especially in his unguarded hours
of boisterous merriment, are found 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 forgave James for his
adherence to Spain and peace, instead of France and warlike designs.]

       *        *        *        *        *

THE KING'S PRIVATE LIFE IN HIS OCCASIONAL RETIREMENTS.


The king's occasional retirements to Royston and Newmarket have even been
surmised to have borne some analogy to the horrid Capræa of Tiberius; but
a witness has accidentally detailed the king's uniform life in these
occasional seclusions. James I. withdrew at times from public life, but
not from public affairs; and hunting, 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, where 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 occasional
retirements, than when they were at London.[A] I have noticed, that the
state papers were composed by himself; that he wrote letters on important
occasions without consulting any one; and that he derived little aid from
his secretaries. James was probably never indolent; 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 no one loved
more the still-life of peace than this studious monarch, whose habits
formed an agreeable combination of the contemplative and the active life,
study and business--no king more zealously tried to keep down the growing
abuses of his government, by personally concerning himself in the
protection of the subject.[B]

[Footnote A: Hacket's Scrinia Reserata, Part I. p. 27.]

[Footnote B: As evidences of this zeal for reform, I throw into this note
some extracts from the MS. letters of contemporaries.--Of the king's
interference between the judges of two courts about prohibitions, Sir
Dudley Carleton gives this account:--"The king played the best part in
collecting arguments on both sides, and concluded that he saw much
endeavour to draw water to their several mills; and advised them to take
moderate courses, 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 which the subject had been too long abused.'"--MS.
Letter of Sir Dudley Carleton.

In "Winwood'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 being a private one, can
hardly be suspected of court flattery. "His Majesty hath in person, with
the greatest dexterity of wit and strength of argument 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."--Winwood'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
satisfaction made to the wronged, immediately.]

       *        *        *        *        *

DISCREPANCIES OF OPINION AMONG THE DECRIERS OF JAMES THE FIRST.


Let us detect, among the modern decriers of the character of James I.,
those contradictory opinions, which start out in the same page; for the
conviction of truth flashed on the eyes of those who systematically
vilified him, and must often have pained them; while it embarrassed and
confused 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 promoted _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
destroy their own peace, and that of the rest of mankind_." This is true
philosophy, however politicians may comment, and however the military may
command the state. Had Hume, with all the 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, "boasted of his management of Ireland as
his masterpiece." According to the accounts of Sir John Davies, whose
political works are still read, and whom Hume quotes, James I. "in the
space of nine years made greater advances towards 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 was not without
foundation." Thus in describing that wisest act of 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, employs a degrading epithet--and yet he, who had indulged
a sarcasm on the _vanity_ of James, in closing his general view of his
wise administration in Ireland, is carried away by his nobler feelings.
--"Such were the arts," exclaims the historian, "by which James introduced
humanity and justice among a people who had ever been buried in the most
profound barbarism. Noble cares! much superior to the vain and criminal
glory of conquests." Let us add, that had the genius of James the First
been warlike, had he commanded a battle to be fought and a victory 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
"despicable 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 historian. 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" recorded, of which probably she knew
little. Forced to confess that James's education had been "a more learned
one than is usually bestowed on princes," we find how useless it is to
educate princes at all; for this "more learned education" made this prince
"more than commonly deficient in 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, having 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 appears
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 amiable
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 the sovereign, that he closely attended the Danish courts of
justice; and Daines Barrington, in his curious "Observations on the
Statutes," mentions, that the king borrowed from the Danish code three
statutes for the punishment 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 consort." Yet this is not true: the king was jovial
there, and was as indulgent a husband as he was a father. Osborne even
censures James for once giving marks of his uxoriousness![A] But while
Daines Barrington degrades, by unmerited ridicule, the honourable
employment of the "British Solomon," he becomes himself perplexed at the
truth that flashes on his eyes. He expresses 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 scoff remained to pray. Thus a lawyer, in examining the laws
of James the First, concludes by approaching nearer to the truth: the step
was a bold one! He says, "_It 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 perplexed; but what can be more
convincing than a lawyer, on a review of the character of James the First,
being struck, as he tells us, by "his desire of being instructed in the
English law, and holding frequent conferences for this purpose with the
most eminent lawyers,--as Sir Edward Coke, and others!" Such was the
monarch whose character was perpetually reproached for indolent 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 Hacket.[B]

[Footnote A: See "Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii. p. 334.]

[Footnote B: Brodie's "History of British Empire," vol. ii. p. 244, 411.]

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 contemporaries of James I. thought of the
cause of the disorders of their age. They were alike struck by the wisdom
and the zeal of the monarch, and the prevalent discontents of this long
reign of peace. At first, says the continuator of Stowe, all ranks but
those "who were settled in piracy," as he designates the cormorants of
war, and curiously enumerates their classes, "were right joyful of the
peace; but, in a few years afterwards, all the benefits 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
ingratitude."[A] My philosophy enables me to advance but little beyond. A
learned contemporary, 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 posterity." Sir Symond censures the king for
not engaging in the German war to support the Palsgrave, and maintain "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.[B] "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 unlimited or illegal taxes and corrosions, his
death deserved more sorrow and condolement from his subjects than it
found."[C]

[Footnote A: Stowe's Annals, p. 845.]

[Footnote B: See Sir Edward Walker's "Hist. Discourses," p. 321; and
Barrington's "Observ. on the Statutes," who says, "For this he deserves
the highest praise and commendation from a nation of islanders."]

[Footnote C: Harl. MSS. 646.]

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 out
into that bulk in this king's time which begot monstrous satyrs." Such
were the laseivious 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. contemplating 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 Scipio_.

       *       *       *       *       *

SUMMARY OF HIS CHARACTER.


Thus the continued peace of James 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,[A] the curses of the multitude are heaped on that devoted
head. And thus the historian conveniently solves all ambiguous events.

[Footnote A: The Hebrew name, which Calmet translates _Bouc Emissaire_,
and we _Scape Goat_, or rather _Escape Goat_.]

The character of James I. is a moral phenomenon, a singularity of a
complex nature. We see that we cannot 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 representations, 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
offer 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 philosopher 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 ambiguity 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 indiscretion; 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, perhaps 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 sedentary 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 into
the dread circle of their fate, seditions, 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--unregarded,
unremembered!




INDEX.


ABERNETHY'S opinion of enthusiasm, 145.

ABSTRACTION of mind in great men, 133-136.

ACTORS, traits of character in great, 137.

ADRIAN VI., Pope, persecutes literary men, 18.

ÆSTHETIC Critics, 282.

AKENSIDE on the nature of genius, 30.

ALFIERI, childhood of, 32;
  loneliness of his character, 96;
  excited by Plutarch's works, 141.

ANGELO, Michael, illustrates Dante, 21;
  his ideas of intellectual labour, 85;
  his reason for a solitary life, 111;
  his picture of battle of Pisa destroyed by Bandinelli, 158;
  his elevated character, 252;
  his letter to Vasari describing the death of his servant, 373.

ANTIPATHIES of men of genius, 160-163.

ANXIETY of genius, 74;
  of authors and artists over their labours, 80-88.

ARISTOPHANES, popularised by a false preface, 287.

ART FRIENDSHIPS, 209-210.

ARTISTS, "Studies," or first thoughts, 131;
  their mutual jealousies, 156-158.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY, its interest, 295.


BARRY the painter, his love of ancient literature, 23;
  his general enthusiasm, 60;
  his rude eloquence, 107.

BAILLET and his catalogue, 352.

BEATTIE describes the powerful effect on himself of metaphysical study,
  147.

BIRCH, Dr., and Robertson the Historian, 342-350.

BOCCACCIO'S friendship for Petrarch, 212-214.

BOOK COLLECTORS, 227-231.

BOOKSELLERS, the test of public opinion, 194.

BOSIUS, his researches in the Roman catacombs, 144.

BOYLE on the disposition of childhood, 31;
  his advertisement against visitors, _n_, 113;
  his idea of a literary retreat, 188.

BRUCE the traveller disbelieved, 78.

BUFFON gives a reason for his fame, 92.

BUONAPARTE revives old military tactics, 266.

BURNS'S diary of the heart, 71.

BURTON, his constitutional melancholy, 220.

BUNYAN a self-taught genius, 60.

BYRON'S loneliness of feeling, _n._, 96.


CALUMNY frequently attacks genius, 185.

CANTENAC and his autobiography, 296.

CARACCI, the, their unfortunate jealousies, 157.

CASTAGNO murders a rival artist, 157.

CHARLES V., friendship for Titian, 253;
  Robertson's life of, 343.

CHATELET, Madame de, a female philosopher and friend of Voltaire, 95.

CHATHAM, Earl of, his constancy of study, 96.

CHENIER a literary fratricide, 173.

CICERO on youthful influence, 32.

CLARENDON, his love of retirement, 111.

COACHES, their first invention, 359.

COAL, its first use as fuel, 362.

COMA VIGIL, a disease produced by study, 147.

COMPOSITION, its toils, 80-81.

CONTEMPORARY criticism, frequently unjust, 75.

CONVERSATIONS of men of genius, 99-109;
  those who converse well seldom write well, 104.

COTIN, Abbé, troubled by wealth, 188.

CRACHERODE, Rev. C.M., his collections of art and literature, _n._, 13.

CRITICISM not always just, 65-75.

CURRIE, his idea of the power of genius, 26.

CUVIER'S discoveries in natural history, 145.


DANTE, his great abstraction of mind, 134.

DEATHS of literary men, 243.

DEPRECIATION, theory of, 160.

DIARIES, their value, 122.

DISEASE induced by severe study, 147.

DOMENICHINO poisoned by rivals, 158.

DOMESTIC Novelties at first condemned, 355-364.

DOMESTIC life of literary men, 173-186.

DREAMS of eminent men, 127-128.

DROUAIS an enthusiastic painter, 153.


ENGLAND and its tastes, 264.


FAMILY affection an incentive to genius, 179-182.

FENELON'S early enthusiasm for Greece, 151.

FIRST STUDIES of great men, 55-59;
  first thoughts for great works, 129-133.

FORKS, when first used, 356.

FRANKLIN, Dr., notes the calming of the sea, 133;
  his influence on American manners, 272.

FUSELI'S imaginative power, 151.


GALILEO invents the pendulum, 132.

GALVANISM first discovered, 133.

GESNER recommends a study of literature to artists, 22;
  on enthusiasm, 154;
  his wife a model for those of literary men, 206-208.

GLEIM and his portrait gallery, 211.

GOLDSMITH contrasted with Johnson, 294.

GOLDONI overworks his mind, 147.

GOVERNMENT of the thoughts, 117.

GRAY'S excitement in composing verse, 141;

GUIBERT, his great work on military tactics, 265.


HABITUAL PURSUITS, their power over the mind, 302-304.

HALLUCINATIONS of genius, 148;
  realities with some minds, 150.

HAYDN, his regulation of his time, 92.

HELMONT'S (Van) love of study, 152.

HERBERT of Cherbury, Lord, questions the Deity as to the publication of
  his book, 148.

HOBBES, theory to explain his terror, 150.

HOGARTH, attacks on, _n._ 87.

HOLLIS, his miserable celibacy, 201.

HONOURS awarded literary men, 249-258.

HORNE (Bishop), his love of literary labour, 135.

HUME the historian, his irritability, 86;
  unfitted for gay life, 99;
  gives his reason for literary labour, _n._ 177;
  endeavours to correct Robertson, 342.

HUNTER, Dr., fraternal jealousy, 156.

HYPOCHONDRIA, its cause and effect, 150.


IDEALITY defined, 137;
  its power, 138-154.

INCOMPLETED books, 350-355.

INDUSTRY of great writers, 125.

INFLUENCE of authors, 267-270; 273-277.

INTELLECTUAL nobility, 250.

IMITATION in literature, 305-307.

IRRITABILITY of genius, 70, 86-88.

ISOCRATES' belief in native character, 32.


JAMES I., a critical disquisition on the character of, 385-455.

JULIAN, Emperor, anecdotes of, 97.

JEALOUSY in art and literature, 154-159;
  of honours paid to literary men, 251.

JOHNSON, Dr., defines the literary character, 12;
  his moral dignity, 192;
  his metaphysical loves, 200;
  anecdotes of him and Goldsmith, 294.

JUVENILE WORKS, their value, 67.


LABOUR endured by great authors, 75;
  a pleasure to some minds, 176-177.

LETTERS in the vernacular idiom, 375-379.

LINNÆUS sensitive to ridicule, 75;
  honours awarded to, 191.

LITERARY FRIENDSHIP, 209-217.

LITERATURE an avenue to glory, 248.

LOCKE'S simile of the human mind, 25.


MANNERISTS in literature, 293.

MARCO Polo ridiculed unjustly, _n._ 79.

MATRIMONIAL STATE in literature and art, 198-208.

MAZZUCHELLI a great literary historian, 352.

MEDITATION, value of, 129.

MEMORY, as an art, 120, 122.

MENDELSSOHN, Moses, his remarkable history, 61-64.

MEN of LETTERS, their definition, 226-238.

METASTASIO a bad sportsman, 38;
  his susceptibility, 140.

MILTON, his high idea of the literary character, 12;
  his theory of genius, 25;
  his love of study, 135;
  sacrifices sight to poetry, 152.

MISCELLANISTS and their works, 282-286.

MODES OF STUDY used by great men, 125.

MOLIERE, his dramatic career, 310-325.

MONTAIGNE, his personal traits, 223.

MORE, Dr., on enthusiasm of genius, 149.

MORERI devotes a life to literature, 152.

MORTIMER the artist, his athletic exercises, 39.

MURATORI, his literary industry, 351.


NATIONAL tastes in literature, 260.

NECESSITY, its influence on literature, 193-194.


OBSCURE BIRTHS of great men, 248-249.

OLD AGE of literary men, 238-244.


PECULIAR habits of authors, 119-120.

PEIRESC, his early bias toward literature, 234;
  his studious career, 235.

PERSONAL CHARACTER differs from the literary one, 217-226.

PETRARCH'S remarkable conversation on his melancholy, 68;
  his mode of life, 114.

POPE, his anxiety over his Homer, 81;
  severity of his early studies, 147.

POUSSIN fears trading in art, 193.

POVERTY of literary men, 186;
  sometimes a choice, 188-190.

PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE of life wanting in studious men, 183-185.

PRAYERS of great men, 146.

PRECIEUSES, 315-318.

PREDISPOSITION of the mind, 118.

PREFACES, their interest, 286;
  their occasional falsehood, 287;
  vanity of authors in, 288;
  idle apologies in, 289;
  Dryden's interesting, 290.

PREJUDICES, literary, 160-163.

PUBLIC TASTE formed by public writers, 268.


RACINE, sensibility of, 83; 325-332.

RAMBOUILLET, Hotel de, 315-317.

READING analyzed, 298-302.

RECLUSE manners in great authors, 98-99.

RELICS of men of genius, 255-258.

REMUNERATION of literature, 194-195.

RESIDENCES of literary men, 255-257.

REYNOLDS, Sir J., his "automatic system," 26;
  discovers its inconsistencies, 27.

RIDICULE the terror of genius, 94

ROBERTSON the historian, 341-350.

ROLAND, Madame, anecdote of the power of poetry on, 141.

ROMNEY, his anxiety over his picture of the Tempest, 81-82.

ROUSSEAU'S expedient to endure society, 73;
  his domestic infelicity, 175.

ROYAL SOCIETY, attacks on, _n._ 14.

RUBENS' transcripts of the poets, 21.


SANDWICH, Lord, his first idea of a stratagem at sea, 132.

SCUDERY, Mademoiselle, 316.

SENSITIVENESS of genius, 72, 78, 78; 139-140.

SELF-IMMOLATION of genius to labour, 152.

SELF-PRAISE of genius, 162-170.

SERVANTS, a dissertation on, 364-374.

SHEE, Sir M.A., relations of poetry and painting, _n._, 21.

SHENSTONE, his early love, 199.

SIDDONS, Mrs., anecdote of, 137.

SINGLENESS of genius, 245-247.

SOCIETY, artificial, an injury to genius, 90.

SOLITUDE loved by men of genius, 35-40; 109-115.

STEAM first discovered, 133.

STUDIES of advanced life, 241-243.

STERNE, anecdotes of, 332-340.

STYLE and its peculiarities, 291-294.

SUSCEPTIBILITY of men of genius, 170-172.

SUGGESTIONS of one mind perfected by another, 275-276.


TASSO uneasy in his labours, 84.

TAYLOR, Dr. Brooke, his torpid melancholy, 175.

TEMPLE, Sir W., his love of gardens, 283.

THEORETICAL history, 342.

THOMSON, his sensitiveness to grand poetry, 142;
  irritability over false criticisms, 65.

TOBACCO, its introduction to England, 362.

TOOTHPICKS, origin of, 358.

TOWNLEY Gallery of Sculpture, _n._, 13.

TROUBADOURS, their influence, 285.


UMBRELLAS, their history, 358.

UTILITARIANISM and its narrow view of literature, 15.

UNIVERSALITY Of genius, 244.


VAN PRAUN refuses to part with his collection to an emperor, 229.

VERNET sketches in a storm, 144.

VERS DE SOCIETE, 308-310.

VINDICTIVENESS of genius, 170-173.

VISIONARIES of genius, 148.

VISITORS disliked by literary men, 112-113.

VOLTAIRE, anecdote of his visit to a country house, 95;
  his universal genius, 245.

WALPOLE's, Horace, opinion of Gray, 91;
  of Burke, _ib._

WATSON neglects research in his professorship, 17.

WERNER'S discoveries in science, 145.

WILKES desirous of literary glory, 17.

WIT sometimes mechanical, 126.

WIVES of literary men, 202-208.

WORKS intended, but not executed, 123.

WOOD, Anthony, sacrifices all to study, 152.


YOUNG the poet, his want of sympathy, 185.

YOUTH of great men, 34-54.


THE END.



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