When the literary character shall discover himself to be as 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 honey-combs. Let them preserve but the flame alive on the altar, and at the last moments they may be found in the act of sacrifice! The venerable BEDE, the instructor of his generation and the historian for so many successive ones, expired in the act of dictating. Such was the fate of PETRARCH, who not long before his death, had written to a friend, "I read, I write, I think; such is my life, and my pleasures as they were in my youth." Petrarch was found lying on a folio in his library, from which volume he had been busied in making extracts for the biography of his countrymen; his domestics having often observed him studying in that reclining posture for days together, it was

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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 must not be forgotten, for it affords a remarkable proof of the spontaneous 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; de

prived of the sense of touch-his hand without motion-the earl perceived himself struck by palsy and thus was the life of the noble exile closed amidst the warmth of a literary work unfinished!

CHAPTER XXIII

OF THE LIMITED NOTION OF GENIUS BY THE ANCIENTS-UNIVERSAL GENIUS-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 chose 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 attempt

ing 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 there, 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 an universality of power to a masterintellect: 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.