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 individual and particular to themselves, and not from that variety which includes so much which others can equal. Their variety will ever stand unconnected with our conception of their positive originality. 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 com

posed odes and tragedies, the great philosophical poet, master of human life and of 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, no 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, you would not expect from the

grandeur of the historical painter, or the sweetness of the Paysagiste. Is it not then 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 DERIVED FROM 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, they seem self-born; and in the baptism of fame, they have given themselves their name. Bruyere 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 that "the cask retains its flavour," though by his favourite Horace; and VOITURE, the descendant of a marchand du vin, whose heart sickened over that which exhilarates all other hearts, whenever his opinion of its quality was maliciously consulted; all of these 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 deprived of ancestry, of titles, even of parents, on the day of his creation;