Genius alone can do justice to genius; and kindred genius alone will do it.  There have been, no doubt, a great many writers of biography who had no objection to compensate their feelings for bygone slights or discourtesies, suffered from some wayward or inattentive superiority, some stroke of ridicule or malice.  Literary antipathies do not die with the dead.  The posthumous impression of Margaret Fuller Ossoli has been colored by some who sneer at her ways and pretensions, because there was probably something in her manner which displeased them in a personal way.  She had certainly a very awkward fashion of blinking her eyes, and also “a mountainous me.”  It is very probable poor Edgar Poe has had his faults exaggerated by those who suffered from the critical superiority of his intellect; since some of those notices of him which tend most to fix his character as a reprobate, and appear in a laggard way in the English periodicals, were probably written by some of his own countrymen.  It was a painful consciousness of this literary revenge that made H.W.  Herbert, in his last agony, call on his brother-penmen for mercy on his remains, and that induces many of our public men to bring out their own memoirs or encourage others to do so.  It looks like vainglory, but it is not such.  The memoirs show a mortal dread of calumny or misrepresentation.  Mr. Barnum, for instance, was more just to himself than anybody else would be.  He showed that his doings were only of a piece with those of thousands around him in society; and this not unreasonable extenuation is one that few of his critics are apt to make use of in commenting on him and his dexterities of living.  As for Shelley, he might have shunned or slighted or overlooked Mr. Trelawny in some painful or preoccupied moment, or offended the robust man of the world by the mere delicate shyness of his look; he might also have puzzled and bewildered Mr. Hogg, being, perhaps, puzzled and bewildered himself, by some subtile mental speculation,—­unconscious that for these things he was yet to be brought to judgment and turned into ridicule, for the coming generation, by these familiar men,—­these drilled and pipe-clayed familiar men.  He might have tossed up a paradox or two to keep the muscles of his mind in exercise on a cold day, and his rapid intellect may have run away from his hearer, trampling on the conventions and platitudes in its course; but Mr. Hogg does not think he had fixed notions concerning anything.  The poet did not nail his colors with a cheer to the mast of any of the great questions of the day, ethical or social, and therefore suffered the disparagements of those intelligent friends of his who have been taught to consider a well-defined rigidity of conviction and maintenance, in the midst of all these phenomena of our universe, telluric and uranological, as the test of everything valuable in human character and morals.  And thus it has come about, that genius, with its native instincts of reason, truth, and common sense, is doomed to pay the penalty of its preeminence and its divergencies, and suffer at the hands of friends and enemies alike, from the show of those false appearances, insincerities, equivocations, which are its natural and proper antipathies.