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