[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.