only can give, has not always accompanied the work itself.  We find great men often greater than the books they write.  Ask the man of genius if he have written all that he wished to have written?  Has he satisfied himself in this work, for which you accuse his pride?  Has he dared what required intrepidity to achieve?  Has he evaded difficulties which he should have overcome?  The mind of the reader has the limits of a mere recipient, while that of the author, even after his work, is teeming with creation.  “On many occasions, my soul seems to know more than it can say, and to be endowed with a mind by itself, far superior to the mind I really have,” said MARIVAUX, with equal truth and happiness.

With these explanations of what are called the vanity and egotism of Genius, be it remembered, that the sense of their own sufficiency is assumed by men at their own risk.  The great man who thinks greatly of himself, is not diminishing that greatness in heaping fuel on his fire.  It is indeed otherwise with his unlucky brethren, with whom an illusion of literary vanity may end in the aberrations of harmless madness; as it happened to PERCIVAL STOCKDALE.  After a parallel between himself and Charles XII. of Sweden, he concludes that “some parts will be to his advantage, and some to mine;” but in regard to fame, the main object between himself and Charles XII., Percival imagined that “his own will not probably take its fixed and immovable station, and shine with its expanded and permanent splendour, till it consecrates his ashes, till it illumines his tomb.”  After this the reader, who may never have heard of the name of Percival Stockdale, must be told that there exist his own “Memoirs of his Life and Writings."[A] The memoirs of a scribbler who saw the prospects of life close on him while he imagined that his contemporaries were unjust, are instructive to literary men.  To correct, and to be corrected, should be their daily practice, that they may be taught not only to exult in themselves, but to fear themselves.

[Footnote A:  I have sketched a character of PERCIVAL STOCKDALE, in “Calamities of Authors” (pp. 218—­224); it was taken ad vivum.]

It is hard to refuse these men of genius that aura vitalis, of which they are so apt to be liberal to others.  Are they not accused of the meanest adulations?  When a young writer experiences the notice of a person of some eminence, he has expressed himself in language which transcends that of mortality.  A finer reason than reason itself inspires it.  The sensation has been expressed with all its fulness by Milton:—­

  The debt immense of endless gratitude.

Who ever pays an “immense debt” in small sums?  Every man of genius has left such honourable traces of his private affections; from LOCKE, whose dedication of his great work is more adulative than could be imagined from a temperate philosopher, to CHURCHILL, whose warm eulogiums on his friends beautifully contrast with his satire.  Even in advanced age, the man of genius dwells on the praise he caught in his youth from veteran genius, which, like the aloe, will flower at the end of life.  When Virgil was yet a youth, it is said that Cicero heard one of his eclogues, and exclaimed with his accustomed warmth,