Magna spes altera Romae!

“The second hope of mighty Rome!” intending by the first either himself or Lucretius.  The words of Cicero were the secret honey on which the imagination of Virgil fed for many a year; for in one of his latest productions, the twelfth book of the AEneid, he applies these very words to Ascanius.  So long had the accents of Cicero’s praise lingered in the poet’s ear!

This extreme susceptibility of praise in men of genius is the same exuberant sensibility which is so alive to censure.  I have elsewhere fully shown how some have died of criticism.[A] The self-love of genius is perhaps much more delicate than gross.

But this fatal susceptibility is the cause of that strange facility which has often astonished the world, by the sudden transitions of sentiment which literary characters have frequently exhibited.  They have eulogised men and events which they had reprobated, and reprobated what they had eulogised.  The recent history of political revolutions has furnished some monstrous examples of this subservience to power.  Guicciardini records one of his own times, which has been often repeated in ours.  JOVIANUS PONTANUS, the secretary of Ferdinand, King of Naples, was also selected to be the tutor of the prince, his son.  When Charles VIII. of France invaded Naples, Pontanus was deputed to address the French conqueror.  To render himself agreeable to the enemies of his country, he did not avoid expatiating on the demerits of his expelled patrons:  “So difficult it is,” adds the grave and dignified historian, “for ourselves to observe that moderation and those precepts which no man knew better than Pontanus, who was endowed with such copious literature, and composed with such facility in moral philosophy, and possessed such acquirements in universal erudition, that he had made himself a prodigy to the eye of the world."[B] The student, occupied by abstract pursuits, may not indeed always take much interest in the change of dynasties; and perhaps the famous cancelled dedication to Cromwell, by the learned orientalist Dr. CASTELL,[C] who supplied its place by another to Charles II., ought not to be placed to the account of political tergiversation.  But the versatile adoration of the continental savans of the republic or the monarchy, the consul or the emperor, has inflicted an unhealing wound on the literary character; since, like PONTANUS, to gratify their new master, they had not the greatness of mind to save themselves from ingratitude to their old.

[Footnote A:  In the article entitled “Anecdotes of Censured Authors,” in vol. i. of “Curiosities of Literature.”]

[Footnote B:  Guicciardini, Book II.]

[Footnote C:  For the melancholy history of this devoted scholar, see note to the article on “The Rewards of Oriental Students,” in “Calamities of Authors,” p. 189.]

Their vengeance, as quickly kindled, lasts as long.  Genius is a dangerous gift of nature.  The same effervescent passions form a Catiline or a Cicero.  Plato lays great stress on his man of genius possessing the most vehement passions, but he adds reason to restrain them.  It is Imagination which by their side stands as their good or evil spirit.  Glory or infamy is but a different direction of the same passion.