How are we to describe symptoms which, flowing from one source, yet show themselves in such opposite forms as those of an intermittent fever, a silent delirium, or a horrid hypochondriasm?  Have we no other opiate to still the agony, no other cordial to warm the heart, than the great ingredient in the recipe of Plato’s visionary man of genius—­calm reason?  Must men, who so rarely obtain this tardy panacea, remain with all their tortured and torturing passions about them, often self-disgusted, self-humiliated?  The enmities of genius are often connected with their morbid imagination.  These originate in casual slights, or in unguarded expressions, or in hasty opinions, or in witty derision, or even in the obtruding goodness of tender admonition.  The man of genius broods over the phantom that darkens his feelings:  he multiplies a single object; he magnifies the smallest; and suspicions become certainties.  It is in this unhappy state that he sharpens his vindictive fangs, in a libel called his “Memoirs,” or in another species of public outrage, styled a “Criticism.”

We are told that COMINES the historian, when residing at the court of the Count de Charolois, afterwards Duke of Burgundy, one day returning from hunting, with inconsiderate jocularity sat down before the Count, and ordered the prince to pull off his boots.  The Count would not affect greatness, and having executed his commission, in return for the princely amusement, the Count dashed the boot on Comines’ nose, which bled; and from that time, he was mortified at the court of Burgundy, by retaining the nickname of the booted head. The blow rankled in the heart of the man of genius, and the Duke of Burgundy has come down to us in COMINE’S “Memoirs,” blackened by his vengeance.  Many, unknown to their readers, like COMINES, have had a booted head; but the secret poison is distilled on their lasting page, as we have recently witnessed in Lord Waldegrave’s “Memoirs.”  Swift’s perpetual malevolence to Dryden originated in that great poet’s prediction, that “cousin Swift would never be a poet;” a prediction which the wit never could forget.  I have elsewhere fully written a tale of literary hatred, where is seen a man of genius, in the character of GILBERT STUART, devoting a whole life to harassing the industry or the genius which he himself could not attain.[A]

[Footnote A:  See “Calamities of Authors,” pp. 131—­139.]

A living Italian poet, of great celebrity, when at the court of Rome, presented a magnificent edition of his poetry to Pius VI.  The bard, Mr. Hobhouse informs us, lived not in the good graces of his holiness, and although the pontiff accepted the volume, he did not forbear a severity of remark which could not fall unheeded by the modern poet; for on this occasion, repeating some verses of Metastasio, his holiness drily added, “No one now-a-days writes like that great poet.”  Never was this to be erased from memory:  the stifled resentment of MONTI vehemently