Not that in this history of men of genius we are without illustrious examples of those who have even learnt to want, that they might emancipate their genius from their necessities!

We see ROUSSEAU rushing out of the palace of the financier, selling his watch, copying music by the sheet, and by the mechanical industry of two hours, purchasing ten for genius.  We may smile at the enthusiasm of young BARRRY, who finding himself too constant a haunter of taverns, imagined that this expenditure of time was occasioned by having money; and to put an end to the conflict, he threw the little he possessed at once into the Liffey; but let us not forget that BARRY, in the maturity of life, confidently began a labour of years,[A] and one of the noblest inventions in his art—­a great poem in a picture—­with no other resource than what he found by secret labours through the night, in furnishing the shops with those slight and saleable sketches which secured uninterrupted mornings for his genius.  SPINOSA, a name as celebrated, and perhaps as calumniated, as Epicurus, lived in all sorts of abstinence, even of honours, of pensions, and of presents; which, however disguised by kindness, he would not accept, so fearful was this philosopher of a chain!  Lodging in a cottage, and obtaining a livelihood by polishing optical glasses, he declared he had never spent more than he earned, and certainly thought there was such a thing as superfluous earnings.  At his death, his small accounts showed how he had subsisted on a few pence a-day, and

  Enjoy’d, spare feast! a radish and an egg.

[Footnote A:  His series of pictures for the walls of the meeting-room of the Society of Arts in the Adelphi.—­ED.]

POUSSIN persisted in refusing a higher price than that affixed to the back of his pictures, at the time he was living without a domestic.  The great oriental scholar, ANQUETIL DE PERRON, is a recent example of the literary character carrying his indifference to privations to the very cynicism of poverty; and he seems to exult over his destitution with the same pride as others would expatiate over their possessions.  Yet we must not forget, to use the words of Lord Bacon, that “judging that means were to be spent upon learning, and not learning to be applied to means,” DE PERRON refused the offer of thirty thousand livres for his copy of the “Zend-avesta.”  Writing to some Bramins, he describes his life at Paris to be much like their own.  “I subsist on the produce of my literary labours without revenue, establishment, or place.  I have no wife nor children; alone, absolutely free, but always the friend of men of probity.  In a perpetual war with my senses, I triumph over the attractions of the world or I contemn them.”

This ascetic existence is not singular.  PARINI, a great modern poet of Italy, whom the Milanese point out to strangers as the glory of their city, lived in the same state of unrepining poverty.  Mr. Hobhouse has given us this self-portrait of the poet:—­