instead of a poet rapt in silent meditation, a volatile youth leaped out of the chaise, who was an enthusiast for retirement only when writing verses.  An artist, whose pictures exhibit a series of scenes of domestic tenderness, awakening all the charities of private life, I have heard, participated in them in no other way than on his canvas.  EVELYN, who has written in favour of active life, “loved and lived in retirement;"[A] while Sir GEORGE MACKENZIE, who had been continually in the bustle of business, framed a eulogium on solitude.  We see in MACHIAVEL’S code of tyranny, of depravity, and of criminal violence, a horrid picture of human nature; but this retired philosopher was a friend to the freedom of his country; he participated in none of the crimes he had recorded, but drew up these systemized crimes “as an observer, not as a criminal.”  DRUMMOND, whose sonnets still retain the beauty and the sweetness and the delicacy of the most amiable imagination, was a man of a harsh irritable temper, and has been thus characterised:—­

  Testie Drummond could not speak for fretting.

[Footnote A:  Since this was written the correspondence of EVELYN has appeared, by which we find that he apologised to Cowley for having published this very treatise, which seemed to condemn that life of study and privacy to which they were both equally attached; and confesses that the whole must be considered as a mere sportive effusion, requesting that Cowley would not suppose its principles formed his private opinions.  Thus LEIBNITZ, we are told, laughed at the fanciful system revealed in his Theodicee, and acknowledged that he never wrote it in earnest; that a philosopher is not always obliged to write seriously, and that to invent an hypothesis is only a proof of the force of imagination.]

Thus authors and artists may yield no certain indication of their personal characters in their works.  Inconstant men will write on constancy, and licentious minds may elevate themselves into poetry and piety.  We should be unjust to some of the greatest geniuses if the extraordinary sentiments which they put into the mouths of their dramatic personages are maliciously to be applied to themselves.  EURIPIDES was accused of atheism when he introduced a denier of the gods on the stage.  MILTON has been censured by CLARKE for the impiety of Satan; and an enemy of SHAKSPEARE might have reproached him for his perfect delineation of the accomplished villain Iago, as it was said that Dr. MOORE was hurt in the opinions of some by his odious Zeluco.  CREBILLON complains of this:—­“They charge me with all the iniquities of Atreus, and they consider me in some places as a wretch with whom it is unfit to associate; as if all which the mind invents must be derived from the heart.”  This poet offers a striking instance of the little alliance existing between the literary and personal dispositions of an author.  CREBILLON, who exulted, on his entrance into the French Academy, that he had never tinged his pen with the gall of satire, delighted to strike on the most harrowing string of the tragic lyre.  In his Atreus the father drinks the blood of his son; in his Rhadamistus the son expires under the hand of the father; in his Electra, the son assassinates the mother.  A poet is a painter of the soul, but a great artist is not therefore a bad man.