and the feebleness of nervous affections, can shake the senate or the bar with the vehemence of their eloquence and the intrepidity of their spirit.  The writings of the famous BAPTISTA PORTA are marked by the boldness of his genius, which formed a singular contrast with the pusillanimity of his conduct when menaced or attacked.  The heart may be feeble, though the mind is strong.  To think boldly may be the habit of the mind, to act weakly may be the habit of the constitution.

[Footnote A:  Nothing is more delightful to me in my researches on the literary character than when I find in persons of unquestionable and high genius the results of my own discoveries.  This circumstance has frequently happened to confirm my principles.  Long after this was published, Madame de Stael made this important confession in her recent work, “Dix Annees d’Exil,” p. 154.  “Je ne pouvais me dissimuler que je n’etais pas une persoune courageuse; j’ai de la hardiesse dans l’imagination, mais de la timidite dans la caractere.”]

However the personal character may contrast with that of their genius, still are the works themselves genuine, and exist as realities for us—­and were so, doubtless, to the composers themselves in the act of composition.  In the calm of study, a beautiful imagination may convert him whose morals are corrupt into an admirable moralist, awakening feelings which yet may be cold in the business of life:  as we have shown that the phlegmatic can excite himself into wit, and the cheerful man delight in “Night Thoughts.”  SALLUST, the corrupt Sallust, might retain the most sublime conceptions of the virtues which were to save the Republic; and STERNE, whose heart was not so susceptible in ordinary occurrences, while he was gradually creating incident after incident and touching successive emotions, in the stories of Le Fevre and Maria, might have thrilled—­like some of his readers.  Many have mourned over the wisdom or the virtue they contemplated, mortified at their own infirmity.  Thus, though there may be no identity between the book and the man, still for us an author is ever an abstract being, and, as one of the Fathers said—­“A dead man may sin dead, leaving books that make others sin.”  An author’s wisdom or his folly does not die with him.  The volume, not the author, is our companion, and is for us a real personage, performing before us whatever it inspires—­“He being dead, yet speaketh.”  Such is the vitality of a book!

CHAPTER XXI.

The man of letters.—­Occupies an intermediate station between authors and readers.—­His solitude described.—­Often the father of genius.—­Atticus, a man of letters of antiquity.—­The perfect character of a modern man of letters exhibited in Peiresc.—­Their utility to authors and artists.

Among the active members of the literary republic, there is a class whom formerly we distinguished by the title of MEN OF LETTERS—­a title which, with us, has nearly gone out of currency, though I do not think that the general term of “literary men” would be sufficiently appropriate.