When the literary character shall discover himself to be like a stranger in a new world, when all that he loved has not life, and all that lives has no love for old age:  when his ear has ceased to listen, and nature has locked up the man within himself, he may still expire amidst his busied thoughts.  Such aged votaries, like the old bees, have been found dying in their honeycombs.  Let them preserve but the flame alive on the altar, and at the last momenta they may be found in the act of sacrifice!  The venerable BEDE, the instructor of his generation, and the historian for so many successive ones, expired in the act of dictating.  Such was the fate of PETRARCH, who, not long before his death, had written to a friend, “I read, I write, I think; such is my life, and my pleasures as they were in my youth.”  Petrarch was found lying on a folio in his library, from which volume he had been busied making extracts for the biography of his countrymen.  His domestics having often observed him studying in that reclining posture for days together, it was long before they discovered that the poet was no more.  The fate of LEIBNITZ was similar:  he was found dead with the “Argenis” of Barclay in his hand; he had been studying the style of that political romance as a model for his intended history of the House of Brunswick.  The literary death of BARTHELEMY affords a remarkable proof of the force of uninterrupted habits of study.  He had been slightly looking over the newspaper, when suddenly he called for a Horace, opened the volume, and found the passage, on which he paused for a moment; and then, too feeble to speak, made a sign to bring him Dacier’s; but his hands were already cold, the Horace fell—­and the classical and dying man of letters sunk into a fainting fit, from which he never recovered.  Such, too, was the fate—­perhaps now told for the first time—­of the great Lord CLARENDON.  It was in the midst of composition that his pen suddenly dropped from his hand on the paper, he took it up again, and again it dropped:  deprived of the sense of touch—­his hand without motion—­the earl perceived himself struck by palsy—­and the life of the noble exile closed amidst the warmth of a literary work unfinished!

CHAPTER XXIII.

Universality of genius.—­Limited notion of genius entertained by the ancients.—­Opposite faculties act with diminished force.—­Men of genius excel only in a single art.

The ancients addicted themselves to one species of composition; the tragic poet appears not to have entered into the province of comedy, nor, as far as we know, were their historians writers of verse.  Their artists worked on the same principle; and from Pliny’s account of the ancient sculptors, we may infer that with them the true glory of genius consisted in carrying to perfection a single species of their art.  They did not exercise themselves indifferently on all subjects,