but cultivated the favourite ones which they had chosen from the impulse of their own imagination.  The hand which could copy nature in a human form, with the characteristics of the age and the sex, and the occupations of life, refrained from attempting the colossal and ideal majesty of a divinity; and when one of these sculptors, whose skill was pre-eminent in casting animals, had exquisitely wrought the glowing coursers for a triumphal car, he requested the aid of Praxiteles to place the driver in the chariot, that his work might not be disgraced by a human form of inferior beauty to his animals.  Alluding to the devotion of an ancient sculptor to his labours, Madame de Stael has finely said, “The history of his life was the history of his statue.”

Such was the limited conception which the ancients formed of genius.  They confined it to particular objects or departments in art.  But there is a tendency among men of genius to ascribe a universality of power to a master-intellect.  Dryden imagined that Virgil could have written satire equally with Juvenal, and some have hardily defined genius as “a power to accomplish all that we undertake.”  But literary history will detect this fallacy, and the failures of so many eminent men are instructions from Nature which must not be lost on us.

No man of genius put forth more expansive promises of universal power than LEIBNITZ.  Science, imagination, history, criticism, fertilized the richest of human soils; yet LEIBNITZ, with immense powers and perpetual knowledge, dissipated them in the multiplicity of his pursuits.  “The first of philosophers,” the late Professor Playfair observed, “has left nothing in the immense tract of his intellect which can be distinguished as a monument of his genius.”  As a universalist, VOLTAIRE remains unparalleled in ancient or in modern times.  This voluminous idol of our neighbours stands without a rival in literature; but an exception, even if this were one, cannot overturn a fundamental principle, for we draw our conclusions not from the fortune of one man of genius, but from the fate of many.  The real claims of this great writer to invention and originality are as moderate as his size and his variety are astonishing.  The wonder of his ninety volumes is, that he singly consists of a number of men of the second order, making up one great man; for unquestionably some could rival Voltaire in any single province, but no one but himself has possessed them all.  Voltaire discovered a new art, that of creating a supplement to the genius which had preceded him; and without Corneille, Racine, and Ariosto, it would be difficult to conjecture what sort of a poet Voltaire could have been.  He was master, too, of a secret in composition, which consisted in a new style and manner.  His style promotes, but never interrupts thinking, while it renders all subjects familiar to our comprehension:  his manner consists in placing objects well known in new combinations;