CIBBER, a spirited comic writer, was noted for the most degrading failures in tragedy; while ROWE, successful in the softer tones of the tragic muse, proved as luckless a candidate for the smiles of the comic as the pathetic OTWAY.  LA FONTAINE, unrivalled humorist as a fabulist, found his opera hissed, and his romance utterly tedious.  The true genius of STERNE was of a descriptive and pathetic cast, and his humour and ribaldry were a perpetual violation of his natural bent.  ALFIERI’S great tragic powers could not strike out into comedy or wit.  SCARRON declared he intended to write a tragedy.  The experiment was not made; but with his strong cast of mind and habitual associations, we probably have lost a new sort of “Roman comique.”  CICERO failed in poetry, ADDISON in oratory, VOLTAIRE in comedy, and JOHNSON in tragedy.  The Anacreontic poet remains only Anacreontic in his epic.  With the fine arts the same occurrence has happened.  It has been observed in painting, that the school eminent for design was deficient in colouring; while those who with Titian’s warmth could make the blood circulate in the flesh, could never rival the expression and anatomy of even the middling artists of the Roman school.

Even among those rare and gifted minds which have startled us by the versatility of their powers, whence do they derive the high character of their genius?  Their durable claims are substantiated by what is inherent in themselves—­what is individual—­and not by that flexibility which may include so much which others can equal.  We rate them by their positive originality, not by their variety of powers.  When we think of YOUNG, it is only of his “Night Thoughts,” not of his tragedies, nor his poems, nor even of his satires, which others have rivalled or excelled.  Of AKENSIDE, the solitary work of genius is his great poem; his numerous odes are not of a higher order than those of other ode-writers.  Had POPE only composed odes and tragedies, the great philosophical poet, master of human life and of perfect verse, had not left an undying name.  TENIERS, unrivalled in the walk of his genius, degraded history by the meanness of his conceptions.  Such instances abound, and demonstrate an important truth in the history of genius that we cannot, however we may incline, enlarge the natural extent of our genius, any more than we can “add a cubit to our stature.”  We may force it into variations, but in multiplying mediocrity, or in doing what others can do, we add nothing to genius.

So true is it that men of genius appear only to excel in a single art, or even in a single department of art, that it is usual with men of taste to resort to a particular artist for a particular object.  Would you ornament your house by interior decorations, to whom would you apply if you sought the perfection of art, but to different artists, of very distinct characters in their invention and their execution?  For your arabesques you would call in the artist whose