delicacy of touch and playfulness of ideas are not to be expected from the grandeur of the historical painter, or the sweetness of the Paysagiste.  Is it not evident that men of genius excel only in one department of their art, and that whatever they do with the utmost original perfection, cannot be equally done by another man of genius?  He whose undeviating genius guards itself in its own true sphere, has the greatest chance of encountering no rival.  He is a Dante, a Milton, a Michael Angelo, a Raphael:  his hand will not labour on what the Italians call pasticcios; and he remains not unimitated but inimitable.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Literature an avenue to glory.—­An intellectual nobility not chimerical, but created by public opinion.—­Literary honours of various nations.—­ Local associations with the memory of the man of genius.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.  Like that illustrious Roman who owed nothing to his ancestors, videtur ex se natus, these seem self-born; and in the baptism of fame, they have given themselves their name.  Bruyere has finely said of men of genius, “These men have neither ancestors nor posterity; they alone compose their whole race.”

But AKENSIDE, we have seen, blushed when his lameness reminded him of the fall of one of his father’s cleavers; PRIOR, the son of a vintner, could not endure to be reminded, though by his favourite Horace, that “the cask retains its flavour;” like VOITURE, another descendant of a marchand de vin, whose heart sickened over that which exhilarates all other hearts, whenever his opinion of its quality was maliciously consulted.  All these instances too evidently prove that genius is subject to the most vulgar infirmities.

But some have thought more courageously.  The amiable ROLLIN was the son of a cutler, but the historian of nations never felt his dignity compromised by his birth.  Even late in life, he ingeniously alluded to his first occupation, for we find an epigram of his in sending a knife for a new-year’s gift, “informing his friend, that should this present appear to come rather from Vulcan than from Minerva, it should not surprise, for,” adds the epigrammatist, “it was from the cavern of the Cyclops I began to direct my footsteps towards Parnassus.”  The great political negotiator, Cardinal D’OSSAT, was elevated by his genius from an orphan state of indigence, and was alike destitute of ancestry, of titles, even of parents.  On the day of his creation, when others of noble extraction assumed new titles from the seignorial names of their ancient houses, he was at a loss to fix on one.  Having asked the Pope whether he should choose that of his bishopric, his holiness requested him to preserve his plain family name, which he had rendered famous by his own genius.  The sons of a sword-maker, a potter, and a tax-gatherer, were the greatest of the orators, the most majestic of the poets, and the most graceful of the satirists of antiquity; Demosthenes, Virgil, and Horace.  The eloquent Massillon, the brilliant Flechier, Rousseau, and Diderot; Johnson, Goldsmith, and Franklin, arose amidst the most humble avocations.