Vespasian raised a statue to the historian JOSEPHUS, though a Jew; and the Athenians one to AEsop, though a slave.  Even among great military republics the road to public honour was open, not alone to heroes and patricians, but to that solitary genius which derives from itself all which it gives to the public, and nothing from its birth or the public situation it occupies.

It is the prerogative of genius to elevate obscure men to the higher class of society.  If the influence of wealth in the present day has created a new aristocracy of its own, where they already begin to be jealous of their ranks, we may assert that genius creates a sort of intellectual nobility, which is now conferred by public feeling; as heretofore the surnames of “the African,” and of “Coriolanus,” won by valour, associated with the names of the conqueror of Africa and the vanquisher of Corioli.  Were men of genius, as such, to have armorial bearings they might consist, not of imaginary things, of griffins and chimeras, but of deeds performed and of public works in existence.  When DONDI raised the great astronomical clock at the University of Padua, which was long the admiration of Europe, it gave a name and nobility to its maker and all his descendants.  There still lives a Marquis Dondi dal’ Horologio.  Sir HUGH MIDDLETON, in memory of his vast enterprise, changed his former arms to bear three piles, to perpetuate the interesting circumstance, that by these instruments he had strengthened the works he had invented, when his genius poured forth the waters through our metropolis, thereby distinguishing it from all others in the world.  Should not EVELYN have inserted an oak-tree in his bearings? for his “Sylva” occasioned the plantation of “many millions of timber-trees,” and the present navy of Great Britain has been constructed with the oaks which the genius of Evelyn planted.  There was an eminent Italian musician, who had a piece of music inscribed on his tomb; and I have heard of a Dutch mathematician, who had a calculation for his epitaph.

We who were reproached for a coldness in our national character, have caught the inspiration and enthusiasm for the works and the celebrity of genius; the symptoms indeed were long dubious.  REYNOLDS wished to have one of his own pictures, “Contemplation in the figure of an Angel,” carried at his funeral; a custom not unusual with foreign painters; but it was not deemed prudent to comply with this last wish of the great artist, from the fears entertained as to the manner in which a London populace might have received such a novelty.  This shows that the profound feeling of art is still confined within a circle among us, of which hereafter the circumference perpetually enlarging, may embrace even the whole people.  If the public have borrowed the names of some lords to dignify a “Sandwich” and a “Spencer,” we may be allowed to raise into titles of literary nobility those distinctions which the public voice has attached to some authors; AEschylus Potter, Athenian Stuart, and Anacreon Moore.  BUTLER, in his own day, was more generally known by the single and singular name of Hudibras, than by his own.