“I can make lords of you every day, but I cannot create a Titian,” said the Emperor Charles V. to his courtiers, who had become jealous of the hours and the half-hours which the monarch stole from them that he might converse with the man of genius at his work.  There is an elevated intercourse between power and genius; and if they are deficient in reciprocal esteem, neither are great.  The intellectual nobility seems to have been asserted by De Harlay, a great French statesman; for when the Academy was once not received with royal honours, he complained to the French monarch, observing, that when “a man of letters was presented to Francis I. for the first time, the king always advanced three steps from the throne to receive him.”  It is something more than an ingenious thought, when Fontenelle, in his eloge on LEIBNITZ, alluding to the death of Queen Anne, adds of her successor, that “The Elector of Hanover united under his dominion an electorate, the three kingdoms of Great Britain, and LEIBNITZ and NEWTON."[A]

[Footnote A:  This greatness of intellect that glorifies a court, however small, is well instanced in that at Weimar, where the Duke Frederic surrounded himself with the first men in Germany.  It was the chosen residence and burial-place of Herder; the birth-place of Kotzebue.  Here also Wieland resided for many years; and in the vaults of the ducal chapel the ashes of Schiller repose by those of Goethe, who for more than half a century assisted in the councils, and adorned the court of Weimar.—­Ed.]

If ever the voice of individuals can recompense a life of literary labour, it is in speaking a foreign accent.  This sounds like the distant plaudit of posterity.  The distance of space between the literary character and the inquirer, in some respects represents the distance of time which separates the author from the next age.  FONTENELLE was never more gratified than when a Swede, arriving at the gates of Paris, inquired of the custom-house officers where Fontenelle resided, and expressed his indignation that not one of them had ever heard of his name.  HOBBES expresses his proud delight that his portrait was sought after by foreigners, and that the Great Duke of Tuscany made the philosopher the object of his first inquiries.  CAMDEN was not insensible to the visits of German noblemen, who were desirous of seeing the British Pliny; and POCOCK, while he received no aid from patronage at home for his Oriental studies, never relaxed in those unrequited labours, animated by the learned foreigners, who hastened to see and converse with this prodigy of Eastern learning.