[Footnote A:  Lope de Vega.]

[Footnote B:  We cannot bury the fame of our English worthies—­that exists before us, independent of ourselves; but we bury the influence of their inspiring presence in those immortal memorials of genius easy to be read by all men—­their statues and their busts, consigning them to spots seldom visited, and often too obscure to be viewed. [We have recent evidence of a more noble acknowledgment of our great men.  The statue of Dr. Jenner is placed in Trafalgar Square; and Grantham has now a noble work to commemorate its great townsman, Sir Isaac Newton.]]

These distinctive honours accorded to genius were in unison with their decree respecting the will of BAYLE.  It was the subject of a lawsuit between the heir of the will and the inheritor by blood.  The latter contested that this great literary character, being a fugitive for religion, and dying in a proscribed country, was divested by law of the power to dispose of his property, and that our author, when resident in Holland, in a civil sense was dead.  In the Parliament of Toulouse the judge decided that learned men are free in all countries:  that he who had sought in a foreign land an asylum from his love of letters, was no fugitive; that it was unworthy of France to treat as a stranger a son in whom she gloried, and he protested against the notion of a civil death to such a man as Bayle, whose name was living throughout Europe.  This judicial decision in France was in unison with that of the senate of Rotterdam, who declared of the emigrant BAYLE, that “such a man should not be considered as a foreigner.”

Even the most common objects are consecrated when associated with the memory of the man of genius.  We still seek for his tomb on the spot where it has vanished.  The enthusiasts of genius still wander on the hills of Pausilippo, and muse on VIRGIL to retrace his landscape.  There is a grove at Magdalen College which retains the name of ADDISON’s walk, where still the student will linger; and there is a cave at Macao, which is still visited by the Portuguese from a national feeling, for CAMOENS there passed many days in composing his Lusiad.  When PETRARCH was passing by his native town, he was received with the honours of his fame; but when the heads of the town conducted Petrarch to the house where the poet was born, and informed him that the proprietor had often wished to make alterations, but that the townspeople had risen to insist that the house which was consecrated by the birth of Petrarch should be preserved unchanged; this was a triumph more affecting to Petrarch than his coronation at Rome.[A]

[Footnote A:  On this passage I find a remarkable manuscript note by Lord Byron:—­“It would have pained me more that ‘the proprietor’ should have ’often wished to make alterations, than it could give pleasure that the rest of Arezzo rose against his right (for right he had); the depreciation of the lowest of mankind is more painful than the applause of the highest is pleasing; the sting of a scorpion is more in torture than the possession of anything could be in rapture.”]