Hence, then, we deduce that true genius is the organ of its nation.  The creative faculty is itself created; for it is the nation which first imparts an impulse to the character of genius.  Such is the real source of those distinct tastes which we perceive in all great national authors.  Every literary work, to ensure its success, must adapt itself to the sympathies and the understandings of the people it addresses.  Hence those opposite characteristics, which are usually ascribed to the master-writers themselves, originate with the country, and not with the writer.  LOPE DE VEGA, and CALDEBON, in their dramas, and CERVANTES, who has left his name as the epithet of a peculiar grave humour, were Spaniards before they were men of genius.  CORNEILLE, RACINE, and RABELAIS, are entirely of an opposite character to the Spaniards, having adapted their genius to their own declamatory and vivacious countrymen.  PETRARCH and TASSO display a fancifulness in depicting the passions, as BOCCACCIO narrates his facetious stories, quite distinct from the inventions and style of northern writers.  SHAKSPEARE is placed at a wider interval from all of them than they are from each other, and is as perfectly insular in his genius as his own countrymen were in their customs, and their modes of thinking and feeling.

Thus the master-writers of every people preserve the distinct national character in their works; and hence that extraordinary enthusiasm with which every people read their own favourite authors; but in which others cannot participate, and for which, with all their national prejudices, they often recriminate on each other with false and even ludicrous criticism.

But genius is not only the organ of its nation, it is also that of the state of the times; and a great work usually originates in the age.  Certain events must precede the man of genius, who often becomes only the vehicle of public feeling.  MACHIAVEL has been reproached for propagating a political system subversive of all human honour and happiness; but was it Machiavel who formed his age, or the age which created Machiavel?  Living among the petty principalities of Italy, where stratagem and assassination were the practices of those wretched courts, what did that calumniated genius more than lift the veil from a cabinet of bandtiti?  MACHIAVEL alarmed the world by exposing a system subversive of all human virtue and happiness, and, whether he meant it or not, certainly led the way to political freedom.  On the same principle we may learn that BOCCACCIO would not have written so many indecent tales had not the scandalous lives of the monks engaged public attention.  This we may now regret; but the court of Rome felt the concealed satire, and that luxurious and numerous class in society never recovered from the chastisement.