forgotten mode of warfare.  GUIBERT, in his great work, “Histoire de la Milice Francaise,” or rather the History of the Art of War, adopted Folard’s system of charging by columns, and breaking the centre of the enemy, which seems to be the famous plan of our Rodney and Nelson in their maritime battles.  But this favourite plan became the ridicule of the military; and the boldness of his pen, with the high confidence of the author, only excited adversaries to mortify his pretensions, and to treat him as a dreamer.  From this perpetual opposition to his plans, and the neglect he incurred, GUIBEBT died of “vexation of spirit;” and the last words on the death-bed of this man of genius were, “One day they will know me!” FOLARD and GUIBERT created a BUONAPARTE, who studied them on the field of battle; and he who would trace the military genius who so long held in suspense the fate of the world, may discover all that he performed in the neglected inventions of preceding genius.

Hence also may we deduce the natural gradations of genius.  Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear.  Before HOMER there were other epic poets; a catalogue of their names and their works has come down to us.  CORNEILLE could not have been the chief dramatist of France had not the founders of the French drama preceded him, and POPE could not have preceded DRYDEN.  It was in the nature of things that a GIOTTO and a CIMABUE should have preceded a RAPHAEL and a MICHAEL ANGELO.

Even the writings of such extravagant geniuses as BRUNO and CAEDAN gave indications of the progress of the human mind; and had RAMUS not shaken the authority of the Organon of Aristotle we might not have had the Novum Organon of BACON.  Men slide into their degree in the scale of genius often by the exercise of a single quality which their predecessors did not possess, or by completing what at first was left imperfect.  Truth is a single point in knowledge, as beauty is in art:  ages revolve till a NEWTON and a LOCKE accomplish what an ARISTOTLE and a DESCARTES began.  The old theory of animal spirits, observes Professor Dugald Stewart, was applied by DESCARTES to explain the mental phenomena which led NEWTON into that train of thinking, which served as the groundwork of HARTLEY’S theory of vibrations.  The learning of one man makes others learned, and the influence of genius is in nothing more remarkable than in its effects on its brothers.  SELDEN’S treatise on the Syrian and Arabian Deities enabled MILTON to comprise, in one hundred and thirty beautiful lines, the two large and learned syntagma which Selden had composed on that abstract subject.  LELAND, the father of British antiquities, impelled STOWE to work on his “Survey of London;” and Stowe’s “London” inspired CAMDEN’S stupendous “Britannia.”  Herodotus produced Thucydides, and Thucydides Xenophon.  With us HUME, ROBERTSON, and GIBBON rose almost simultaneously by mutual inspiration.