Such, then, is the influence of AUTHORS!—­those “great lights of the world,” by whom the torch of genius has been successively seized and perpetually transferred from hand to hand, in the fleeting scene.  DESCARTES delivers it to NEWTON, BACON to LOCKE; and the continuity of human affairs, through the rapid generations of man, is maintained from, age to age!

[Footnote A:  Turner’s “History of England,” vol. ii. p. 432.]

LITERARY MISCELLANIES.

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MISCELLANISTS.

Miscellanists are the most popular writers among every people; for it is they who form a communication between the learned and the unlearned, and, as it were, throw a bridge between those two great divisions of the public.  Literary Miscellanies are classed among philological studies.  The studies of philology formerly consisted rather of the labours of arid grammarians and conjectural critics, than of that more elegant philosophy which has, within our own time, been introduced into literature, and which, by its graces and investigation, augment the beauties of original genius.  This delightful province has been termed in Germany the AEsthetic, from a Greek term signifying sentiment or feeling.  AEsthetic critics fathom the depths, or run with the current of an author’s thoughts, and the sympathies of such a critic offer a supplement to the genius of the original writer.  Longinus and Addison are AEsthetic critics.  The critics of the adverse school always look for a precedent, and if none is found, woe to the originality of a great writer!

Very elaborate criticisms have been formed by eminent writers, in which great learning and acute logic have only betrayed the absence of the AEsthetic faculty.  Warburton called Addison an empty superficial writer, destitute himself of an atom of Addison’s taste for the beautiful; and Johnson is a flagrant instance that great powers of reasoning are more fatal to the works of imagination than had ever been suspected.

By one of these learned critics was Montaigne, the venerable father of modern Miscellanies, called “a bold ignorant fellow.”  To thinking readers, this critical summary will appear mysterious; for Montaigne had imbibed the spirit of all the moral writers of antiquity; and although he has made a capricious complaint of a defective memory, we cannot but wish the complaint had been more real; for we discover in his works such a gathering of knowledge that it seems at times to stifle his own energies.  Montaigne was censured by Scaliger, as Addison was censured by Warburton; because both, like Socrates, smiled at that mere erudition which consists of knowing the thoughts of others and having no thoughts of our own.  To weigh syllables, and to arrange dates, to adjust texts, and to heap annotations, has generally proved the absence of the higher faculties.  When a more adventurous spirit