Sterne perhaps derives a portion of his celebrity from the same influence; he interests us in his minutest motions, for he tells us all he feels.  Richardson was sensible of the power with which these minute strokes of description enter the heart, and which are so many fastenings to which the imagination clings.  He says, “If I give speeches and conversations, I ought to give them justly; for the humours and characters of persons cannot be known, unless I repeat what they say, and their manner of saying.”  I confess I am infinitely pleased when Sir William Temple acquaints us with the size of his orange-trees, and with the flavour of his peaches and grapes, confessed by Frenchmen to equal those of France; with his having had the honour to naturalise in this country four kinds of grapes, with his liberal distribution of them, because “he ever thought all things of this kind the commoner they are the better.”  In a word, with his passionate attachment to his garden, where he desired his heart to be buried, of his desire to escape from great employments, and having passed five years without going to town, where, by the way, “he had a large house always ready to receive him.”  Dryden has interspersed many of these little particulars in his prosaic compositions, and I think that his character and dispositions may be more correctly acquired by uniting these scattered notices, than by any biographical account which can now be given of this man of genius.

From this agreeable mode of writing, a species of compositions may be discriminated, which seems above all others to identify the reader with the writer; compositions which are often discovered in a fugitive state, but to which their authors were prompted by the fine impulses of genius, derived from the peculiarity of their situation.  Dictated by the heart, or polished with the fondness of delight, these productions are impressed by the seductive eloquence of genius, or attach us by the sensibility of taste.  The object thus selected is no task imposed on the mind of the writer for the mere ambition of literature, but is a voluntary effusion, warm with all the sensations of a pathetic writer.  In a word, they are the compositions of genius, on a subject in which it is most deeply interested; which it revolves on all its sides, which it paints in all its tints, and which it finishes with the same ardour it began.  Among such works may be placed the exiled Bolingbroke’s “Reflections upon Exile;” the retired Petrarch and Zimmerman’s Essays on “Solitude;” the imprisoned Boethius’s “Consolations of Philosophy;” the oppressed Pierius Valerianus’s Catalogue of “Literary Calamities;” the deformed Hay’s Essay on “Deformity;” the projecting De Foe’s “Essays on Projects;” the liberal Shenstone’s Poem on “Economy.”

We may respect the profound genius of voluminous writers; they are a kind of painters who occupy great room, and fill up, as a satirist expresses it, “an acre of canvas.”  But we love to dwell on those more delicate pieces,—­a group of Cupids; a Venus emerging from the waves; a Psyche or an Aglaia, which embellish the cabinet of the man of taste.