It is remarkable that this love of repose and musing is retained throughout life.  A man of fine genius is rarely enamoured of common amusements or of robust exercises; and he is usually unadroit where dexterity of hand or eye, or trivial elegances, are required.  This characteristic of genius was discovered by HORACE in that Ode which schoolboys often versify.  BEATTIE has expressly told us of his Minstrel,

  The exploit of strength, dexterity or speed
  To him nor vanity nor joy could bring.

ALFIERI said he could never be taught by a French dancing-master, whose art made him at once shudder and laugh.  HORACE, by his own confession, was a very awkward rider, and the poet could not always secure a seat on his mule:  METASTASIO humorously complains of his gun; the poetical sportsman could only frighten the hares and partridges; the, truth was, as an elder poet sings,

  Instead of hounds that make the wooded hills
  Talk in a hundred voices to the rills,
  I, like the pleasing cadence of a line,
  Struck by the concert of the sacred Nine.

And we discover the true “humour” of the indolent contemplative race in their great representatives VIRGIL and HORACE.  When they accompanied Mecaenas into the country, while the minister amused himself at tennis, the two bards reposed on a vernal bank amidst the freshness of the shade.  The younger Pliny, who was so perfect a literary character, was charmed by the Roman mode of hunting, or rather fowling by nets, which admitted him to sit a whole day with his tablets and stylus; so, says he, “should I return with empty nets, my tablets may at least be full.”  THOMSON was the hero of his own “Castle of Indolence;” and the elegant WALLER infuses into his luxurious verses the true feeling: 

  Oh, low I long my careless limbs to lay
  Under the plantane shade, and all the day
  Invoke the Muses and improve my vein.

The youth of genius, whom Beattie has drawn after himself, and I after observation, a poet of great genius, as I understand, has declared to be “too effeminate and timid, and too much troubled with delicate nerves.  The greatest poets of all countries,” he continues, “have been men eminently endowed with bodily powers, and rejoiced and excelled in all manly exercises.”  May not our critic of northern habits have often mistaken the art of the great poets in describing such “manly exercises or bodily powers,” for the proof of their “rejoicing and excelling in them?” Poets and artists, from their habits, are not usually muscular and robust.[A] Continuity of thought, absorbing reverie, and sedentary habits, will not combine with corporeal skill and activity.  There is also a constitutional delicacy which is too often the accompaniment of a fine intellect.  The inconveniences attached to the inferior sedentary labourers are participated in by men of genius; the analogy is obvious, and their fate is common.