Perhaps I have sometimes too warmly apologised for the infirmities of men of genius.  From others we may hourly learn to treat with levity the man of genius because he is only such.  Perhaps also I may have been too fond of the subject, which has been for me an old and a favourite one—­I may have exalted the literary character beyond the scale by which society is willing to fix it.  Yet what is this Society, so omnipotent, so all judicial?  The society of to-day was not the society of yesterday.  Its feelings, its thoughts, its manners, its rights, its wishes, and its wants, are different and are changed:  alike changed or alike created by those very literary characters whom it rarely comprehends and often would despise.  Let us no longer look upon this retired and peculiar class as useless members of our busy race.  There are mental as well as material labourers.  The first are not less necessary; and as they are much rarer, so are they more precious.  These are they whose “published labours” have benefited mankind—­these are they whose thoughts can alone rear that beautiful fabric of social life, which it is the object of all good men to elevate or to support.  To discover truth and to maintain it,—­to develope the powers, to regulate the passions, to ascertain the privileges of man, —­such have ever been, and such ever ought to be, the labours of authors!  Whatever we enjoy of political and private happiness, our most necessary knowledge as well as our most refined pleasures, are alike owing to this class of men; and of these, some for glory, and often from benevolence, have shut themselves out from the very beings whom they love, and for whom they labour.

Upwards of forty years have elapsed since, composed in a distant county, and printed at a provincial press, I published “An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character.”  To my own habitual and inherent defects were superadded those of my youth.  The crude production was, however, not ill received, for the edition disappeared, and the subject was found more interesting than the writer.

During a long interval of twenty years, this little work was often recalled to my recollection by several, and by some who have since obtained celebrity.  They imagined that their attachment to literary pursuits had been strengthened even by so weak an effort.  An extraordinary circumstance concurred with these opinions.  A copy accidentally fell into my hands which had formerly belonged to the great poetical genius of our times; and the singular fact, that it had been more than once read by him, and twice in two subsequent years at Athens, in 1810 and 1811, instantly convinced me that the volume deserved my renewed attention.

It was with these feelings that I was again strongly attracted to a subject from which, indeed, during the course of a studious life, it had never been long diverted.  The consequence of my labours was the publication, in 1818, of an octavo volume, under the title of “The Literary Character, illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, drawn from their own feelings and confessions.”