time that they are betraying their weakness, yet are they still mighty in that enthusiasm which is only disciplined by its own fierce habits.  Never can the native faculty of genius with its creative warmth be crushed out of the human soul; it will work itself out beneath the encumbrance of the most uncultivated minds, even amidst the deep perplexed feelings and the tumultuous thoughts of the most visionary enthusiast, who is often only a man of genius misplaced.[A] We may find a whole race of these self-taught among the unknown writers of the old romances, and the ancient ballads of European nations; there sleep many a Homer and Virgil—­legitimate heirs of their genius, though possessors of decayed estates.  BUNYAN is the Spenser of the people.  The fire burned towards Heaven, although the altar was rude and rustic.

[Footnote A:  “One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience, that there exist folios on the human understanding and the nature of man which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found as much fulness of heart and intellect as burst forth in many a simple page of George Fox and Jacob Behmen.”—­Mr. Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria, i. 143.]

BARRY, the painter, has left behind him works not to be turned over by the connoisseur by rote, nor the artist who dares not be just.  That enthusiast, with a temper of mind resembling Rousseau’s, but with coarser feelings, was the same creature of untamed imagination consumed by the same passions, with the same fine intellect disordered, and the same fortitude of soul; but he found his self-taught pen, like his pencil, betray his genius.[B] A vehement enthusiasm breaks through his ill-composed works, throwing the sparks of his bold conceptions into the soul of the youth of genius.  When, in his character of professor, he delivered his lectures at the academy, at every pause his auditors rose in a tumult, and at every close their hands returned to him the proud feelings he adored.  This gifted but self-educated man, once listening to the children of genius whom he had created about him, exclaimed, “Go it, go it, my boys! they did so at Athens.”  This self-formed genius could throw up his native mud into the very heaven of his invention!

[Footnote B:  Like Hogarth, when he attempted to engrave his own works, his originality of style made them differ from the tamer and more mechanical labours of the professional engraver.  They have consequently less beauty, but greater vigour.—­ED.]

But even such pages as those of BARRY’S are the aliment of young genius.  Before we can discern the beautiful, must we not be endowed with the susceptibility of love?  Must not the disposition be formed before even the object appears?  I have witnessed the young artist of genius glow and start over the reveries of the uneducated BARRY, but pause and meditate, and inquire over the mature elegance of REYNOLDS; in the one he caught the passion for beauty, and in the other he discovered the beautiful; with the one he was warm and restless, and with the other calm and satisfied.