[Footnote A:  I have given a history of literary quarrels from personal motives, in “Quarrels of Authors,” p. 529.  There we find how many controversies, in which the public get involved, have sprung from some sudden squabbles, some neglect of petty civility, some unlucky epithet, or some casual observation dropped without much consideration, which mortified or enraged the genus irritabile; a title which from ancient days has been assigned to every description of authors.  The late Dr. WELLS, who had some experience in his intercourse with many literary characters, observed, that “in whatever regards the fruits of their mental labours, this is universally acknowledged to be true.  Some of the malevolent passions indeed frequently become in learned men more than ordinarily strong, from want of that restraint upon their excitement which society imposes.”  A puerile critic has reproached me for having drawn my description entirely from my own fancy:—­I have taken it from life!  See further symptoms of this disease at the close of the chapter on Self-praise in the present work.]

Once we were nearly receiving from the hand of genius the most curious sketches of the temper, the irascible humours, the delicacy of soul, even to its shadowiness, from the warm sbozzos of BURNS, when he began a diary of the heart,—­a narrative of characters and events, and a chronology of his emotions.  It was natural for such a creature of sensation and passion to project such a regular task, but quite impossible for him to get through it.  The paper-book that he conceived would have recorded all these things turns out, therefore, but a very imperfect document.  Imperfect as it was, it has been thought proper not to give it entire.  Yet there we view a warm original mind, when he first stepped into the polished circles of society, discovering that he could no longer “pour out his bosom, his every thought and floating fancy, his very inmost soul, with unreserved confidence to another, without hazard of losing part of that respect which man deserves from man; or, from the unavoidable imperfections attending human nature, of one day repenting his confidence.”  This was the first lesson he learned at Edinburgh, and it was as a substitute for such a human being that he bought a paper-book to keep under lock and key:  “a security at least equal,” says he, “to the bosom of any friend whatever.”  Let the man of genius pause over the fragments of this “paper-book;”—­it will instruct as much as any open confession of a criminal at the moment he is about to suffer.  No man was more afflicted with that miserable pride, the infirmity of men of imagination, which is so jealously alive, even among their best friends, as to exact a perpetual acknowledgment of their powers.  Our poet, with all his gratitude and veneration for “the noble Glencairn,” was “wounded to the soul” because his lordship showed “so much attention, engrossing attention, to the only blockhead at table;