the whole company consisted of his lordship, Dunderpate, and myself.”  This Dunderpate, who dined with Lord Glencairn, might have been a useful citizen, who in some points is of more value than an irritable bard.  Burns was equally offended with another patron, who was also a literary brother, Dr. Blair.  At the moment, he too appeared to be neglecting the irritable poet “for the mere carcass of greatness, or when his eye measured the difference of their point of elevation; I say to myself, with scarcely any emotion,” (he might have added, except a good deal of painful contempt,) “what do I care for him or his pomp either?” —­“Dr. Blair’s vanity is proverbially known among his acquaintance,” adds Burns, at the moment that the solitary haughtiness of his own genius had entirely escaped his self-observation.

This character of genius is not singular.  Grimm tells of MARIVAUX, that though a good man, there was something dark and suspicious in his character, which made it difficult to keep on terms with him; the most innocent word would wound him, and he was always inclined to think that there was an intention to mortify him; this disposition made him unhappy, and rendered his acquaintance too painful to endure.

What a moral paradox, but what an unquestionable fact, is the wayward irritability of some of the finest geniuses, which is often weak to effeminacy, and capricious to childishness! while minds of a less delicate texture are not frayed and fretted by casual frictions; and plain sense with a coarser grain, is sufficient to keep down these aberrations of their feelings.  How mortifying is the list of—­

  Fears of the brave and follies of the wise!

Many have been sore and implacable on an allusion to some personal defect —­on the obscurity of their birth—­on some peculiarity of habit; and have suffered themselves to be governed in life by nervous whims and chimeras, equally fantastic and trivial.  This morbid sensibility lurks in the temperament of genius, and the infection is often discovered where it is not always suspected.  Cumberland declared that the sensibility of some men of genius is so quick and captious, that you must first consider whom they can be happy with, before you can promise yourself any happiness with them:  if you bring uncongenial humours into contact with each other, all the objects of society will be frustrated by inattention to the proper grouping of the guests.  Look round on our contemporaries; every day furnishes facts which confirm our principle.  Among the vexations of POPE was the libel of “the pictured shape;"[A] and even the robust mind of JOHNSON could not suffer to be exhibited as “blinking Sam."[B] MILTON must have delighted in contemplating his own person; and the engraver not having reached our sublime bard’s ideal grace, he has pointed his indignation in four iambics.  The praise of a skipping ape raised the feeling of envy in that child of nature and genius, GOLDSMITH.  VOITURE, the son of a vintner, like