our PRIOR, was so mortified whenever reminded of his original occupation, that it was bitterly said, that wine, which cheered the hearts of all men, sickened the heart of Voiture.  AKENSIDE ever considered his lameness as an unsupportable misfortune, for it continually reminded him of the fall of the cleaver from one of his father’s blocks.  BECCARIA, invited to Paris by the literati, arrived melancholy and silent, and abruptly returned home.  At that moment this great man was most miserable from a fit of jealousy:  a young female had extinguished all his philosophy.  The poet ROUSSEAU was the son of a cobbler; and when his honest parent waited at the door of the theatre to embrace his son on the success of his first piece, genius, whose sensibility is not always virtuous, repulsed the venerable father with insult and contempt.  But I will no longer proceed from folly to crime.

[Footnote A:  He was represented as an ill-made monkey in the frontispiece to a satire noted in “Quarrels of Authors,” p. 286 (last edition).—­ED.]

[Footnote B:  Johnson was displeased at the portrait Reynolds painted of him which dwelt on his nearsightedness; declaring that “a man’s defects should never be painted.”  The same defect was made the subject of a caricature particularly allusive to critical prejudices in his “Lives of the Poets,” in which he is pictured as an owl “blinking at the stars.”  —­ED.]

Those who give so many sensations to others must themselves possess an excess and a variety of feelings.  We find, indeed, that they are censured for their extreme irritability; and that happy equality of temper so prevalent among MEN OF LETTERS, and which is conveniently acquired by men of the world, has been usually refused to great mental powers, or to fervid dispositions—­authors and artists.  The man of wit becomes petulant, the profound thinker morose, and the vivacious ridiculously thoughtless.

When ROUSSEAU once retired to a village, he had to learn to endure its conversation; for this purpose he was compelled to invent an expedient to get rid of his uneasy sensations.  “Alone, I have never known ennui, even when perfectly unoccupied:  my imagination, filling the void, was sufficient to busy me.  It is only the inactive chit-chat of the room, when every one is seated face to face, and only moving their tongues, which I never could support.  There to be a fixture, nailed with one hand on the other, to settle the state of the weather, or watch the flies about one, or, what is worse, to be bandying compliments, this to me is not bearable.”  He hit on the expedient of making lace-strings, carrying his working cushion in his visits, to keep the peace with the country gossips.