Is the occupation of making a great name less anxious and precarious than that of making a great fortune? the progress of a man’s capital is unequivocal to him, but that of the fame of authors and artists is for the greater part of their lives of an ambiguous nature.  They become whatever the minds or knowledge of others make them; they are the creatures of the prejudices and the predispositions of others, and must suffer from those precipitate judgments which are the result of such prejudices and such predispositions.  Time only is the certain friend of literary worth, for time makes the world disagree among themselves; and when those who condemn discover that there are others who approve, the weaker party loses itself in the stronger, and at length they learn that the author was far more reasonable than their prejudices had allowed them to conceive.  It is thus, however, that the regard which men of genius find in one place they lose in another.  We may often smile at the local gradations of genius; the fervid esteem in which an author is held here, and the cold indifference, if not contempt, he encounters in another place; here the man of learning is condemned as a heavy drone, and there the man of wit annoys the unwitty listener.

And are not the anxieties of even the most successful men of genius renewed at every work—­often quitted in despair, often returned to with rapture? the same agitation of the spirits, the same poignant delight, the same weariness, the same dissatisfaction, the same querulous languishment after excellence?  Is the man of genius an INVENTOR? the discovery is contested, or it is not comprehended for ten years after, perhaps not during his whole life; even men of science are as children before him.  Sir Thomas Bodley wrote to Lord Bacon, remonstrating with him on his new mode of philosophising.  It seems the fate of all originality of thinking to be immediately opposed; a contemporary is not prepared for its comprehension, and too often cautiously avoids it, from the prudential motive which turns away from a new and solitary path.  BACON was not at all understood at home in his own day; his reputation—­for it was not celebrity—­was confined to his history of Henry VII., and his Essays; it was long after his death before English writers ventured to quote Bacon as an authority; and with equal simplicity and grandeur, BACON called himself “the servant of posterity.”  MONTESQUIEU gave his Esprit des Loix to be read by that man in France, whom he conceived to be the best judge, and in return received the most mortifying remarks.  The great philosopher exclaimed in despair, “I see my own age is not ripe enough to understand my work; however, it shall be published!” When KEPLER published the first rational work on comets, it was condemned, even by the learned, as a wild dream.  COPERNICUS so much dreaded the prejudice of mankind against his treatise on “The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies,” that, by a species of continence of all others most