These moments of anxiety often darken the brightest hours of genius.  RACINE had extreme sensibility; the pain inflicted by a severe criticism outweighed all the applause he received.  He seems to have felt, what he was often reproached with, that his Greeks, his Jews, and his Turks, were all inmates of Versailles.  He had two critics, who, like our Dennis with Pope and Addison, regularly dogged his pieces as they appeared[A].  Corneille’s objections he would attribute to jealousy—­at his pieces when burlesqued at the Italian theatre[B] he would smile outwardly, though sick at heart; but his son informs us, that a stroke of raillery from his witty friend Chapelle, whose pleasantry hardly sheathed its bitterness, sunk more deeply into his heart than the burlesques at the Italian theatre, the protest of Corneille, and the iteration of the two Dennises.  More than once MOLIERE and Racine, in vexation of spirit, resolved to abandon their dramatic career; it was BOILEAU who ceaselessly animated their languor:  “Posterity,” he cried, “will avenge the injustice of our age!” And CONGREVE’S comedies met with such moderate success, that it appears the author was extremely mortified, and on the ill reception of The Way of the World, determined to write no more for the stage.  When he told Voltaire, on the French wit’s visit, that Voltaire must consider him as a private gentleman, and not as an author,—­which apparent affectation called down on Congreve the sarcastic severity of the French author,[C] —­more of mortification and humility might have been in Congreve’s language than of affectation or pride.

[Footnote A:  See the article “On the Influence of a bad temper in Criticism” in “Calamities of Authors,” for a notice of Dennis and his career.—­ED.]

[Footnote B:  See the article on “The Sensibility of Racine” in “Literary Miscellanies,” (in the present volume) and that on “Parody,” in “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. ii. p. 459.—­ED.]

[Footnote C:  Voltaire quietly said he should not have troubled himself to visit him if he had been merely a private gentleman.—­ED.]

The life of TASSO abounds with pictures of a complete exhaustion of this kind.  His contradictory critics had perplexed him with the most intricate literary discussions, and either occasioned or increased a mental alienation.  In one of his letters, we find that he repents the composition of his great poem, for although his own taste approved of that marvellous, which still forms a noble part of its creation, yet he confesses that his cold reasoning critics have decided that the history of his hero, Godfrey, required another species of conduct.  “Hence,” cries the unhappy bard, “doubts torment me; but for the past, and what is done, I know of no remedy;” and he longs to precipitate the publication, that “he may be delivered from misery and agony.”  He solemnly swears—­“Did not the circumstances of my situation compel me, I would not print it, even