[Footnote A:  Hogarth was not without reason for exasperation.  He was severely attacked for his theories about the curved line of beauty, which was branded as a foolish attempt to prove crookedness elegant, and himself vulgarly caricatured.  It was even asserted that the theory was stolen from Lomazzo.  ED.]

Parties confederate against a man of genius,—­as happened to Corneille, to D’Avenant,[A] and Milton; and a Pradon and a Settle carry away the meed of a Racine and a Dryden.  It was to support the drooping spirit of his friend Racine on the opposition raised against Phaedra, that Boileau addressed to him an epistle “On the Utility to be drawn from the Jealousy of the Envious.”  The calm dignity of the historian DE THOU, amidst the passions of his times, confidently expected that justice from posterity which his own age refused to his early and his late labour.  That great man was, however, compelled by his injured feelings, to compose a poem under the name of another, to serve as his apology against the intolerant court of Rome, and the factious politicians of France; it was a noble subterfuge to which a great genius was forced.  The acquaintances of the poet COLLINS probably complained of his wayward humours and irritability; but how could they sympathise with the secret mortification of the poet, who imagined that he had composed his Pastorals on wrong principles, or when, in the agony of his soul, he consigned to the flames with his own hands his unsold, but immortal odes?  Can we forget the dignified complaint of the Rambler, with which he awfully closes his work, appealing to posterity?

[Footnote A:  See “Quarrels of Authors,” p. 403, on the confederacy of several wits against D’Avenant, a great genius; where I discovered that a volume of poems, said “to be written by the author’s friends,” which had hitherto been referred to as a volume of panegyrics, contains nothing but irony and satire, which had escaped the discovery of so many transcribers of title-pages, frequently miscalled literary historians.]

Genius contracts those peculiarities of which it is so loudly accused in its solitary occupations—­that loftiness of spirit, those quick jealousies, those excessive affections and aversions which view everything as it passes in its own ideal world, and rarely as it exists in the mediocrity of reality.  If this irritability of genius be a malady which has raged even among philosophers, we must not be surprised at the temperament of poets.  These last have abandoned their country; they have changed their name; they have punished themselves with exile in the rage of their disorder.  No! not poets only.  DESCARTES sought in vain, even in his secreted life, for a refuge for his genius; he thought himself persecuted in France, he thought himself calumniated among strangers, and he went and died in Sweden; and little did that man of genius think that his countrymen would beg to have his ashes restored to them.  Even the reasoning HUME once proposed to change his name and his country; and I believe did.  The great poetical genius of our own times has openly alienated himself from the land of his brothers.  He becomes immortal in the language of a people whom he would contemn.[A] Does he accept with ingratitude the fame he loves more than life?