An extraordinary instance of this disagreement between the man of the world and the literary character, we find in a philosopher seated on a throne.  The celebrated JULIAN stained the imperial purple with an author’s ink; and when he resided among the Antiochians, his unalterable character shocked that volatile and luxurious race.  He slighted the plaudits of their theatre, he abhorred their dances and their horse-races, he was abstinent even at a festival, and incorrupt himself, perpetually admonished the dissipated citizens of their impious abandonment of the laws of their country.  The Antiochians libelled their emperor, and petulantly lampooned his beard, which the philosopher carelessly wore neither perfumed nor curled.  Julian, scorning to inflict a sharper punishment, pointed at them his satire of “the Misopogon, or the Antiochian; the Enemy of the Beard,” where, amidst irony and invective, the literary monarch bestows on himself many exquisite and characteristic touches.  All that the persons of fashion alleged against the literary character, Julian unreservedly confesses—­his undressed beard and awkwardness, his obstinacy, his unsociable habits, his deficient tastes, while at the same time he represents his good qualities as so many extravagances.  But, in this Cervantic pleasantry of self-reprehension, the imperial philosopher has not failed to show this light and corrupt people that the reason he could not possibly resemble them, existed in the unhappy circumstance of having been subject to too strict an education under a family tutor, who had never suffered him to swerve from the one right way, and who (additional misfortune!) had inspired him with such a silly reverence for Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus, that he had been induced to make them his models.  “Whatever manners,” says the emperor, “I may have previously contracted, whether gentle or boorish, it is impossible for me now to alter or unlearn.  Habit is said to be a second nature; to oppose it is irksome, but to counteract the study of more than thirty years is extremely difficult, especially when it has been imbibed with so much attention.”

And what if men of genius, relinquishing their habits, could do this violence to their nature, should we not lose the original for a factitious genius, and spoil one race without improving the other?  If nature and habit, that second nature which prevails even over the first, have created two beings distinctly different, what mode of existence shall ever assimilate them?  Antipathies and sympathies, those still occult causes, however concealed, will break forth at an unguarded moment.  Clip the wings of an eagle that he may roost among domestic fowls,—­at some unforeseen moment his pinions will overshadow and terrify his tiny associates, for “the feathered king” will be still musing on the rock and the cloud.