Cicero was uneasy amidst applauding Rome, and he has designated his numerous works by the titles of his various villas, where they were composed.  Voltaire had talents, and a taste for society, yet he not only withdrew by intervals, but at one period of his life passed five years in the most secret seclusion and fervent studies.  Montesquieu quitted the brilliant circles of Paris for his books, his meditations, and for his immortal work, and was ridiculed by the gay triflers he relinquished.  Harrington, to compose his Oceana, severed himself from the society of his friends, and was so wrapped in abstraction, that he was pitied as a lunatic.  Descartes, inflamed by genius, abruptly breaks off all his friendly connexions, hires an obscure house in an unfrequented corner at Paris, and applies himself to study during two years unknown to his acquaintance.  Adam Smith, after the publication of his first work, throws himself into a retirement that lasted ten years; even Hume rallied him for separating himself from the world; but the great political inquirer satisfied the world, and his friends, by his great work on the Wealth of Nations.

But this solitude, at first a necessity, and then a pleasure, at length is not borne without repining.  I will call for a witness a great genius, and he shall speak himself.  Gibbon says, “I feel, and shall continue to feel, that domestic solitude, however it may be alleviated by the world, by study, and even by friendship, is a comfortless state, which will grow more painful as I descend in the vale of years.”  And afterwards he writes to a friend, “Your visit has only served to remind me that man, however amused and occupied in his closet, was not made to live alone.”

I must therefore now sketch a different picture of literary solitude than some sanguine and youthful minds conceive.

Even the sublimest of men, Milton, who is not apt to vent complaints, appears to have felt this irksome period of life.  In the preface to Smectymnuus, he says, “It is but justice, not to defraud of due esteem the wearisome labours and studious watchings, wherein I have spent and tired out almost a whole youth.”

Solitude in a later period of life, or rather the neglect which awaits the solitary man, is felt with acuter sensibility.  Cowley, that enthusiast for rural seclusion, in his retirement calls himself “The melancholy Cowley.”  Mason has truly transferred the same epithet to Gray.  Bead in his letters the history of solitude.  We lament the loss of Cowley’s correspondence, through the mistaken notion of Sprat; he assuredly had painted the sorrows of his heart.  But Shenstone has filled his pages with the cries of an amiable being whose soul bleeds in the dead oblivion of solitude.  Listen to his melancholy expressions:—­“Now I am come from a visit, every little uneasiness is sufficient to introduce my whole train of melancholy considerations, and to make me utterly dissatisfied with the life