and instructive, that it tempts us to venture on a digression.  Long before Frances Burney was born, Mr. Crisp had made his entrance into the world, with every advantage.  He was well connected and well educated.  His face and figure were conspicuously handsome; his manners were polished; his fortune was easy; his character was without stain ; he lived in the best society; he had read much ; he talked well; his taste in literature, music, painting, architecture, sculpture, was held in high esteem.  Nothing that the world can give seemed to be wanting to his happiness and respectability, except that he should understand the limits of his powers, and should not throw away distinctions which were within his reach in the pursuit of distinctions which were unattainable. " It is an uncontrolled truth,” says Swift, “that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.”  Every day brings with it fresh illustrations of this weighty saying ; but the best commentary that we remember is the history of Samuel Crisp.  Men like him have their proper place, and it is a most important one, in the Commonwealth of Letters.  It is by the judgment of such men that the rank of authors is finally determined.  It is neither to the multitude, nor to the few who are gifted with great creative genius, that we are to look for sound critical decisions.  The multitude, unacquainted with the best models, are captivated by whatever stuns and dazzles them.  They deserted Mrs. Siddons to run after Master Betty; and they now prefer, we have no doubt, Jack Sheppard to Van Artevelde.  A man of great original genius, on the other hand, a man who has attained to mastery in some high walk of art, is by no means to be implicitly trusted as a judge of the performances of others.  The erroneous decisions pronounced by such men are without number.  It is commonly supposed that jealousy makes them unjust.  But a more creditable explanation may easily be found.  The very excellence of a work shows that some of the faculties of the author have been developed at the expense of the rest — for it is not given to the human intellect to expand itself widely in all directions at once and to be at the same time gigantic and well-proportioned.  Whoever becomes pre-eminent in any art, nay, in any style of art, generally does so by devoting himself with intense and exclusive enthusiasm to the pursuit of one kind of excellence.  His perception of other Page xx

kinds of excellence is too often impaired.  Out of his own department, he blames at random, and is far less to be trusted than the mere connoisseur, who produces nothing, and whose business is only to judge and enjoy.  One painter is distinguished by his exquisite finishing.  He toils day after day to bring the veins of a cabbage leaf, the folds of a lace veil, the wrinkles of an old woman’s face, nearer and nearer to perfection.  In the time which he employs on a square foot of canvas,