With them the transient becomes permanent, the suppressed lies open, and they are the truest representatives of their nation for those very passions with which they are themselves infected. The pen of the ready-writer transmits to us the public and the domestic story, and thus books become the intellectual history of a people. As authors are scattered through all the ranks of society, among the governors and the governed, and the objects of their pursuits are usually carried on by their own peculiar idiosyncracy, we are deeply interested in the secret connexion of the incidents of their lives with their intellectual habits. In the development of that predisposition which is ever working in characters of native force, all their facilities and their failures, and the fortunes which such men have shaped for themselves, and often for the world, we discover what is not found in biographical dictionaries, the history of the mind of the individual;and this constitutes the psychology of genius. In the midst of my studies I was arrested by the loss of sight; the papers in this collection are a portion of my projected history. The title prefixed to this work has been adopted to connect it with its brothers, the "Curiosities of Literature,” and "Miscellanies of Literature;" but though the form and manner bear a family resemblance, the subject has more unity of design. The propriety of the title, I must confess, depends on the graciousness of my readers; the diversified literature in which I have so long indulged, is of such late origin in this country, that the species has never obtained a name. Blair entitles his work "Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres," and Goldsmith in his review of the modern literature of Europe, calls it "polite learning." The Italians have been more fortunate in describing this class, as la letteratura amena; and if it were required to place a classical seal on the term, we might appeal to Pliny, who has given it to literary pursuits in general, amœnitates studiorum. These volumes are not addressed to learned antiquaries, to whose stores it is so difficult to add; I stand gratefully indebted to their labors, for though I have sometimes held a sickle in their harvest, I am oftener a gleaner in their fields these volumes are designed for those of my contemporaries who amid the diversified acquisitions of this age in science and in art, some of which had no existence with the public in my youth, are still susceptible of inquiries so intimately connected with the progress of the human mind and of society, which should never be separated. Whoever imagines that he may safely lay aside all the successive efforts of the English mind, as fashions out of date, contracts his faculties within his own day, and can form no adequate conception of that ample inheritance of the intellectual powers bequeathed to us from age to age. To be ignorant of all antiquity is a mutilation of the human mind; it is early associations and local circumstances which give a bent to the mind of a people from their infancy, and insensibly constitute the nationality of genius, separating the manners and feelings of neighboring nations. Even the errors or singularities of our predecessors, the sagacious know, become so many accessions to their experimental knowledge; and in whatever is excellent, the impulses of our predecessors stand connected with our own. We but continue the chain of human sympathies, whose remotest link, be it ever so backward, supports what is now around us. There is one more remark in which I must indulge: the author of the present work is denied the satisfaction of reading a single line of it, yet he flatters himself that he shall not trespass on the indulgence he claims for any slight inadvertences. It has been confided to ONE whose eyes unceasingly pursue the volume for him who can no more read, and whose eager hand traces the thought ere it vanish in the thinking; but it is only a father who can conceive the affectionate patience of filial devotion. |