of Milton's verse we perceive the feeling he associated with this literary honour: The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus when temple and tower was And the meanest things, the very household stuff, associated with the memory of the man of genius, become the objects of our affections. At a festival, in honour of THOMSON the poet, the chair in which he composed part of his Seasons produced, and appears to have communicated some of the raptures to which he was liable who had sat in that chair. RABELAIS, amongst his drollest inventions, could not have imagined that his old cloak would have been preserved in the university of Montpelier for future doctors to wear on the day they took their degree; nor could SHAKSPEARE have supposed, with all his fancy, that the mulberry-tree which he planted would have been multiplied into relics. But in such instances the feeling is right, with a wrong direction; and while the populace are exhausting their emotions on an old tree, an old chair, and an old cloak, they are paying that involuntary tribute to genius which forms its pride, and will generate the race. CHAPTER XXV. Influence of Authors on society, and of society on Authors. --National tastes a source of literary prejudices. -True Genius always the organ of its nation.-Master-writers preserve the distinct national character. -Genius the organ of the state of the age.-Causes of its suppression in a people. Often invented, but neglected.-The natural gradations of genius.-Men of Genius produce their usefulness in privacy. The public mind is now the creation of the public writer.-Politicians affect to deny this principle.-Authors stand between the governors and the governed. A view of the solitary Author in his study. They create an epoch in history.-Influence of popular Authors.-The immortality of thought. The Family of Genius illustrated by their genealogy. LITERARY fame, which is the sole preserver of all other fame, participates little, and remotely, in the remuneration and the honours of professional characters. All other professions press more immediately on the wants and attentions of men, than the occupations of LITERARY CHARACTERS, who from their habits are secluded; producing their usefulness often at a late period of life, and not always valued by their own generation. It is not the commercial character of a nation which inspires veneration in mankind, nor will its military power engage the affections of its neighbours. So late as in 1700 the Italian Gemelli told all Europe that he could find nothing among us but our writings to distinguish us from a people of barbarians. It was long considered that our genius partook of the density and variableness of our climate, and that we were incapacitated even by situation from the enjoyments of those beautiful arts which have not yet travelled to us—as if Nature herself had designed to disjoin us from more polished nations and brighter skies. At length we have triumphed! Our philosophers, our poets, and our historians, are printed at foreign presses. This is a perpetual victory, and establishes the ascendancy of our genius, as much at least as the commerce and the prowess of England. This singular revolution in the history of the human mind, and by its reaction this singular revolution in human affairs, was effected by a glorious succession of AUTHORS, who have enabled our nation to arbitrate among the nations of Europe, and to possess ourselves of their involuntary esteem by discoveries in science, by principles in philosophy, by truths in history, and even by the graces of fiction; and there is not a man of genius among foreigners who stands unconnected with our intellectual sovereignty. Even had our country displayed more limited resources than its awful powers have opened, and had the sphere of its dominion been enclosed by its island boundaries, if the same national literary character had predominated, we should have stood on the same eminence among our Continental rivals. The small cities of Athens and of Florence will perpetually attest the influence of the literary character over other nations. The one received the tribute of the mistress of the universe, when the Romans sent their youth to be educated at the Grecian city, while the other, at the revival of letters, beheld every polished European crowding to its little court. In closing this imperfect work by attempting to ascertain the real influence of authors on society, it will be necessary to notice some curious facts in the history of genius. The distinct literary tastes of different nations, and the repugnance they mutually betray for the master-writers of each other, is an important circumstance to the philosophical observer. These national tastes originate in modes of feeling, in customs, in idioms, and all the numerous associations prevalent among every people. The reciprocal influence of manners on taste, and of taste on manners- -of government and religion on the literature of a people, and of their literature on the national character, with other congenial objects of inquiry, still require a more ample investigation. Whoever attempts to reduce this diversity, and these strong contrasts of national tastes to one common standard, by forcing such dissimilar objects into comparative parallels, or by trying them by conventional principles and arbitrary regulations, will often condemn what in truth his mind is inadequate to comprehend, and the experience of his associations to combine. These attempts have been the fertile source in literature of what may be called national prejudices. The French nation insists that the northerns are defective in taste the taste, they tell us, which is estalibshed at Paris, and which existed at Athens: the Gothic imagination of the north spurns at the timid copiers of the Latin classics, and interminable disputes prevail in their literature, as in their architecture and their painting. Philosophy discovers a fact of which taste seems little conscious; it is, that genius varies with the soil, and produces a nationality of taste. The feelings of mankind indeed have the same common source, but they must come to us through the medium and by the modifications of society. Love is a universal passion, but the poetry of love in different nations is peculiar to each; for every great poet belongs to his country. Petrarch, Lope de Vega, Racine, Shakspeare, and Sadi, would each express this universal passion by the most specific differences; and the style that would be condemned as unnatural by one people, might be habitual with another. The concetti of the Italian, the figurative style of the Persian, the swelling grandeur of the Spaniard, the classical correctness of the French, are all modifications of genius, relatively true to each particular writer. On national tastes critics are but wrestlers: the Spaniard will still prefer his Lope de Vega to the French Racine, or the English his Shakspeare, as the Italian his Tasso and his Petrarch. Hence all national writers are studied with enthusiasm by their own people, and their very peculiarities, offensive to others, with the natives constitute their excellences. Nor does this perpetual contest about the great writers of other nations solely arise from an association of patriotic glory, but really because these great native writers have most strongly excited the sympathies and conformed to the habitual tastes of their own people. Hence, then, we deduce that true genius is the organ of its nation. The creative faculty is itself created; for it is the nation which first imparts an impulse to the character of genius. Such is the real source of those distinct tastes which we perceive in all great national authors. Every literary work, to ensure its success, must adapt itself to the sympathies and the understandings of the people it addresses. Hence those opposite characteristics, which are usually ascribed to the master-writers themselves, originate with the country, and not with the writer. LOPE DE VEGA, and CALDERON, in their dramas, and CERVANTES, who has left his name as the epithet of a peculiar grave humour, were Spaniards before they were men of genius. CORNEILLE, RACINE, and RABELAIS, are entirely of an opposite character to the Spaniards, having adapted their genius to their own declamatory and vivacious countrymen. PETRARCH and TASSO display a fancifulness in depicting the passions, as BOCCACCIO narrates his facetious stories, quite distinct from the inventions and style of northern writers. SHAKSPEARE is placed at a wider interval from all of them than they are from each other, and is as perfectly insular in his genius as his own countrymen were in their customs, and their modes of thinking and feeling. Thus the master-writers of every people preserve the distinct national character in their works; and hence that extraordinary enthusiasm with which every people read their own favourite authors; but in which others cannot participate, and for which, with all their national prejudices, they often recriminate on each other with false and even ludicrous criticism. But genius is not only the organ of its nation, it is also that of the state of the times; and a great work usually originates in the age. Certain events must precede the man of genius, who often becomes only the vehicle of public feeling. MACHIAVEL has been reproached for propagating a political system subversive of all human honour and happiness; but was it Machiavel who formed his age, or the age which created Machiavel? Living among the petty principalities of Italy, where stratagem and assassination were the prac tices of those wretched courts, what did that calumniated genius more than lift the veil from a cabinet of bandtiti? MACHIAVEL alarmed the world by exposing a system subversive of all human virtue and happiness, and, whether he meant it or not, certainly led the way to political freedom. On the same principle we may learn that BOCCACCIO would not have written so many indecent tales had not the scandalous lives of the monks engaged public attention. This we may now regret; but the court of Rome felt the concealed satire, and that luxurious and numerous class in society never recovered from the chastisement. MONTAIGNE has been censured for his universal scepticism, and for the unsettled notions he drew out on his motley page, which has been attributed to his incapacity of forming decisive opinions. "Que sçais-je ?" was his motto. The same accusation may reach the gentle ERASMUS, who alike offended the old catholics and the new reformers. The real source of their vacillations we may discover in the age itself. It was one of controversy and of civil wars, when the minds of men were thrown into perpetual agitation, and opinions, like the victories of the parties, were every day changing sides. Even in its advancement beyond the intelligence of its own age genius is but progressive. In nature all is continuous; she makes no starts and leaps. Genius is said to soar, but we should rather say that genius climbs. Did the great VERULAM, or RAWLEIGH, or Dr. MORE, emancipate themselves from all the dreams of their age, from the occult agency of witchcraft, the astral influence, and the ghost and demon creed? Before a particular man of genius can appear, certain events must arise to prepare the age for him. A great commercial nation, in the maturity of time, opened all the sources of wealth to the contemplation of ADAM SMITH. That extensive system of what is called political economy could not have been produced at any other time; for before this period the materials of this work had but an imperfect existence, and the advances which this sort of science had made were only partial and preparatory. If the principle of Adam Smith's great work seems to confound the happiness of a nation with its wealth, we can scarcely reproach the man of genius, who we shall find is always reflecting back the feelings of his own nation, even in his most original speculations. In works of pure imagination we trace the same march of the human intellect; and we discover in those inventions, which appear sealed by their originality, how much has been dreived from the age and the people in which they were |