Literary Character of Men of Genius Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions

s, and of the Lovers

bly to themselves, are combining in the same common labours, and participating in the same divided glory. In the metropolitan cities of Europe the same authors are now read, and the same opinions become established: the Englishman is fam

ns de tous

s de tous

en among the Turks and the Tartars. We see the Italian Pignotti referring to the opinion of an English critic, Lord Bolingbroke, for decisive authority on the peculiar characteristics of the historian Guicciardini: the German Schlegel writes on our Shakspeare like

hat they learned each other's languages; and they discovered that, however their manners varied as they arose from their different customs, they participated in the same intellectual faculties, suffered from the same wants, and were alive to the same pleasures; they perceived that there were no conventional fashions, nor national distinctions, in abstract truths and fundamenta

ndred alliance; even a genius of the first order has not always been aware that he is the fo

litude, to inquire or to answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar. He wanders about the world without pomp or terror; and is

rth, by pover

JOHNSON was of that order of men whose individual genius becomes that of a people. A prouder conception rose in the majestic mind of MILTON, of "that last

hough it frequently occurs that he is himself a member of one. Professional characters are modified by the change of manners, and are usually nation

riumphs and the disappointments of literary glory, were as truly described by CICERO and the younger PLINY as by PETRARCH and ERASMUS, and as they have been by HUME and GIBBON. And this similarity, too, may equally be remarked with respect to that noble passion of the lovers of literature and of art for collecting together their mingled treasures; a thirst which was as insatiable in ATTICUS and PEIRESC as in our CRACHERODE and TOWNLEY.[A

of the

still disperse

and all rare or curious, were deposited in the print-room of the same establishment; his antiquities, &c. were in a similar way added to the other departments. The "Townley Gallery" of classic sculpture was purchased of his executors by Government for 28,200_l_. It had been collected with singular taste and jud