bably included in it a greater degree of malig

nancy

than I would now describe.

"Envy which turns pale

And sickens even if a friend prevail."

SWIFT, in that curious poem on his own death, said of POPE, that

The Dean, perhaps, is not quite serious, but probably is in the next lines.

"It gives me such a jealous fit,

I cry, Pox take him and his wit.'"

If the reader pursues this hint throughout the poem, these compliments to his friends, always at his own expense, exhibit a singular mixture of the sensibility and the frankness of true genius, which Swift himself has honestly confessed.

"What poet would not grieve to see

His brother write as well as he?"

ADDISON experienced this painful and mixed

emotion in his intercourse with POPE, to whose rising celebrity he soon became too jealously alive. It was more tenderly, but not less keenly felt by the Spanish artist CASTILLO, a man distinguished by every amiable disposition: he was the great painter of Seville; but when some of his nephew MURILLO's paintings were shown to him, he stood in meek astonishment before them, and turning away, he exclaimed with a sigh, Ya murio Castillo! Castillo is no more! Returning home the stricken genius relinquished his pencil, and pined away in hopelessness. The same occurrence happened to PIETRO PERUGINO, the master of Raphael, whose general character as a painter was so entirely eclipsed by his far renowned scholar; yet, while his real excellencies in the ease of his attitudes, and the mild grace of his female countenances have been passed over, Raphael himself might have caught from them his first feelings of ideal beauty.

CHAPTER XIV.

WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM, OFTEN ORIGINATING
IN A DEFICIENCY OF ANALOGOUS IDEAS-IT IS
NOT ALWAYS ENVY OR JEALOUSY WHICH IN-
DUCE MEN OF GENIUS TO UNDERVALUE
OTHER.

EACH

AMONG men of genius that want of mutual esteem, usually attributed to envy or jealousy, often originates in a deficiency of analogous ideas, or sympathy, in the parties. On this principle several curious phenomena in the history of genius may be explained.

Every man of genius has a manner of his own; a mode of thinking and a habit of style, and usually decides on a work as it approximates or varies from his own. When one great author depreciates another, it has often no worse source than his own taste. The witty Cowley despised the natural Chaucer; the austere classical Boileau the rough sublimity of Crebillon; the refining

Marivaux the familiar Molière. Fielding ridiculed Richardson, whose manner so strongly contrasted with his own; and Richardson contemned Fielding, and declared he would not last. Cumberland escaped a fit of unforgiveness, not living to read his own character by Bishop Watson, whose logical head tried the lighter elegancies of that polished man by his own nervous genius, destitute of whatever was beautiful in taste. There was no envy in the breast of Johnson when he advised Mrs. Thrale not to purchase Gray's Letters as trifling and dull, no more than in Gray himself when he sunk the poetical character of Shenstone, his simplicity and purity of feeling, by an image of ludicrous contempt. I have heard that WILKES, a mere wit and elegant scholar, used to treat GIBBON as a mere book-maker; and applied to that philosophical historian the verse by which Voltaire described, with so much caustic facetiousness, the genius of the Abbé Trablet;

"Il a compilé, compilé, compilé."

The deficient sympathy in these men of genius

for modes of feeling opposite to their own was the real cause of their opinions; and thus it happens that even superior genius is so often liable to be unjust and false in its decisions.

The same principle operates still more strikingly in the remarkable contempt of men of genius for those pursuits and the pursuers, which require talents quite distinct from their own, and a cast of mind thrown by nature into another mould. Hence we must not be surprised at the poetical antipathies of Selden and Locke, as well as Longerue and Buffon; Newton called "poetry, ingenious nonsense.' On the other side, the poetical tribe undervalue the pursuits of the antiquary, the naturalist, and the metaphysician, by their own favourite course of imagination. As we can only understand in the degree we comprehend, and feel in that we sympathise with, in both these cases the parties will be found altogether deficient in those qualities of genius which constitute the excellence of the other. To this cause, rather than to the one the friends of MICKLE