nfection is often discovered where it is
not always suspected. Cumberland declared that the sensibility of some men
of genius is so quick and captious, that you must first consider whom they
can be happy with, before you can promise yourself any happiness with
them: if you bring uncongenial humours into contact with each other, all
the objects of society will be frustrated by inattention to the proper
grouping of the guests. Look round on our contemporaries; every day
furnishes facts which confirm our principle. Among the vexations of POPE
was the libel of "the pictured shape;"[A] and even the robust mind of
JOHNSON could not suffer to be exhibited as "blinking Sam."[B] MILTON must
have delighted in contemplating his own person; and the engraver not
having reached our sublime bard's ideal grace, he has pointed his
indignation in four iambics. The praise of a skipping ape raised the
feeling of envy in that child of nature and genius, GOLDSMITH. VOITURE,
the son of a vintner, like our PRIOR, was so mortified whenever reminded
of his original occupation, that it was bitterly said, that wine, which
cheered the hearts of all men, sickened the heart of Voiture. AKENSIDE
ever considered his lameness as an unsupportable misfortune, for it
continually reminded him of the fall of the cleaver from one of his
father's blocks. BECCARIA, invited to Paris by the literati, arrived
melancholy and silent, and abruptly returned home. At that moment this
great man was most miserable from a fit of jealousy: a young female had
extinguished all his philosophy. The poet ROUSSEAU was the son of a
cobbler; and when his honest parent waited at the door of the theatre to
embrace his son on the success of his first piece, genius, whose
sensibility is not always virtuous, repulsed the venerable father with
insult and contempt. But I will no longer proceed from folly to crime.

[Footnote A: He was represented as an ill-made monkey in the frontispiece
to a satire noted in "Quarrels of Authors," p. 286 (last edition).--ED.]

[Footnote B: Johnson was displeased at the portrait Reynolds painted of
him which dwelt on his nearsightedness; declaring that "a man's defects
should never be painted." The same defect was made the subject of a
caricature particularly allusive to critical prejudices in his "Lives of
the Poets," in which he is pictured as an owl "blinking at the stars."
--ED.]

Those who give so many sensations to others must themselves possess an