excess and a variety of feelings. We find, indeed, that they are censured
for their extreme irritability; and that happy equality of temper so
prevalent among MEN OF LETTERS, and which is conveniently acquired by men
of the world, has been usually refused to great mental powers, or to
fervid dispositions--authors and artists. The man of wit becomes petulant,
the profound thinker morose, and the vivacious ridiculously thoughtless.

When ROUSSEAU once retired to a village, he had to learn to endure its
conversation; for this purpose he was compelled to invent an expedient to
get rid of his uneasy sensations. "Alone, I have never known ennui,
even when perfectly unoccupied: my imagination, filling the void, was
sufficient to busy me. It is only the inactive chit-chat of the room, when
every one is seated face to face, and only moving their tongues, which I
never could support. There to be a fixture, nailed with one hand on the
other, to settle the state of the weather, or watch the flies about
one, or, what is worse, to be bandying compliments, this to me is not
bearable." He hit on the expedient of making lace-strings, carrying his
working cushion in his visits, to keep the peace with the country gossips.

Is the occupation of making a great name less anxious and precarious than
that of making a great fortune? the progress of a man's capital is
unequivocal to him, but that of the fame of authors and artists is for the
greater part of their lives of an ambiguous nature. They become whatever
the minds or knowledge of others make them; they are the creatures of the
prejudices and the predispositions of others, and must suffer from those
precipitate judgments which are the result of such prejudices and such
predispositions. Time only is the certain friend of literary worth, for
time makes the world disagree among themselves; and when those who condemn
discover that there are others who approve, the weaker party loses itself
in the stronger, and at length they learn that the author was far more
reasonable than their prejudices had allowed them to conceive. It is thus,
however, that the regard which men of genius find in one place they lose
in another. We may often smile at the local gradations of genius; the
fervid esteem in which an author is held here, and the cold indifference,
if not contempt, he encounters in another place; here the man of learning
is condemned as a heavy drone, and there the man of wit annoys the unwitty