ich have often dogged great inventors to their
tomb, and there only have vanished.--But I seem writing the "calamities of
authors," and have only begun the catalogue.

The reputation of a writer of taste is subject to more difficulties than
any other. Similar was the fate of the finest ode-writers in our poetry.
On their publication, the odes of COLLINS could find no readers; and those
of GRAY, though ushered into the reading world by the fashionable press of
Walpole, were condemned as failures. When RACINE produced his "Athalie,"
it was not at all relished: Boileau indeed declared that he understood
these matters better than the public, and prophesied that the public would
return to it: they did so; but it was sixty years afterwards; and Racine
died without suspecting that "Athalie" was his masterpiece. I have heard
one of our great poets regret that he had devoted so much of his life to
the cultivation of his art, which arose from a project made in the golden
vision of his youth: "at a time," said he, "when I thought that the
fountain could never be dried up."--"Your baggage will reach posterity,"
was observed.--"There is much to spare," was the answer.

Every day we may observe, of a work of genius, that those parts which have
all the raciness of the soil, and as such are most liked by its admirers,
are those which are the most criticised. Modest critics shelter themselves
under that general amnesty too freely granted, that tastes are allowed to
differ; but we should approximate much nearer to the truth, if we were to
say, that but few of mankind are prepared to relish the beautiful with
that enlarged taste which comprehends all the forms of feeling which
genius may assume; forms which may be necessarily associated with defects.
A man of genius composes in a state of intellectual emotion, and the magic
of his style consists in the movements of his soul; but the art of
conveying those movements is far separated from the feeling which inspires
them. The idea in the mind is not always found under the pen, any more
than the artist's conception can always breathe in his pencil. Like
FIAMINGO'S image, which he kept polishing till his friend exclaimed, "What
perfection would you have?"--"Alas!" exclaimed the sculptor, "the original
I am labouring to come up to is in my head, but not yet in my hand."

The writer toils, and repeatedly toils, to throw into our minds that
sympathy with which we hang over the illusion of his pag