a distance. Their foibles and
their infirmities are obvious to their associates, often only capable of
discerning these qualities. The defects of great men are the consolation
of the dunces.

CHAPTER VIII.

The spirit of literature and the spirit of society.--The Inventors.
--Society offers seduction and not reward to men of genius.--The notions
of persons of fashion of men of genius.--The habitudes of the man of
genius distinct from those of the man of society.--Study, meditation, and
enthusiasm, the progress of genius.--The disagreement between the men of
the world and the literary character.

The Inventors, who inherited little or nothing from their predecessors,
appear to have pursued their insulated studies in the full independence of
their mind and development of their inventive faculty; they stood apart,
in seclusion, the solitary lights of their age. Such were the founders of
our literature--Bacon and Hobbes, Newton and Milton. Even so late as the
days of Dryden, Addison, and Pope, the man of genius drew his circle round
his intimates; his day was uniform, his habits unbroken; and he was never
too far removed, nor too long estranged from meditation and reverie: his
works were the sources of his pleasure ere they became the labours of his
pride.

But when a more uniform light of knowledge illuminates from all sides, the
genius of society, made up of so many sorts of genius, becomes greater
than the genius of the individual who has entirely yielded himself up
to his solitary art. Hence the character of a man of genius becomes
subordinate. A conversation age succeeds a studious one; and the family of
genius, the poet, the painter, and the student, are no longer recluses.
They mix with their rivals, who are jealous of equality, or with others
who, incapable of valuing them for themselves alone, rate them but as
parts of an integral.

The man of genius is now trammelled with the artificial and mechanical
forms of life; and in too close an intercourse with society, the
loneliness and raciness of thinking is modified away in its seductive
conventions. An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life
constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opulent age; but of
late, while the arts of assembling in large societies have been practised,
varied by all forms, and pushed on to all excesses, it may become a
question whether by them our happiness is as much improved, or our
individual character as