t,
Drank the last life-drop of his bleeding breast,

One of our former great students, when reduced in health by excessive
study, was entreated to abandon it, and in the scholastic language of the
day, not to _perdere substantiam propter accidentia_. With a smile the
martyr of study repeated a verse from Juvenal:

Nec propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
No! not for life lose that for which I live!

Thus the shadow of death falls among those who are existing with more than
life about them. Yet "there is no celebrity for the artist," said GESNER,
"if the love of his own art do not become a vehement passion; if the hours
he employs to cultivate it be not for him the most delicious ones of his
life; if study become not his true existence and his first happiness; if
the society of his brothers in art be not that which most pleases him; if
even in the night-time the ideas of his art do not occupy his vigils or
his dreams; if in the morning he fly not to his work, impatient to
recommence what he left unfinished. These are the marks of him who labours
for true glory and posterity; but if he seek only to please the taste of
his age, his works will not kindle the desires nor touch the hearts of
those who love the arts and the artists."

Unaccompanied by enthusiasm, genius will produce nothing but uninteresting
works of art; not a work of art resembling the dove of Archytas, which
beautiful piece of mechanism, while other artists beheld flying, no one
could frame such another dove to meet it in the air. Enthusiasm is that
secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius,
throwing the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very
ideal presence whence these works have really originated. A great work
always leaves us in a state of musing.

CHAPTER XIII.

Of the jealousy of Genius.--Jealousy often proportioned to the degree of
genius.--A perpetual fever among Authors and Artists.--Instances of its
incredible excess among brothers and benefactors.--Of a peculiar species,
where the fever consumes the sufferer, without its malignancy.

Jealousy, long supposed to be the offspring of little minds, is not,
however, confined to them. In the literary republic, the passion fiercely
rages among the senators as well as among the people. In that curious
self-description which LINNAEUS comprised in a single page, written with
the precision of a naturalist, that great man discovered tha