are drawn from a manuscript of the late Sir
Herbert Croft, who regretted that Dr. Johnson would not suffer him to give
this account during the doctor's lifetime, in his Life of Young, but which
it had always been his intention to have added to it.]

But men of genius have often been accused of imaginary crimes. Their very
eminence attracts the lie of calumny, which tradition often conveys beyond
the possibility of refutation. Sometimes they are reproached as wanting in
affection, when they displease their fathers by making an obscure name
celebrated. The family of DESCARTES lamented, as a blot in their
escutcheon, that Descartes, who was born a gentleman, should become a
philosopher; and this elevated genius was refused the satisfaction of
embracing an unforgiving parent, while his dwarfish brother, with a mind
diminutive as his person, ridiculed his philosophic relative, and turned
to advantage his philosophic disposition. The daughter of ADDISON was
educated with a perfect contempt of authors, and blushed to bear a name
more illustrious than that of all the Warwicks, on her alliance to which
noble family she prided herself. The children of MILTON, far from solacing
the age of their blind parent, became impatient for his death, embittered
his last hours with scorn and disaffection, and combined to cheat and rob
him. Milton, having enriched our national poetry by two immortal epics,
with patient grief blessed the single female who did not entirely abandon
him, and the obscure fanatic who was pleased with his poems because they
were religious. What felicities! what laurels! And now we have recently
learned, that the daughter of Madame DE SEVIGNE lived on ill terms
with her mother, of whose enchanting genius she appears to have been
insensible! The unquestionable documents are two letters hitherto
cautiously secreted. The daughter was in the house of her mother when an
extraordinary letter was addressed to her from the chamber of Madame de
Sevigne after a sleepless night. In this she describes, with her peculiar
felicity, the ill-treatment she received from the daughter she idolised;
it is a kindling effusion of maternal reproach, and tenderness, and
genius.[A]

[Footnote A: Lettres inedites de Madame de Sevigne, pp. 201 and 203.]

Some have been deemed disagreeable companions, because they felt the
weariness of dulness, or the impertinence of intrusion; described as bad
husbands, when united to women who, without a kind