tions of the brightest traditions
connected with Nature they link her more luxuriant loveliness! Must we
breathe only the malaria of Rome to be capable of feeling the interest
attached to the fountain or the statue?

"I am glad," said the Earl, "that you admired my bust of Cicero--it
is from an original very lately discovered. What grandeur in the
brow!--what energy in the mouth, and downward bend of the head! It
is pleasant even to imagine we gaze upon the likeness of so bright
a spirit;--and confess, at least of Cicero, that in reading the
aspirations and outpourings of his mind, you have felt your apathy to
Fame melting away; you have shared the desire to live to the future
age,--'the longing after immortality?"

"Was it not that longing," replied Aram, "which gave to the character
of Cicero its poorest and most frivolous infirmity? Has it not made
him, glorious as he is despite of it, a byword in the mouths of every
schoolboy? Wherever you mention his genius, do you not hear an appendix
on his vanity?"

"Yet without that vanity, that desire for a name with posterity,
would he have been equally great--would he equally have cultivated his
genius?"

"Probably, my Lord, he would not have equally cultivated his genius,
but in reality he might have been equally great. A man often injures his
mind by the means that increase his genius. You think this, my Lord, a
paradox, but examine it. How many men of genius have been but ordinary
men, take them from the particular objects in which they shine. Why is
this, but that in cultivating one branch of intellect they neglect the
rest? Nay, the very torpor of the reasoning faculty has often kindled
the imaginative. Lucretius composed his sublime poem under the influence
of a delirium. The susceptibilities that we create or refine by the
pursuit of one object, weaken our general reason; and I may compare with
some justice the powers of the mind to the faculties of the body, in
which squinting is occasioned by an inequality of strength in the eyes,
and discordance of voice by the same inequality in the ears."

"I believe you are right," said the Earl; "yet I own I willingly forgive
Cicero for his vanity, if it contributed to the production of his
orations and his essays; and he is a greater man, even with his vanity
unconquered, than if he had conquered his foible, and in doing so taken
away the incitements to his genius."

"A greater man in the world's eye, my Lord, but scarc