his merits. Do what he can, he cannot help being an
original-minded man. His poetry is not servile. While the cuckoo returns
in the spring, while the daisy looks bright in the sun, while the
rainbow lifts its head above the storm--

Yet I'll remember thee, Glencairn,
And all that thou hast done for me!

Sir Joshua Reynolds, in endeavouring to show that there is no such thing
as proper originality, a spirit emanating from the mind of the artist
and shining through his works, has traced Raphael through a number of
figures which he has borrowed from Masaccio and others. This is a bad
calculation. If Raphael had only borrowed those figures from others,
would he, even in Sir Joshua's sense, have been entitled to the praise
of originality? Plagiarism, in so far as it is plagiarism, is not
originality. Salvator is considered by many as a great genius. He is
what they call an irregular genius. My notion of genius is not exactly
the same as theirs. It has also been made a question; whether there is
not more genius in Rembrandt's Three Trees than in all Claude Lorraine's
landscapes. I do not know how that may be; but it was enough for Claude
to have been a perfect landscape-painter.

Capacity is not the same thing as genius. Capacity may be described to
relate to the quantity of knowledge, however acquired; genius, to its
quality and the mode of acquiring it. Capacity is power over given ideas
combinations of ideas; genius is the power over those which are not
given, and for which no obvious or precise rule can be laid down. Or
capacity is power of any sort; genius is power of a different sort from
what has yet been shown. A retentive memory, a clear understanding, is
capacity, but it is not genius. The admirable Crichton was a person of
prodigious capacity; but there is no proof (that I know) that he had an
atom of genius. His verses that remain are dull and sterile. He could
learn all that was known of any subject; he could do anything if others
could show him the way to do it. This was very wonderful; but that
is all you can say of it. It requires a good capacity to play well at
chess; but, after all, it is a game of skill, and not of genius. Know
what you will of it, the understanding still moves in certain tracks in
which others have trod it before, quicker or slower, with more or less
comprehension and presence of mind. The greatest skill strikes out
nothing for itself, from its own peculiar resources; the nature of th