een converted into buttons for
Isaac Hawkins Browne, there is no saying what such fiery things may be
brought to at last."]

[Footnote 52: Of the lamentable contrast between sentiments and conduct,
which this transfer of the seat of sensibility from the heart to the
fancy produces, the annals of literary men afford unluckily too many
examples. Alfieri, though he could write a sonnet full of tenderness to
his mother, never saw her (says Mr. W. Rose) but once after their early
separation, though he frequently passed within a few miles of her
residence. The poet Young, with all his parade of domestic sorrows, was,
it appears, a neglectful husband and harsh father; and Sterne (to use
the words employed by Lord Byron) preferred "whining over a dead ass to
relieving a living mother."]

[Footnote 53: It is the opinion of Diderot, in his Treatise on Acting,
that not only in the art of which he treats, but in all those which are
called imitative, the possession of real sensibility is a bar to
eminence;--sensibility being, according to his view, "le caractere de la
bonte de l'ame et de la mediocrite du genie."]

[Footnote 54: Pope.]

[Footnote 55: See Foscolo's Essay on Petrarch. On the same principle,
Orrery says, in speaking of Swift, "I am persuaded that his distance
from his English friends proved a strong incitement to their mutual
affection."]

[Footnote 56: That he was himself fully aware of this appears from a
passage in one of his letters already given:--"My sister is in town,
which is a great comfort; for, never having been much together, we are
naturally more attached to each other."]

[Footnote 57: Wife and children, Bacon tells us in one of his Essays,
are "impediments to great enterprises;" and adds, "Certainly, the best
works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the
unmarried or childless men." See, with reference to this subject,
chapter xviii. of Mr. D'Israeli's work on "The Literary Character."]

[Footnote 58: Milton's first wife, it is well known, ran away from him,
within a month after their marriage, disgusted, says Phillips, "with his
spare diet and hard study;" and it is difficult to conceive a more
melancholy picture of domestic life than is disclosed in his nuncupative
will, one of the witnesses to which deposes to having heard the great
poet himself complain, that his children "were careless of him, being
blind, and made nothing of deserting him."]

[Footnote 59: By whatev