the dead," he says, in his Gray Cap for a Green Head, "So fold up your discourse that their virtues may be outwardly shown, while their vices are wrapped up in silence."

X

I have no doubt that the Fourierites honestly fancy "a nasty poet fit for nothing" to be the true translation of "poeta nascitur non fit.”

XI

There surely cannot be "more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of" (oh, Andrew Jackson Davis!)" in your philosophy."

XII

"It is only as the bird of paradise quits us in taking wing," observes, or should observe, some poet, "that we obtain a full view of the beauty of its plumage "; and it is only as the politician is about being "turned out that, like the snake of the Irish Chronicle when touched by St. Patrick, he " awakens to a sense of his situation."

XIII

Newspaper editors seem to have constitutions closely similar to those of the deities in Valhalla, who cut each other to pieces every day, and yet get up perfectly sound and fresh every morning.

XIV

As far as I can comprehend the modern cant in favor of "unadulterated Saxon," it is fast leading us to the language of that region where, as Addison has it, "they sell the best fish and speak the plainest English."

XV

The frightfully long money-pouches, "like the cucumber called the Gigantic," which have come in vogue among our belles, are not of Parisian origin, as many suppose, but are strictly indigenous here. The fact is, such a fashion would be quite out of place in Paris, where it is money only that women keep in a purse. The purse of an American lady, however, must be large enough to carry both her money and the soul of its owner.

XVI

I can see no objection to gentlemen "standing for Congress," provided they stand on one side; nor to their "running for Congress," if they are in a very great hurry to get there; but it would be a blessing if some of them could be persuaded into sitting still, for Congress, after they arrive.

XVII

If envy, as Cyprian has it, be "the moth of the soul," whether shall we regard content as its Scotch snuff or its camphor ?

XVIII

M-, having been " used up " in the

Review,

goes about town lauding his critic, as an epicure lauds the best London mustard-with the tears in his eyes.

XIX

"Con tal que las costumbres de un autor sean puras y castas," says the Catholic Don Tomas de las Torres, in the preface to his Amatory Poems, "importo muy poco qui no sean igualmente severas sus obras," meaning, in plain English, that, provided the personal morals of an author are pure, it matters little what those of his books are.

For so unprincipled an idea, Don Tomas, no doubt, is still having a hard time of it in Purgatory; and, by way of most pointedly manifesting their disgust at his philosophy on the topic in question, many modern theologians and divines are now busily squaring their conduct by his proposition exactly conversed.

Children are never too tender to be whipped; like tough beef-steaks, the more you beat them the more tender they become.

XXI

Lucian, in describing the statue "with its surface of Parian marble and its interior filled with rags," must

have been looking with a prophetic eye at some of our great" moneyed institutions.”

XXII

That poets (using the word comprehensively, as including artists in general) are a genus irritabile is well understood; but the why seems not to be commonly

seen.

An artist is an artist only by dint of his exquisite sense of beauty-a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying, or involving, an equally exquisite sense of deformity of disproportion. Thus a wrong, an injustice, done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets see injustice, never where it does not exist, but very often where the unpoetical see no injustice whatever. Thus the poetical irritability has no reference to" temper" in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness in respect to wrong; this clear-sightedness being nothing more than a corollary from the vivid perception of right, of justice, of proportion-in a word, of rò naλóv. But one thing is clear, that the man who is not "irritable " (to the ordinary apprehension) is no poet.

XXIII

Let a man succeed ever so evidently, ever so demonstrably, in many different displays of genius, the envy

of criticism will agree with the popular voice in denying him more than talent in any. Thus a poet who has achieved a great (by which I mean an effective) poem, should be cautious not to distinguish himself in any other walk of letters. In especial, let him make no effort in science, unless anonymously or with the view of waiting patiently the judgment of posterity. Because universal or even versatile geniuses have rarely or never been known, therefore, thinks the world, none such can ever be. A "therefore" of this kind is, with the world, conclusive. But what is the fact, as taught us by analysis of mental power? Simply that the highest genius-that the genius which all men instantaneously acknowledge as such, which acts upon individuals as well as upon the mass, by a species of magnetism incomprehensible but irresistible and never resisted,-that this genius which demonstrates itself in the simplest gesture, or even by the absence of all; this genius which speaks without a voice and flashes from the unopened eye, is but the result of generally large mental power existing in a state of absolute proportion, so that no one faculty has undue predominance. That factitious" genius," that" genius " in the popular sense which is but the manifestation of the abnormal predominance of some one faculty over all the others, and, of course, at the expense and to the detriment of all the others, is a result of mental disease or, rather, of organic malformation of mind;