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delight of their own times, and the wonder of posterity. There appears something nobly wild and extravagant in these great na tural geniuses, that is infinitely more beautiful than all the turn and polishing of what the French call a Bel Esprit, by which they would express a genius refined by conversation, reflection, and the reading of the most polite authors. The greatest genius which runs through the arts and sciences, takes a kind of tincture from them, and falls unavoidably into imitation.

Many of these great natural geniuses that were never disciplined and broken by rules of art, are to be found among the ancients, and, in particular, among those of the more eastern parts of the world. Homer has innumerable flights that Virgil was not able to reach; and in the Old Testament we find several passages more elevated and sublime than any in Homer. At the same time that we allow a greater and more daring genius to the ancients, we must own that the greatest of them very much failed in, or, if you will, that they were much above, the nicety and correctness of the moderns. In their similitudes and allusions, provided there was a likeness, they did not much trouble themselves about the decency' of the comparison: thus Solomon resembles* the nose of his beloved to the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus; as the coming of a thief in the night, is a similitude of the same kind in the New Testament. It would be endless to make collections of this nature: Homer illustrates one of his heroes encompassed with the enemy, by an ass in a field of corn, that has his sides belaboured by all the boys of the village without stirring a foot for it; and another of them tossing to and fro in his bed, and burning with resentment, to a piece of flesh broiled on the coals. This particular failure in the ancients, opens

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In short, a modern pindaric writer compared with Pindar, is like a sister among the Camisars' compared with Virgil's Sibyl: there is the distortion, grimace, and outward figure, but nothing of that divine impulse which raises the mind above itself, and makes the sounds more than human.

There is another kind of great geniuses which I shall place in a second class, not as I think them inferior to the first, but only for distinction's sake, as they are of a different kind. This second class of great geniuses are those that have formed themselves by rules, and submitted the greatness of their natural talents to the corrections and restraints of art. Such among the Greeks were Plato and Aristotle; among the Romans, Virgil and Tully; among the English, Milton and Sir Francis Bacon.

The genius in both these classes of authors may be equally great, but shows itself after a different manner. In the first it is like a rich soil in a happy climate, that produces a whole wilderness of noble plants, rising in a thousand beautiful landscapes, without any certain order or regularity. In the other it is the same rich soil under the same happy climate, that has been laid out in walks and parterres, and cut into shape and beauty by the skill of the gardener.

The great danger in these latter kind of geniuses, is, lest they

'Or 'French prophets,' from the Cevennes in France, who came to London in 1707, and attracted attention by their extravagance. They worked themselves into strange agitations and convulsions of body, would be seized with violent throbs, hiccoughs, or throw themselves into the most violent distortions, imagining the wild ravings they then uttered were the dictates of the Holy Spirit! They dealt in miracles and prophecy: and though publicly prosecuted and punished, found for a time proselytes and supporters. V. For their origin, Voltaire Siècle de Louis XIV., ch. 36; and for their appearance in England, Smollet ad. ann., and Chesterfield's Works, 4to, v. i; p. 523.-G.

Not as I think, &c. It should have been "not that I think," or "not as being inferior," or "not as thinking them," &c.-II.