hich they might feed themselves day after
day in their own Louvre. They must all be historical; and they are,
almost to a man, attitudinizers. If we wished to give any young
artist the most impressive warning our imagination could devise
against that kind of vice in the pictorial, which corresponds to rant
in the histrionic art, we would advise him to walk once up and once
down the gallery of the Luxembourg. Every figure in French painting or
statuary seems to be showing itself off before spectators; they are
not poetical, but in the worst style of corrupted eloquence.

II

_Nascitur Poeta_ is a maxim of classical antiquity, which has passed
to these latter days with less questioning than most of the doctrines
of that early age. When it originated, the human faculties were
occupied, fortunately for posterity, less in examining how the works
of genius are created, than in creating them: and the adage, probably,
had no higher source than the tendency common among mankind to
consider all power which is not visibly the effect of practice, all
skill which is not capable of being reduced to mechanical rules, as
the result of a peculiar gift. Yet this aphorism, born in the infancy
of psychology, will perhaps be found, now when that science is in its
adolescence, to be as true as an epigram ever is, that is, to contain
some truth: truth, however, which has been so compressed and bent out
of shape, in order to tie it up into so small a knot of only two words
that it requires an almost infinite amount of unrolling and laying
straight, before it will resume its just proportions.

We are not now intending to remark upon the grosser misapplications of
this ancient maxim, which have engendered so many races of
poetasters. The days are gone by when every raw youth whose borrowed
phantasies have set themselves to a borrowed tune, mistaking, as
Coleridge says, an ardent desire of poetic reputation for poetic
genius, while unable to disguise from himself that he had taken no
means whereby he might _become_ a poet, could fancy himself a born
one. Those who would reap without sowing, and gain the victory without
fighting the battle, are ambitious now of another sort of distinction,
and are born novelists, or public speakers, not poets. And the wiser
thinkers understand and acknowledge that poetic excellence is subject
to the same necessary conditions with any other mental endowment; and
that to no one of the spiritual benefactors of m