ome particular contribution to human
society. Environment is not ignored by the man who wrote "Of
Genius," for he insists that each man's bent may be greatly
developed by favorable circumstances and proper education, and,
conversely, that it may be entirely frustrated by unpropitious
circumstances or wilful neglect. But in no way can a man's inborn
talent for one thing be converted to a talent for anything else.

In the works of many Augustan writers, too, it is easy to see how
the enthusiasm for individualism, later to become one of the
hallmarks of romanticism, actually sprang from an earlier faith
in a God-directed universe of law and order. There is a kind of
universal law of supply and demand, and the argument is simply
that each link in the human chain, like those in the animate and
inanimate worlds above and below it, is predestined to a specific
function for the better ordering of the whole. Lewis Maidwell,
for instance, still employs the medieval and Renaissance analogy
of the correspondence between the human body and the social
organism (_An Essay upon the Necessity and Excellency of
Education_):

Upon Consideration we find this Difference of Tempers to
arise from Providence, and the Law of the Creation, and to
be most Evident in al Irrational, and Inanimat Beings ... One
Man is no more design'd for Al Arts, than Al Arts for
One Man. We are born Confaederats, mutually to help One
another, therefor appropriated in the Body Politic, to
this, or that Busyness, as our Members are in the Natural
to perform their separat Offices.

This same comparison between the body politic and the body human
occurs in the essay of 1719, and even the author's chief analogy
drawn from musical harmony bears with it some of the flavor of an
older system of universal correspondences. His comparison of the
force of genius to the pull of gravity, however, evokes a newer
picture. Yet it is a picture no less orderly and one from which
the preordained function of each individual could be just as
logically derived. And his rhapsodic praise of the infinite
diversity of human temperaments is based on that favorite
comparison with natural scenery and that familiar canon of
neoclassical esthetics: ordered variety within unity, whether it
be in nature or in art.

The author of the pamphlet of 1719 introduces another refinement
on the idea of an inborn bent or genius. A man is born not only
with a peculiar