ider that the rule of observing what
the French call the _bienseance_ in an allusion has been found out of
later years, and in the colder regions of the world, where we could make
some amends for our want of force and spirit by a scrupulous nicety and
exactness in our compositions. Our countryman Shakespeare was a
remarkable instance of this first kind of great geniuses.

I cannot quit this head without observing that Pindar was a great genius
of the first class, who was hurried on by a natural fire and impetuosity
to vast conceptions of things and noble sallies of imagination. At the
same time can anything be more ridiculous than for men of a sober and
moderate fancy to imitate this poet's way of writing in those monstrous
compositions which go among us under the name of Pindarics? When I see
people copying works which, as Horace has represented them, are singular
in their kind, and inimitable; when I see men following irregularities by
rule, and by the little tricks of art straining after the most unbounded
flights of nature, I cannot but apply to them that passage in Terence:

--_Incerta haec si tu postules_
_Ratione certa facere_, _nihilo plus agas_
_Quam si des operam_, _ut cum ratione insanias_.

_Eun._, Act I., Sc. 1, I. 16.

You may as well pretend to be mad and in your senses at the same time, as
to think of reducing these uncertain things to any certainty by reason.

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