his ashes restored to them. Even the
reasoning HUME once proposed to change his name and his country; and I
believe did. The great poetical genius of our own times has openly
alienated himself from the land of his brothers. He becomes immortal in
the language of a people whom he would contemn.[A] Does he accept with
ingratitude the fame he loves more than life?

[Footnote A: I shall preserve a manuscript note of Lord BYRON on this
passage; not without a hope that we shall never receive from him the
genius of Italian poetry, otherwise than in the language of his "_father
land_"; an expressive term, which I adopted from the Dutch language some
years past, and which I have seen since sanctioned by the pens of Lord
Byron and of Mr. Southey.

His lordship has here observed, "It is not my fault that I am obliged to
write in English. If I understood my present language equally well, I
would write in it; but this will require ten years at least to form a
style: no tongue so easy to acquire a little of, or so difficult to master
thoroughly, as Italian." On the same page I find the following note: "What
was rumoured of me in that language? If true, I was unfit for England: if
false, England was unfit for me:--'There is a world elsewhere.' I have
never regretted for a moment that country, but often that I ever returned
to it at all."]

Such, then, is that state of irritability in which men of genius
participate, whether they be inventors, men of learning, fine writers, or
artists. It is a state not friendly to equality of temper. In the various
humours incidental to it, when they are often deeply affected, the cause
escapes all perception of sympathy. The intellectual malady eludes even
the tenderness of friendship. At those moments, the lightest injury to the
feelings, which at another time would make no impression, may produce a
perturbed state of feeling in the warm temper, or the corroding chagrin of
a self-wounded spirit. These are moments which claim the encouragements of
a friendship animated by a high esteem for the intellectual excellence of
the man of genius; not the general intercourse of society; not the
insensibility of the dull, nor the levity of the volatile.

Men of genius are often reverenced only where they are known by their
writings--intellectual beings in the romance of life; in its history, they
are men! ERASMUS compared them to the great figures in tapestry-work,
which lose their effect when not seen at