Let us no longer look upon this retired and peculiar class as
useless members of our busy race. There are mental as well as material
labourers. The first are not less necessary; and as they are much rarer,
so are they more precious. These are they whose "published labours" have
benefited mankind--these are they whose thoughts can alone rear that
beautiful fabric of social life, which it is the object of all good men to
elevate or to support. To discover truth and to maintain it,--to develope
the powers, to regulate the passions, to ascertain the privileges of man,
--such have ever been, and such ever ought to be, the labours of AUTHORS!
Whatever we enjoy of political and private happiness, our most necessary
knowledge as well as our most refined pleasures, are alike owing to this
class of men; and of these, some for glory, and often from benevolence,
have shut themselves out from the very beings whom they love, and for whom
they labour.

Upwards of forty years have elapsed since, composed in a distant county,
and printed at a provincial press, I published "An Essay on the Manners
and Genius of the Literary Character." To my own habitual and inherent
defects were superadded those of my youth. The crude production was,
however, not ill received, for the edition disappeared, and the subject
was found more interesting than the writer.

During a long interval of twenty years, this little work was often
recalled to my recollection by several, and by some who have since
obtained celebrity. They imagined that their attachment to literary
pursuits had been strengthened even by so weak an effort. An extraordinary
circumstance concurred with these opinions. A copy accidentally fell into
my hands which had formerly belonged to the great poetical genius of our
times; and the singular fact, that it had been more than once read by him,
and twice in two subsequent years at Athens, in 1810 and 1811, instantly
convinced me that the volume deserved my renewed attention.

It was with these feelings that I was again strongly attracted to a
subject from which, indeed, during the course of a studious life, it
had never been long diverted. The consequence of my labours was the
publication, in 1818, of an octavo volume, under the title of "The
Literary Character, illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, drawn
from their own feelings and confessions."

In the preface to this edition, in mentioning the fact respecting Lord
Byron, which had