he Enemy of the Beard," where, amidst irony and invective,
the literary monarch bestows on himself many exquisite and characteristic
touches. All that the persons of fashion alleged against the literary
character, Julian unreservedly confesses--his undressed beard and
awkwardness, his obstinacy, his unsociable habits, his deficient tastes,
while at the same time he represents his good qualities as so many
extravagances. But, in this Cervantic pleasantry of self-reprehension, the
imperial philosopher has not failed to show this light and corrupt people
that the reason he could not possibly resemble them, existed in the
unhappy circumstance of having been subject to too strict an education
under a family tutor, who had never suffered him to swerve from the one
right way, and who (additional misfortune!) had inspired him with such a
silly reverence for Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus, that
he had been induced to make them his models. "Whatever manners," says the
emperor, "I may have previously contracted, whether gentle or boorish, it
is impossible for me now to alter or unlearn. Habit is said to be a second
nature; to oppose it is irksome, but to counteract _the study of more than
thirty years_ is extremely difficult, especially when it has been imbibed
with so much attention."

And what if men of genius, relinquishing their habits, could do this
violence to their nature, should we not lose the original for a factitious
genius, and spoil one race without improving the other? If nature and
habit, that second nature which prevails even over the first, have created
two beings distinctly different, what mode of existence shall ever
assimilate them? Antipathies and sympathies, those still occult causes,
however concealed, will break forth at an unguarded moment. Clip the wings
of an eagle that he may roost among domestic fowls,--at some unforeseen
moment his pinions will overshadow and terrify his tiny associates, for
"the feathered king" will be still musing on the rock and the cloud.

The man of genius will be restive even in his trammelled paces. Too
impatient amidst the heartless courtesies of society, and little practised
in the minuter attentions, he has rarely sacrificed to the unlaughing
graces of Lord Chesterfield. Plato ingeniously compares Socrates to the
gallipots of the Athenian apothecaries; the grotesque figures of owls and
apes were painted on their exterior, but they contained within precious
ba