f the beautiful in
taste. There was no envy in the breast of Johnson when he advised Mrs.
Thrale not to purchase "Gray's Letters," as trifling and dull, no more
than there was in Gray himself when he sunk the poetical character of
Shenstone, and debased his simplicity and purity of feeling by an image of
ludicrous contempt. I have heard that WILKES, a mere wit and elegant
scholar, used to treat GIBBON as a mere bookmaker; and applied to that
philosophical historian the verse by which Voltaire described, with so
much caustic facetiousness, the genius of the Abbe Trablet--

Il a compile, compile, compile.

The deficient sympathy in these men of genius for modes of feeling
opposite to their own was the real cause of their opinions; and thus it
happens that even superior genius is so often liable to be unjust and
false in its decisions.

The same principle operates still more strikingly in the remarkable
contempt of men of genius for those pursuits which require talents
distinct from their own, and a cast of mind thrown by nature into another
mould. Hence we must not be surprised at the poetical antipathies of
Selden and Locke, as well as Longuerue and Buffon. Newton called poetry
"ingenious nonsense." On the other side, poets undervalue the pursuits of
the antiquary, the naturalist, and the metaphysician, forming their
estimate by their own favourite scale of imagination. As we can only
understand in the degree we comprehend, and feel in the degree in which we
sympathize, we may be sure that in both these cases the parties will be
found altogether deficient in those qualities of genius which constitute
the excellence of the other. To this cause, rather than to the one the
friends of MICKLE ascribed to ADAM SMITH, namely, a personal dislike to
the poet, may we place the severe mortification which the unfortunate
translator of Camoens suffered from the person to whom he dedicated "The
Lusiad." The Duke of Buccleugh was the pupil of the great political
economist, and so little valued an epic poem, that his Grace had not even
the curiosity to open the leaves of the presentation copy.

A professor of polite literature condemned the study of botany, as adapted
to mediocrity of talent, and only demanding patience; but LINNAEUS showed
how a man of genius becomes a creator even in a science which seems to
depend only on order and method. It will not be a question with some
whether a man must be endowed with the energy and apti