exult in
themselves, but to fear themselves.

[Footnote A: I have sketched a character of PERCIVAL STOCKDALE, in
"Calamities of Authors" (pp. 218--224); it was taken _ad vivum_.]

It is hard to refuse these men of genius that _aura vitalis_, of which
they are so apt to be liberal to others. Are they not accused of the
meanest adulations? When a young writer experiences the notice of a person
of some eminence, he has expressed himself in language which transcends
that of mortality. A finer reason than reason itself inspires it. The
sensation has been expressed with all its fulness by Milton:--

The debt immense of endless gratitude.

Who ever pays an "immense debt" in small sums? Every man of genius has
left such honourable traces of his private affections; from LOCKE, whose
dedication of his great work is more adulative than could be imagined from
a temperate philosopher, to CHURCHILL, whose warm eulogiums on his friends
beautifully contrast with his satire. Even in advanced age, the man of
genius dwells on the praise he caught in his youth from veteran genius,
which, like the aloe, will flower at the end of life. When Virgil was yet
a youth, it is said that Cicero heard one of his eclogues, and exclaimed
with his accustomed warmth,

Magna spes altera Romae!

"The second hope of mighty Rome!" intending by the first either himself or
Lucretius. The words of Cicero were the secret honey on which the
imagination of Virgil fed for many a year; for in one of his latest
productions, the twelfth book of the AEneid, he applies these very words
to Ascanius. So long had the accents of Cicero's praise lingered in the
poet's ear!

This extreme susceptibility of praise in men of genius is the same
exuberant sensibility which is so alive to censure. I have elsewhere fully
shown how some have died of criticism.[A] The self-love of genius is
perhaps much more delicate than gross.

But this fatal susceptibility is the cause of that strange facility which
has often astonished the world, by the sudden transitions of sentiment
which literary characters have frequently exhibited. They have eulogised
men and events which they had reprobated, and reprobated what they had
eulogised. The recent history of political revolutions has furnished some
monstrous examples of this subservience to power. Guicciardini records one
of his own times, which has been often repeated in ours. JOVIANUS
PONTANUS, the secretary of Ferdinand, King of Na