Phillips.]

No event in literary history is more impressive than the fate of
QUINTILIAN; it was in the midst of his elaborate work, which was composed
to form the literary character of a son, that he experienced the most
terrible affliction in the domestic life of genius--the successive deaths
of his wife and his only child. It was a moral earthquake with a single
survivor amidst the ruins. An awful burst of parental and literary
affliction breaks forth in Quintilian's lamentation,--"My wealth, and my
writings, the fruits of a long and painful life, must now be reserved only
for strangers; all I possess is for aliens, and no longer mine!" We feel
the united agony of the husband, the father, and the man of genius!

Deprived of these social consolations, we see JOHNSON call about him those
whose calamities exiled them from society, and his roof lodges the blind,
the lame, and the poor; for the heart must possess something it can call
its own, to be kind to.

In domestic life, the Abbe DE ST. PIERRE enlarged its moral vocabulary, by
fixing in his language two significant words. One served to explain the
virtue most familiar to him--_bienfaisance_; and that irritable vanity
which magnifies its ephemeral fame, the sage reduced to a mortifying
diminutive--_la gloriole!_

It has often excited surprise that men of genius are not more reverenced
than other men in their domestic circle. The disparity between the public
and the private esteem of the same man is often striking. In privacy we
discover that the comic genius is not always cheerful, that the sage is
sometimes ridiculous, and the poet seldom delightful. The golden hour of
invention must terminate like other hours, and when the man of genius
returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of
life, his companions behold him as one of themselves--the creature of
habits and infirmities.

In the business of life, the cultivators of science and the arts, with all
their simplicity of feeling and generous openness about them, do not meet
on equal terms with other men. Their frequent abstractions calling off the
mind to whatever enters into its lonely pursuits, render them greatly
inferior to others in practical and immediate observation. Studious men
have been reproached as being so deficient in the knowledge of the human
character, that they are usually disqualified for the management of public
business. Their confidence in their friends has no bound,