earning to be applied to means," DE PERRON refused
the offer of thirty thousand livres for his copy of the "Zend-avesta."
Writing to some Bramins, he describes his life at Paris to be much like
their own. "I subsist on the produce of my literary labours without
revenue, establishment, or place. I have no wife nor children; alone,
absolutely free, but always the friend of men of probity. In a perpetual
war with my senses, I triumph over the attractions of the world or I
contemn them."

This ascetic existence is not singular. PARINI, a great modern poet of
Italy, whom the Milanese point out to strangers as the glory of their
city, lived in the same state of unrepining poverty. Mr. Hobhouse has
given us this self-portrait of the poet:--

Me, non nato a percotere
Le dure illustri porte,
Nudo accorra, ma libero
Il regno della morte.

Naked, but free! A life of hard deprivations was long that of the
illustrious LINNAEUS. Without fortune, to that great mind it never seemed
necessary to acquire any. Perigrinating on foot with a stylus, a
magnifying-glass, and a basket for plants, he shared the rustic meal of
the peasant. Never was glory obtained at a cheaper rate! exclaims one of
his eulogists. Satisfied with the least of the little, he only felt one
perpetual want--that of completing his Flors. Not that LINNAEUS was
insensible to his situation, for he gave his name to a little flower in
Lapland--the _Linnaea Borealis,_ from the fanciful analogy he discovered
between its character and his own early fate, "a little northern plant
flowering early, depressed, abject, and long overlooked." The want of
fortune, however, did not deprive this man of genius of his true glory,
nor of that statue raised to him in the gardens of the University of
Upsal, nor of that solemn eulogy delivered by a crowned head, nor of those
medals which his nation struck to commemorate the genius of the three
kingdoms of nature!

This, then, is the race who have often smiled at the light regard of their
good neighbours when contrasted with their own celebrity; for in poverty
and in solitude such men are not separated from their fame; that is ever
proceeding, ever raising a secret, but constant, triumph in their
minds.[A]

Yes! Genius, undegraded and unexhausted, may indeed even in a garret glow
in its career; but it must be on the principle which induced ROUSSEAU
solemnly to renounce writing "_par metier_." This in the _Journal de
Scavans_ he