d to
us no wit; this man of genius, who has formed no work of genius; this
bold advocate for popular freedom, who sunk his patriotism in the
chamberlainship; was indeed desirous of leaving behind him some trace of
the life of an _escroc_ in a piece of autobiography, which, for the
benefit of the world, has been thrown to the flames.

Men who have ascended into office through its gradations, or have been
thrown upwards by accident, are apt to view others in a cloud of passions
and politics. They who once commanded us by their eloquence, come at
length to suspect the eloquent; and in their "pride of office" would now
drive us by that single force of despotism which is the corruption of
political power. Our late great Minister, Pitt, has been reproached even
by his friends for the contemptuous indifference with which he treated
literary men. Perhaps BURKE himself, long a literary character, might
incur some portion of this censure, by involving the character itself in
the odium of a monstrous political sect. These political characters
resemble Adrian VI., who, obtaining the tiara as the reward of his
studies, afterwards persecuted literary men, and, say the Italians,
dreaded lest his brothers might shake the Pontificate itself.[A]

Worst fares it with authors when minds of this cast become the arbiters of
public opinion; for the greatest of writers may unquestionably be forced
into ridiculous attitudes by the well-known artifices practised by modern
criticism. The elephant, no longer in his forest struggling with his
hunters, but falling entrapped by a paltry snare, comes at length, in the
height of ill-fortune, to dance on heated iron at the bidding of the
pantaloon of a fair. Whatever such critics may plead to mortify the
vanity of authors, at least it requires as much vanity to give effect to
their own polished effrontery.[B] Scorn, sarcasm, and invective, the
egotism of the vain, and the irascibility of the petulant, where they
succeed in debilitating genius of the consciousness of its powers, are
practising the witchery of that ancient superstition of "tying the knot,"
which threw the youthful bridegroom into utter despair by its ideal
forcefulness.[C]

[Footnote A: It has been suspected that Adrian VI. has been calumniated,
for that this pontiff was only too sudden to begin the reform he
meditated. But Adrian VI. was a scholastic whose austerity turned away
with contempt from all ancient art, and was no brother to