nly formidable, and
confer that superiority which swells the heart of the lion in the desert,
where he roars without reply, and ravages without resistance." He who
could so finely discover the happy influence of this pleasing quality was
himself a stranger to it, and "the roar and the ravage" were familiar to
our lion. Men of genius frequently substitute their beautiful imagination
for spontaneous and natural sentiment. It is not therefore surprising if
we are often erroneous in the conception we form of the personal character
of a distant author. KLOPSTOCK, the votary of the muse of Zion, so
astonished and warmed the sage BODMER, that he invited the inspired bard
to his house: but his visitor shocked the grave professor, when, instead
of a poet rapt in silent meditation, a volatile youth leaped out of the
chaise, who was an enthusiast for retirement only when writing verses. An
artist, whose pictures exhibit a series of scenes of domestic tenderness,
awakening all the charities of private life, I have heard, participated in
them in no other way than on his canvas. EVELYN, who has written in favour
of active life, "loved and lived in retirement;"[A] while Sir GEORGE
MACKENZIE, who had been continually in the bustle of business, framed a
eulogium on solitude. We see in MACHIAVEL'S code of tyranny, of depravity,
and of criminal violence, a horrid picture of human nature; but this
retired philosopher was a friend to the freedom of his country; he
participated in none of the crimes he had recorded, but drew up these
systemized crimes "as an observer, not as a criminal." DRUMMOND, whose
sonnets still retain the beauty and the sweetness and the delicacy of the
most amiable imagination, was a man of a harsh irritable temper, and has
been thus characterised:--

Testie Drummond could not speak for fretting.

[Footnote A: Since this was written the correspondence of EVELYN has
appeared, by which we find that he apologised to Cowley for having
published this very treatise, which seemed to condemn that life of study
and privacy to which they were both equally attached; and confesses that
the whole must be considered as a mere sportive effusion, requesting that
Cowley would not suppose its principles formed his private opinions. Thus
LEIBNITZ, we are told, laughed at the fanciful system revealed in his
_Theodicee_, and acknowledged that he never wrote it in earnest; that a
philosopher is not always obliged to write seriously, and