life, and all that lives
has no love for old age: when his ear has ceased to listen, and nature has
locked up the man within himself, he may still expire amidst his busied
thoughts. Such aged votaries, like the old bees, have been found dying in
their honeycombs. Let them preserve but the flame alive on the altar, and
at the last momenta they may be found in the act of sacrifice! The
venerable BEDE, the instructor of his generation, and the historian for so
many successive ones, expired in the act of dictating. Such was the fate
of PETRARCH, who, not long before his death, had written to a friend, "I
read, I write, I think; such is my life, and my pleasures as they were in
my youth." Petrarch was found lying on a folio in his library, from which
volume he had been busied making extracts for the biography of his
countrymen. His domestics having often observed him studying in that
reclining posture for days together, it was long before they discovered
that the poet was no more. The fate of LEIBNITZ was similar: he was found
dead with the "Argenis" of Barclay in his hand; he had been studying the
style of that political romance as a model for his intended history of the
House of Brunswick. The literary death of BARTHELEMY affords a remarkable
proof of the force of uninterrupted habits of study. He had been slightly
looking over the newspaper, when suddenly he called for a Horace, opened
the volume, and found the passage, on which he paused for a moment; and
then, too feeble to speak, made a sign to bring him Dacier's; but his
hands were already cold, the Horace fell--and the classical and dying man
of letters sunk into a fainting fit, from which he never recovered. Such,
too, was the fate--perhaps now told for the first time--of the great Lord
CLARENDON. It was in the midst of composition that his pen suddenly
dropped from his hand on the paper, he took it up again, and again it
dropped: deprived of the sense of touch--his hand without motion--the earl
perceived himself struck by palsy--and the life of the noble exile closed
amidst the warmth of a literary work unfinished!

CHAPTER XXIII.

Universality of genius.--Limited notion of genius entertained by the
ancients.--Opposite faculties act with diminished force.--Men of genius
excel only in a single art.

The ancients addicted themselves to one species of composition; the tragic
poet appears not to have entered into the province of comedy, nor, as far
as we kno