w, were their historians writers of verse. Their artists worked
on the same principle; and from Pliny's account of the ancient sculptors,
we may infer that with them the true glory of genius consisted in carrying
to perfection a single species of their art. They did not exercise
themselves indifferently on all subjects, but cultivated the favourite
ones which they had chosen from the impulse of their own imagination. The
hand which could copy nature in a human form, with the characteristics of
the age and the sex, and the occupations of life, refrained from
attempting the colossal and ideal majesty of a divinity; and when one of
these sculptors, whose skill was pre-eminent in casting animals, had
exquisitely wrought the glowing coursers for a triumphal car, he requested
the aid of Praxiteles to place the driver in the chariot, that his work
might not be disgraced by a human form of inferior beauty to his animals.
Alluding to the devotion of an ancient sculptor to his labours, Madame de
Stael has finely said, "The history of his life was the history of his
statue."

Such was the limited conception which the ancients formed of genius. They
confined it to particular objects or departments in art. But there is a
tendency among men of genius to ascribe a universality of power to a
master-intellect. Dryden imagined that Virgil could have written satire
equally with Juvenal, and some have hardily defined genius as "a power to
accomplish all that we undertake." But literary history will detect this
fallacy, and the failures of so many eminent men are instructions from
Nature which must not be lost on us.

No man of genius put forth more expansive promises of universal power than
LEIBNITZ. Science, imagination, history, criticism, fertilized the richest
of human soils; yet LEIBNITZ, with immense powers and perpetual knowledge,
dissipated them in the multiplicity of his pursuits. "The first of
philosophers," the late Professor Playfair observed, "has left nothing in
the immense tract of his intellect which can be distinguished as a
monument of his genius." As a universalist, VOLTAIRE remains unparalleled
in ancient or in modern times. This voluminous idol of our neighbours
stands without a rival in literature; but an exception, even if this were
one, cannot overturn a fundamental principle, for we draw our conclusions
not from the fortune of one man of genius, but from the fate of many. The
real claims of this great writer to inv