ut inimitable.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Literature an avenue to glory.--An intellectual nobility not chimerical,
but created by public opinion.--Literary honours of various nations.--
Local associations with the memory of the man of genius.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who
are deprived of honours or of wealth. Like that illustrious Roman who owed
nothing to his ancestors, _videtur ex se natus_, these seem self-born; and
in the baptism of fame, they have given themselves their name. Bruyere has
finely said of men of genius, "These men have neither ancestors nor
posterity; they alone compose their whole race."

But AKENSIDE, we have seen, blushed when his lameness reminded him of the
fall of one of his father's cleavers; PRIOR, the son of a vintner, could
not endure to be reminded, though by his favourite Horace, that "the cask
retains its flavour;" like VOITURE, another descendant of a _marchand de
vin_, whose heart sickened over that which exhilarates all other hearts,
whenever his opinion of its _quality_ was maliciously consulted. All these
instances too evidently prove that genius is subject to the most vulgar
infirmities.

But some have thought more courageously. The amiable ROLLIN was the son of
a cutler, but the historian of nations never felt his dignity compromised
by his birth. Even late in life, he ingeniously alluded to his first
occupation, for we find an epigram of his in sending a knife for a
new-year's gift, "informing his friend, that should this present appear to
come rather from Vulcan than from Minerva, it should not surprise, for,"
adds the epigrammatist, "it was from the cavern of the Cyclops I began to
direct my footsteps towards Parnassus." The great political negotiator,
Cardinal D'OSSAT, was elevated by his genius from an orphan state of
indigence, and was alike destitute of ancestry, of titles, even of
parents. On the day of his creation, when others of noble extraction
assumed new titles from the seignorial names of their ancient houses, he
was at a loss to fix on one. Having asked the Pope whether he should
choose that of his bishopric, his holiness requested him to preserve his
plain family name, which he had rendered famous by his own genius. The
sons of a sword-maker, a potter, and a tax-gatherer, were the greatest of
the orators, the most majestic of the poets, and the most graceful of the
satirists of antiquity; Demosthenes, Virgil, and Horace.