The eloquent
Massillon, the brilliant Flechier, Rousseau, and Diderot; Johnson,
Goldsmith, and Franklin, arose amidst the most humble avocations.

Vespasian raised a statue to the historian JOSEPHUS, though a Jew; and the
Athenians one to AEsop, though a slave. Even among great military republics
the road to public honour was open, not alone to heroes and patricians,
but to that solitary genius which derives from itself all which it gives
to the public, and nothing from its birth or the public situation it
occupies.

It is the prerogative of genius to elevate obscure men to the higher class
of society. If the influence of wealth in the present day has created a
new aristocracy of its own, where they already begin to be jealous of
their ranks, we may assert that genius creates a sort of intellectual
nobility, which is now conferred by public feeling; as heretofore the
surnames of "the African," and of "Coriolanus," won by valour, associated
with the names of the conqueror of Africa and the vanquisher of Corioli.
Were men of genius, as such, to have armorial bearings they might consist,
not of imaginary things, of griffins and chimeras, but of deeds performed
and of public works in existence. When DONDI raised the great astronomical
clock at the University of Padua, which was long the admiration of Europe,
it gave a name and nobility to its maker and all his descendants. There
still lives a Marquis Dondi dal' Horologio. Sir HUGH MIDDLETON, in memory
of his vast enterprise, changed his former arms to bear three piles, to
perpetuate the interesting circumstance, that by these instruments he had
strengthened the works he had invented, when his genius poured forth the
waters through our metropolis, thereby distinguishing it from all
others in the world. Should not EVELYN have inserted an oak-tree in his
bearings? for his "Sylva" occasioned the plantation of "many millions of
timber-trees," and the present navy of Great Britain has been constructed
with the oaks which the genius of Evelyn planted. There was an eminent
Italian musician, who had a piece of music inscribed on his tomb; and I
have heard of a Dutch mathematician, who had a calculation for his
epitaph.

We who were reproached for a coldness in our national character, have
caught the inspiration and enthusiasm for the works and the celebrity of
genius; the symptoms indeed were long dubious. REYNOLDS wished to have one
of his own pictures, "Contemplation in the figu