ated genius, and Louis XIV. protected it, the impulse
has been communicated to the French people. There the statues of their
illustrious men spread inspiration on the spots which living they would
have haunted:--in their theatres, the great dramatists; in their Institute
their illustrious authors; in their public edifices, congenial men of
genius.[B] This is worthy of the country which privileged the family of LA
FONTAINE to be for ever exempt from taxes, and decreed that "the
productions of the mind were not seizable," when the creditors of
CREBILLON would have attached the produce of his tragedies.

[Footnote A: Lope de Vega.]

[Footnote B: We cannot bury the fame of our English worthies--that exists
before us, independent of ourselves; but we bury the influence of their
inspiring presence in those immortal memorials of genius easy to be read
by all men--their statues and their busts, consigning them to spots seldom
visited, and often too obscure to be viewed. [We have recent evidence of a
more noble acknowledgment of our great men. The statue of Dr. Jenner is
placed in Trafalgar Square; and Grantham has now a noble work to
commemorate its great townsman, Sir Isaac Newton.]]

These distinctive honours accorded to genius were in unison with their
decree respecting the will of BAYLE. It was the subject of a lawsuit
between the heir of the will and the inheritor by blood. The latter
contested that this great literary character, being a fugitive for
religion, and dying in a proscribed country, was divested by law of the
power to dispose of his property, and that our author, when resident in
Holland, in a civil sense was dead. In the Parliament of Toulouse the
judge decided that learned men are free in all countries: that he who had
sought in a foreign land an asylum from his love of letters, was no
fugitive; that it was unworthy of France to treat as a stranger a son in
whom she gloried, and he protested against the notion of a civil death to
such a man as Bayle, whose name was living throughout Europe. This
judicial decision in France was in unison with that of the senate of
Rotterdam, who declared of the emigrant BAYLE, that "such a man should not
be considered as a foreigner."

Even the most common objects are consecrated when associated with the
memory of the man of genius. We still seek for his tomb on the spot where
it has vanished. The enthusiasts of genius still wander on the hills of
Pausilippo, and muse on VI