rious facts in the history of genius.

The distinct literary tastes of different nations, and the repugnance they
mutually betray for the master-writers of each other, is an important
circumstance to the philosophical observer. These national tastes
originate in modes of feeling, in customs, in idioms, and all the numerous
associations prevalent among every people. The reciprocal influence of
manners on taste, and of taste on manners--of government and religion on
the literature of a people, and of their literature on the national
character, with other congenial objects of inquiry, still require a more
ample investigation. Whoever attempts to reduce this diversity, and these
strong contrasts of national tastes to one common standard, by forcing
such dissimilar objects into comparative parallels, or by trying them by
conventional principles and arbitrary regulations, will often condemn what
in truth his mind is inadequate to comprehend, and the experience of his
associations to combine.

These attempts have been the fertile source in literature of what may be
called national prejudices. The French nation insists that the northerns
are defective in taste--the taste, they tell us, which is established at
Paris, and which existed at Athens: the Gothic imagination of the north
spurns at the timid copiers of the Latin classics, and interminable
disputes prevail in their literature, as in their architecture and their
painting. Philosophy discovers a fact of which taste seems little
conscious; it is, that genius varies with the soil, and produces a
nationality of taste. The feelings of mankind indeed have the same
common source, but they must come to us through the medium and by the
modifications of society. Love is a universal passion, but the poetry of
love in different nations is peculiar to each; for every great poet
belongs to his country. Petrarch, Lope de Vega, Racine, Shakspeare, and
Sadi, would each express this universal passion by the most specific
differences; and the style that would be condemned as unnatural by one
people, might be habitual with another. The _concetti_ of the Italian, the
figurative style of the Persian, the swelling grandeur of the Spaniard,
the classical correctness of the French, are all modifications of genius,
relatively true to each particular writer. On national tastes critics are
but wrestlers: the Spaniard will still prefer his Lope de Vega to the
French Racine, or the English his Shakspe