are, as the Italian his Tasso and
his Petrarch. Hence all national writers are studied with enthusiasm by
their own people, and their very peculiarities, offensive to others, with
the natives constitute their excellences. Nor does this perpetual contest
about the great writers of other nations solely arise from an association
of patriotic glory, but really because these great native writers have
most strongly excited the sympathies and conformed to the habitual tastes
of their own people.

Hence, then, we deduce that true genius is the organ of its nation. The
creative faculty is itself created; for it is the nation which first
imparts an impulse to the character of genius. Such is the real source of
those distinct tastes which we perceive in all great national authors.
Every literary work, to ensure its success, must adapt itself to the
sympathies and the understandings of the people it addresses. Hence those
opposite characteristics, which are usually ascribed to the master-writers
themselves, originate with the country, and not with the writer. LOPE DE
VEGA, and CALDEBON, in their dramas, and CERVANTES, who has left his name
as the epithet of a peculiar grave humour, were Spaniards before they were
men of genius. CORNEILLE, RACINE, and RABELAIS, are entirely of an
opposite character to the Spaniards, having adapted their genius to their
own declamatory and vivacious countrymen. PETRARCH and TASSO display a
fancifulness in depicting the passions, as BOCCACCIO narrates his
facetious stories, quite distinct from the inventions and style of
northern writers. SHAKSPEARE is placed at a wider interval from all of
them than they are from each other, and is as perfectly insular in his
genius as his own countrymen were in their customs, and their modes of
thinking and feeling.

Thus the master-writers of every people preserve the distinct national
character in their works; and hence that extraordinary enthusiasm with
which every people read their own favourite authors; but in which others
cannot participate, and for which, with all their national prejudices,
they often recriminate on each other with false and even ludicrous
criticism.

But genius is not only the organ of its nation, it is also that of the
state of the times; and a great work usually originates in the age.
Certain events must precede the man of genius, who often becomes only the
vehicle of public feeling. MACHIAVEL has been reproached for propagating a
polit