mperfect view, who is confined to contemporary knowledge, as
well as he who stops short with the Ancients. Those who do not carry
researches through the genealogical lines of genius, mutilate their minds.

Such, then, is the influence of AUTHORS!--those "great lights of the
world," by whom the torch of genius has been successively seized and
perpetually transferred from hand to hand, in the fleeting scene.
DESCARTES delivers it to NEWTON, BACON to LOCKE; and the continuity of
human affairs, through the rapid generations of man, is maintained from,
age to age!

[Footnote A: Turner's "History of England," vol. ii. p. 432.]

LITERARY MISCELLANIES.

* * * * *

MISCELLANISTS.

Miscellanists are the most popular writers among every people; for
it is they who form a communication between the learned and the unlearned,
and, as it were, throw a bridge between those two great divisions of the
public. Literary Miscellanies are classed among philological studies. The
studies of philology formerly consisted rather of the labours of arid
grammarians and conjectural critics, than of that more elegant philosophy
which has, within our own time, been introduced into literature,
and which, by its graces and investigation, augment the beauties of
original genius. This delightful province has been termed in Germany the
_AEsthetic_, from a Greek term signifying sentiment or feeling. AEsthetic
critics fathom the depths, or run with the current of an author's
thoughts, and the sympathies of such a critic offer a supplement to the
genius of the original writer. Longinus and Addison are AEsthetic critics.
The critics of the adverse school always look for a precedent, and if none
is found, woe to the originality of a great writer!

Very elaborate criticisms have been formed by eminent writers, in which
great learning and acute logic have only betrayed the absence of the
AEsthetic faculty. Warburton called Addison an empty superficial writer,
destitute himself of an atom of Addison's taste for the beautiful; and
Johnson is a flagrant instance that great powers of reasoning are more
fatal to the works of imagination than had ever been suspected.

By one of these learned critics was Montaigne, the venerable father of
modern Miscellanies, called "a bold ignorant fellow." To thinking readers,
this critical summary will appear mysterious; for Montaigne had imbibed
the spirit of all the moral writers of ant