SON.

The traditionary notion that the life of a man of letters is necessarily
deficient in incident, appears to have originated in a misconception of
the essential nature of human action. The life of every man is full of
incidents, but the incidents are insignificant, because they do not
affect his species; and in general the importance of every occurrence is
to be measured by the degree with which it is recognised by mankind. An
author may influence the fortunes of the world to as great an extent as
a statesman or a warrior; and the deeds and performances by which this
influence is created and exercised, may rank in their interest and
importance with the decisions of great Congresses, or the skilful valour
of a memorable field. M. de Voltaire was certainly a greater Frenchman
than Cardinal Fleury, the Prime Minister of France in his time. His
actions were more important; and it is certainly not too much to
maintain that the exploits of Homer, Aristotle, Dante, or my Lord Bacon,
were as considerable events as anything that occurred at Actium,
Lepanto, or Blenheim. A Book may be as great a thing as a battle, and
there are systems of philosophy that have produced as great revolutions
as any that have disturbed even the social and political existence of
our centuries.

The life of the author, whose character and career we are venturing to
review, extended far beyond the allotted term of man: and, perhaps, no
existence of equal duration ever exhibited an uniformity more sustained.
The strong bent of his infancy was pursued through youth, matured in
manhood, and maintained without decay to an advanced old age. In the
biographic spell, no ingredient is more magical than predisposition. How
pure, and native, and indigenous it was in the character of this writer,
can only be properly appreciated by an acquaintance with the
circumstances amid which he was born, and by being able to estimate how
far they could have directed or developed his earliest inclinations.

My grandfather, who became an English Denizen in 1748, was an Italian
descendant from one of those Hebrew families whom the Inquisition forced
to emigrate from the Spanish Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth
century, and who found a refuge in the more tolerant territories of the
Venetian Republic. His ancestors had dropped their Gothic surname on
their settlement in the Terra Firma, and grateful to the God of Jacob
who had sustained them through unprecedented tri