stantly read, I
make it less my occupation than my pleasure. In religion, and in
friendship, I have only to paint myself such as I am--in friendship more
tender than a philosopher; and in religion, as constant and as sincere
as a youth who has more simplicity than experience. My piety is composed
more of justice and charity than of penitence. I rest my confidence on
God, and hope everything from His benevolence. In the bosom of
Providence I find my repose, and my felicity."

MEN OF GENIUS DEFICIENT IN CONVERSATION.

The student or the artist who may shine a luminary of learning and of
genius, in his works, is found, not rarely, to lie obscured beneath a
heavy cloud in colloquial discourse.

If you love the man of letters, seek him in the privacies of his study.
It is in the hour of confidence and tranquillity that his genius shall
elicit a ray of intelligence more fervid than the labours of polished
composition.

The great Peter Corneille, whose genius resembled that of our
Shakspeare, and who has so forcibly expressed the sublime sentiments of
the hero, had nothing in his exterior that indicated his genius; his
conversation was so insipid that it never failed of wearying. Nature,
who had lavished on him the gifts of genius, had forgotten to blend with
them her more ordinary ones. He did not even _speak_ correctly that
language of which he was such a master. When his friends represented to
him how much more he might please by not disdaining to correct these
trivial errors, he would smile, and say--"_I am not the less Peter
Corneille!_"

Descartes, whose habits were formed in solitude and meditation, was
silent in mixed company; it was said that he had received his
intellectual wealth from nature in solid bars, but not in current coin;
or as Addison expressed the same idea, by comparing himself to a banker
who possessed the wealth of his friends at home, though he carried none
of it in his pocket; or as that judicious moralist Nicolle, of the
Port-Royal Society, said of a scintillant wit--"He conquers me in the
drawing-room, but he surrenders to me at discretion on the staircase."
Such may say with Themistocles, when asked to play on a lute--"I cannot
fiddle, but I can make a little village a great city."

The deficiencies of Addison in conversation are well known. He preserved
a rigid silence amongst strangers; but if he was silent, it was the
silence of meditation. How often, at that moment, he laboured