e
game is a thing determinate and fixed: there is no royal or poetical
road to checkmate your adversary. There is no place for genius but in
the indefinite and unknown. The discovery of the binomial theorem was
an effort of genius; but there was none shown in Jedediah Buxton's being
able to multiply 9 figures by 9 in his head. If he could have multiplied
90 figures by 90 instead of 9, it would have been equally useless toil
and trouble.(3) He is a man of capacity who possesses considerable
intellectual riches: he is a man of genius who finds out a vein of new
ore. Originality is the seeing nature differently from others, and
yet as it is in itself. It is not singularity or affectation, but the
discovery of new and valuable truth. All the world do not see the wh
looking at. Habit blinds them to some things; short-sightedness to
others. Every mind is not a gauge and measure of truth. Nature has her
surface and her dark recesses. She is deep, obscure, and infinite. It is
only minds on whom she makes her fullest impressions that can penetrate
her shrine or unveil her _Holy of Holies_. It is only those whom she has
filled with her spirit that have the boldness or the power to reveal her
mysteries to others. But Nature has a thousand aspects, and one man can
only draw out one of them. Whoever does this is a man of genius. One
displays her force, another her refinement; one her power of harmony,
another her suddenness of contrast; one her beauty of form, another her
splendour of colour. Each does that for which he is bast fitted by his
particular genius, that is to say, by some quality of mind into which
the quality of the object sinks deepest, where it finds the most cordial
welcome, is perceived to its utmost extent, and where again it forces
its way out from the fulness with which it has taken possession of
the mind of the student. The imagination gives out what it has first
absorbed by congeniality of temperament, what it has attracted and
moulded into itself by elective affinity, as the loadstone draws and
impregnates iron. A little originality is more esteemed and sought for
than the greatest acquired talent, because it throws a new light upon
things, and is peculiar to the individual. The other is common; and may
be had for the asking, to any amount.

The value of any work is to be judged of by the quantity of originality
contained in it. A very little of this will go a great way. If Goldsmith
had never written anything