IG The Prose Album. \^Jvly, 



was so, you could not feel in the same manner about it. Admiration is 

 partly an affair of sympathy and prejudice. My enthusiasm glows the 

 brighter and steadier for being kindled at a common flame, and at an 

 ancient and hallowed shrine. The grandeur is not merely in the cause 

 or object, but in the effect ; and fame is the shadow of genius, that 

 reflects back its lustre and glory upon it There is an atmosphere of 

 time about intellectual objects, as well as of distance about visible ones, 

 which gives them their peculiar refinement or expansion, and to deny or 

 alter which is to invert the order of nature. 



XI. 



Grandeur of view consists in regarding things as they are seen in his- 

 tory, in their aggregate masses and results, and is equally remote from 

 petty details, and the grossness of prejudice. 



XII. 



A great wit and statesman said, that " speech was given to man to 

 conceal his thoughts." So it might be said, that books serve as a screen 

 to keep us from a knowledge of things. 



XIII. 



The diffusion of knowledge and literature, by increasing the number of 

 pretenders, has lessened the distance between authors and readers ; has 

 made learning common and familiar ; and given to reputation a tempo- 

 rary and ephemeral character. In the succession of new works, we 

 cannot find time to read the old : — in the crowd of living competitors, 

 we lose sight of the dead. The pretensions of rank and literature being 

 each set aside and neutralised by the impertinent scrutiny of vulgar 

 opinion, they club their stock between them, and strive to make a feeble 

 stand that way. Hence the aristocracy of letters ! An author no longer, 

 in the silence of retreat, and in the dearth of criticism, appeals to pos- 

 terity as a last resource, as in a flat and barren country, we look on ob- 

 jects in the distant horizon : in the din and pressure of present opinions 

 and contending claims, he must throw himself, like an actor at a fair, on 

 the gaping throng about him, and seize, by the most speedy and obvious 

 means, the noisy suffrages of his contemporaries. The poet, as of old, is 

 not now, from rarity, regarded as a mystery, a wizard, a something whose 

 privacy is not to be profaned by being encroached upon ; every effort is 

 made to throw down this partition-wall, to rend asunder the veil of 

 genius ; and instead of being kept at a studious and awful distance, he 

 must be brought near, must be shewn as a lioti, must be had out to 

 dinner, or to an at home ; we must procure his autograph, get him to 

 write his name in an album, and, if possible, come into personal contact 

 with him, so as to mix him up with our daily impressions and admiring 

 egotism. Thus the imaginary notion, the divince particula aurce is 

 lost under a heap of common qualities or peculiar defects ; and only 

 the shadow of a name is left. Nothing is fine but the ideal ; or rather, 

 excellence exists only by abstraction. If we wish to be delighted or to 

 admire, we have no business to seek beyond what first excited our 

 delight or admiration. Those who go in search of a cluster of perfec- 

 tions, or expect that because a man is superior in one thing, he is to be 

 superior in all, only go in search of disappointment ; or, in truth, hope 

 to indemnify their self-love by the discovery that, except in some one 

 particular, their idol is very much like themselves. 



