376 On Genius. 
occasionally offering their vows tothe Gentus 
of the unknown regions they had entered. (6) 
The same liveliness of imagination which 
made the ancients people every element with 
gods, and deify every operation of nature, 
led them on to a personification of the most 
abstract ideas,—to an apotheosis (for in fact 
it was so) of character: hence their concep- | 
tion of a Genius, or presiding deity of places 
and of men. ‘fo the Genius which ruled the 
moral and intellectual man and disposed the 
events of life, every thing remarkable in the 
circumstances of the individual was attributed; 
to the same influence was referred every pe- 
culiarity of disposition, every superiority of 
talent. I need only allude, for an illustration 
of these remarks, to the well known case of 
the Genius, or Demon, by which: Socrates 
professed to be controled in his actions; and 
the classical scholar will immediately remem- 
ber the lines, in which Horace resolves the 
question, why men are born into the world 
with such different propensities, by ascribing 
them to the various influence of the tutelary 
(b) So ARneas, on landing in Latium— 
GENIuM que loci, primamque Deorum 
Tellurem, Nymphasque, et adhuc ignota precatur 
Flumina. 
En. VII. 136. 
See also Ain, V. 95, with Heyne’s note. 
