412 On Genius. 
Both of these circumstances enter essentially 
into our idea of Genius, and seem necessary 
to endow it with those qualities of vivid con- 
ception, of glowing enthusiasm, and of 
original sentiment, which we specified, in 
the commencement of the Essay, as its dis- 
tinguishing characteristics. We do not, for 
example, suppose that a man is born with a 
specific Genius for painting, oratory, or 
poetry; that he is peculiarly fitted, by his 
original constitution, for becoming an inge- 
nious mechanic, a skilful logician, a saga- 
cious philosopher, a musician, an actor, a 
geniuses. There have been men of universal acguirements in every 
walk of literature and science ; but to ereate, and invent, and strike out 
new views, in any one department, seems to require the concentrated 
energies and undivided attention of the whole mind. Of the ancients— 
when we consider the number and variety of bis writings, perhaps Cicero 
may be alleged as an exception to the foregoing remark. Yet, as a poet, 
he is proverbially unfortunate ; and, after a fair estimate of his works, his 
most enthusiastic admirers must admit, that eloquence was his fort—the 
channel, into which the stream of his genius had been directed ; and 
that the many beautiful and glowing passages, with which his philoso- 
phical treatises abound, cannot redeem them from the heavy charge of 
perplexed arrangement, of inaperfect definition, of loose and ineonclu- 
sive reasoning. Among the moderns—where shall we look for exam- 
ples of universal Genius? In the characters of the admirable Crichton 
and of: Sir Philip Sidney, there is much of the ostentation and pedantic 
display, peculiar to their age, but none of the features of real Genius, 
OF the distinguished individuals of later ages, Grotius and Milton, Sir 
W. Jones and Voltaire, bid as fair, as any that occur to me, for a 
claim to the honours of universal Genius. Yet the decided bent of the 
mind of our great epic poet was to moral and religious truth ; and his 
multifarious erudition supplied him with the materials of illustrating 
