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to lead to quiescence and repose. Extreme accuracy of distinction is, however, not a merit of this writer, and we must take him as we find him. He very justly remarks, that the modes of life of a man of genius are often in conflict with the monotonous and imitative habits of society; that his occupations and amusements even are discordant with its artificial character. This, undoubtedly, must be very much the case with every man of genius. Genius in society, therefore, even in the very best of it, must often be in apathy, and often in suffering. No wonder that irritation often ensues, even with those who have tamed themselves down to bear the dulness or impertinence of ordinary existence. A company of blockheads will all exclaim against the luckless genius who may have exhibited some symptoms of irritation when condemned to the talk of such foolish company; and that irritation is all laid to the score of his genius. But how would one blockhead feel in the company of ten men of genius? He too would be irritable, and very eccentric too, or we are much mistaken in such a situation. But the world, after all, will have the best of the argument; and they are quite right in attributing the sufferings, or the disgust of superior minds, to an irritable temperament, rather than to the folly, indelicacy, rudeness, or ignorance of those with whom they come into contact.

A man of genius cannot in a moment turn from his own delightful fancies and beautiful creations to the mere talk of the passing day. He may indeed acquire something of this power, but it is not natural to him; and though he may successfully adapt himself for a long time together to the most ordinary minds, in some unlucky moment he forgets himself, and a single sally may do away the effect of much sufferance and condescension. "Professional characters," says Mr D'Israeli," who are themselves so often literary, yielding to their predominant interests, conform to that assumed urbanity which levels them with ordinary minds; but the man of genius cannot leave himself behind in the cabinet he quits; the train of his thoughts is not stopt at will; and, in the range of conversation, his habits of thought will prevail."

The irritability of men of genius

arises, too, from the anxious and precarious occupation of making to themselves a great name. For the most part of his life, the fame of an author or of an artist is of an ambiguous nature. They find it in one place and lose it in another. Praise and blame come to them at one and the same time. They are often ignorant of the extent of their reputation. Admiration often exists, unknown to them, of them and their works. They are exposed to all the vague indefinite feelings of minds excited into a ferment by their works. They know that they are talked of, thought of, approved, condemned. The world thinks itself entitled to make free with them, either in its eulogies or its satire. They stand in a very singular kind of relationship with the world; and the feelings excited by that relationship are often of a feverish and disturbing kind. Each new work places them in a new state of mind. Hope is born, languishes, frets, or attains its object and dies. There is a constant alternation of strong emotions in their hearts. No wonder that they should be what the world in its good nature calls irritable.

Minds of the first order, and of the highest achievement, have in all countries been subjected to mortification and trial. Bacon was not at all understood in his day. Sir Thomas Bodley upbraided him with his new mode of philosophising. Sir Edward Coke wrote miserable and bitter verses on a copy of the Instauratio presented to him by Bacon. James I. declared, that, like

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God's power, it passeth beyond all understanding." Kepler's work on Comets was by the learned condemned as extravagant; and Galileo abjured on his knees the philosophical truths he had ascertained. So has it been, too, with inferior spirits. Nothing can be more bitter to a man of genius, than to see the truth which he has discovered or beautified treated with indifference or scorn. A very slight want of personal respect to the most ordinary man who thinks himself entitled to it, awakens his irritability. What shall be said of the hourly and daily disrespect, or contumely, or indifference, which men of genius meet with from persons who would avenge every such offence to themselves with never-ending persecution? What is to be said of the shock which their feelings must be continually sustaining,

from hearing things and thoughts, to them most sacred, either misunderstood, undervalued, or profaned? There is no occasion to attribute to irritability that which often flows from the purest source; and before we censure the display of keen feelings, we should consider what it was that produced, and probably justified them.

The higher the imagination of a man of genius, the higher is the sphere of his constant thought above the ordinary sphere of human life. Much that is interesting, and even engross ing, to ordinary minds, passes below him like mists or clouds; and when, in his descent to the lower regions, he becomes enveloped in them, no wonder that he should exhibit impatience to regain the calm serenity of his native element. Mr D'Israeli concludes his chapter well. "Men of genius are often reverenced only where they are known by their writings; intellectual beings in the romance of life, in its history they are men. Erasmus compared them to the great figures in tapestry-work, which lose their effect when not seen at a distance. Their foibles and their infirmities are obvious to their associates, often only capable of discerning these qualities. The defects of great men are the consolation of dunces."

A great many important topics in the history of genius are discussed and illustrated in sixteen other chapters. To some of these we mean afterwards to return, and hope to lead our readers into several interesting fields of discussion.

A NIGHT IN THE CATACOMBS.

MR EDITOR,

If you consider the following pages as possessed of interest, I should be happy to see them inserted in your Miscellany. The story may not be so thrilling as some of those you have already given to the public, but I can answer for its truth; and I dare say if old Jerome, who used to shew the catacombs in Paris, be yet alive, he will recollect the handsome Englishman, with brown hair, and dark-blue eyes full of meaning, whom he released one morning from a night's imprisonment in those gloomy vaults. I shall only add, in behalf of my friend, whose letter I transcribe, that

he is a person of the most unsullied
honour and veracity; and that the fine
powers of his mind, however warped
and weakened by superstitious fears in
his youth, have since completely re-
covered their proper tone and elasticity.
Your's, &c.
D. K. S.
September 1818.

MY DEAR S

THERE is nothing more baneful than the influence which privileged nurses and other attendants upon young children exercise over their untutored imaginations, through the medium of superstitious dread. You know that there are few who have suffered more from such cruelty than myself; that for the prime years of my youth I was the victim of a distempered fancy, which I in vain attempted to chasten or correct; and that it was only by a most singular and unexpected accident, that I was freed from the reign of terror. But I believe you have never been made acquainted with the full detail of that accident; and I therefore send you this account of it, impressed with the deepest gratitude to the providence which turned to so much benefit in my own case, that which, considering the peculiar state and temper of my mind, might have caused insanity or death, and wishing it to become, if possible, as useful to others. Superstition is not indeed an epidemic of the present age; yet there may be individuals, who cast their eyes upon my tale, that will thank me for its lesson.

I never knew the fostering care of a father; and my mother, except by the boundless affection which I remember in my solitary tears, did not well supply his place. Inheriting a large domain in the wildest district of Wales, I was early taught to attach notions of dignity and importance to myself, and entertained a long train of more interesting thoughts than usually occupy the breast of boyhood. From the indulgence of my guardians to an only son, I was never sent to school, and thus had no opportunity of acquiring the prompt and active spirit that is generated in a public seminary, or that hard yet brilliant polish of the world, that repels from its surface all assaults of sanguine and romantic feeling. My domestic tutor enriched my mind with an extensive

knowledge of the classics, and imbued it with the deepest admiration of their beauties; but he did not apply himself to correct the wild tissue of absurd and superstitions notions, which an accurate observer must have detected in my bosom, or the greedy taste for fiction, and nervous sensibility, of which I myself perceived and lamented the excess. Ever since I could walk, I had been under the superintendence of an old nurse attached to the family, whose memory, like that of most of her countrywomen, was well stored with legend and tradition, and who had secretly acquired an absolute authority over me. While I was a mere child, she used to frighten me into obedience, if refractory, by threats of supernatural interference, and sometimes by devices of so horrible and extraordinary a nature, that I can hardly now recollect them without a shudder. The earnestness and emphasis, morcover, with which she told me tales in which she more than half believed, gave her gradually an entire dominion over my fears and fancy, which she could rouse and regulate at will. Even after I had emerged from the nursery, it used to be my great delight to steal to her apartment in the evening, and sit listening for hours to her ghostly narratives, till my knees shook, and every nerve in my body trembled, in the agitation and over-excitement she produced. It was then almost too much for my courage to hurry through the long passage, lighted by a single central lamp, to the library in our gothic mansion; and there, when I entered breathless and with a beating heart, I used to find my mother alone, weeping over the correspondence of my poor father in silence, and yielding to the sorrow that finally bowed her to the grave. My sole amusement every night, while thus sitting in the room with her (for we saw no company at all), was in poring with a perpetuallyincreasing interest, over all that could most tend to nourish the deleterious passion of my soul. My mother was too much absorbed in her own recollections to pay much attention to my employments or my studies; and her own mind was too much weakened by affliction to have suggested any salutary restoratives for mine.

The agonies I felt at my beloved parent's death, and for many a wake

ful night after she was committed to the tomb, are too sacred to my remembrance, to be even now unravelled. I shortly after came of age, and one of the first acts of my majority was a visit to Paris, during the short interval of war afforded by the peace of Amiens, in the hopes of alleviating my anguish. Here indeed I saw something of life; but I was too reserved to enter into intimacy with any of those to whose acquaintance my guardians introduced me. Proud, shy, and sensitive, I was fearful of their penetrating into the weaknesses of my character, which I felt were far from harmonizing with the general opinions of mankind; and I fancy they perceived something unfashionably cold and sombre about me, which mutually prevented our knowledge of each other. To the value of even your friendship, my dear S, I was then insensible, but you cannot say I have remained so.

In one of my lonely rambles about the wonderful and interesting capital I was now visiting, I joined a crowd of twenty or thirty persons, waiting at the outer door that leads to the upper entrance of the Catacombs. I had heard of these extraordinary vaults, but not having passed before the Barriere d'Enfer, I had not inspected them in person. Though I could not help conjecturing that a subterraneous cemetery, where the relics of ten centuries reposed, must be a sight too congenial with the morbid temper of my mind, I had no notion of the actual horrors of that mansion for the dead, or in my then distempered state of feeling, I should not have trusted my nerves with the spectacle to be expected. How will the curious tourist of the present day smile as he peruses this confession, if you give my story to the public!-but a few perhaps will understand and pity what were my follies. As it was, I provided myself, like the rest, with a waxen taper, and we waited with impatience for the appearance of the guide from below, with the party that had preceded us. It was about three o'clock of a sultry afternoon, and we were detained so long, that when the door opened at last, we all rushed in, and hurried old Jerome to the task of conducting us, without giving him time for the necessary precaution of counting our number. I was an utter stranger to

all present, and felt at first, as if I should have wished to view the sight, towards which we hurried our conductor, with him alone, or at least with fewer and less vociferous companions: but when we had descended many steps into the bowels of the earth, and the cold air from the dwellings of mortality smote my brow, I owned a sensible relief from the presence of the living around me, and was cheered by the sound of their various exclamations. Even with these accompaniments, however, it was with more than astonishment that I gazed upon the opening scene, and ever and anon, wrapped up in my thoughts, I anticipated with secret forebodings, the horrors I was doomed to undergo. It would be superfluous to describe what has been described so often, yet none can have received, from a survey of the catacombs, such impressions as my mind was prepared to admit ; and few can have retained so vivid and distinct a picture of their appearance, as has been branded on my soul in characters not to be effaced. Alas! I entered them with little of that fine exalting spirit so divinely eulogized by Virgil, in the motto that is inscribed upon their walls :

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari!"

The interminable rows of bare and blackening skulls-the masses interposed of gaunt and rotting bones, that once gave strength and symmetry to the young, the beautiful, the brave, now mildewed by the damp of the cavern, and heaped together in indiscriminate arrangement-the faint mouldering and deathlike smell that pervaded these gloomy labyrinths, and the long recesses in the low-roofed rock, to which I dared not turn my eyes except by short and fitful glances, as if expecting something terrible and ghastly to start from the indistinctness of their distance,-all had associations for my thoughts very different from the solemn and edifying sentiments they must rouse in a well regulated breast, and, by degrees, I yielded up every faculty to the influence of an ill-defined and mysterious alarm. My eyesight waxed gradually dull to all but the fleshless skulls that were glaring in the yellow light of the tapersthe hum of human voices was stifled

in my ears, and I thought myself alone, already with the dead. The guide thrust the light he carried into a huge skull that was lying separate in a niche; but I marked not the action or the man, but only the fearful glimmering of the transparent bone, which I thought a smile of triumphant malice from the presiding spectre of the place, while imagined accents whispered, in my hearing, "Welcome to our charnel-house, for THIS shall be your chamber!" Dizzy with indescribable emotions, I felt nothing but a painful sense of oppression from the presence of others, as if I could not breathe for the black shapes that were crowding near me; and turning unperceived, down a long and gloomy passage of the catacombs, I rushed as far as I could penetrate, to feed' in solitude the growing appetite for horror, that had quelled for the moment, in my bosom, the sense of fear, and even the feeling of identity. To the rapid whirl of various sensations that had bewildered me ever since I left the light of day, a season of intense abstraction now succeeded. I held my burning eyeballs full upon the skulls in front, till they almost seemed to answer my fixed regard, and claim a dreadful fellowship with the being that beheld them. How long I stood motionless in this condition I know not-my taper was calculated to last a considerable time, and I was wakened from my trance by the scorching heat of it's expiring in my hand. Still insensible of what I was about, I threw it to the ground; and gleaming once more, as if to shew the darkness and solitude to which I was consigned, it was speedily extinguished. But, by the strong impression on my brain, the whole scene remained distinct; and it was not for some time that my fit of abstraction passed away, and the horrific conviction came upon me, that I was left deserted, as I fancied in my first confusion, by faithless friends, and abandoned to the mercy of a thousand demons. All the ideal terrors I had cherished from my childhood, exalted to temporary madness by the sense and certainty of the horrid objects that surrounded me, rushed at once upon my soul; and in an agony of impatient consternation, I screamed and shouted, loud and long, for assistance. Not an answer was returned, but the dreary echoes of this dreadful tomb. I saw that my cries

for succour were hopeless and in vain, and my voice failed me for very fear my jaws were fixed and open, my palate dry-a cold sweat distilled from every pore, and my limbs were chill and powerless as death. Their vigour at length revived, and I rushed in a delirium through the passages, struggling through their various windings to retrace my path, and plunged at every step in more inextricable error, till, running with the speed of lightning along one of the longest corridors, I came with violence in full and loathsome contact with the skeleton relics at the end. The shock was like fire to my brain-I wept tears of rage and despair; and thrusting my fingers in the sockets of the empty skulls, to wrench them from the wall, I clutched their bony edges till the blood sprung from my lacerated hand. In short, I cannot paint to you the extravagancies I acted, or the wild alternation of my feelings that endured for many hours. Sometimes excited to phrenzy, I imagined I know not what of horrid and appalling, and saw, with preternatural acuteness, through the darkness as clear as noon,-while grisly visages seemed glaring on me near, and a red and bloody haze enveloped the more fearful distance. Then, when reason was on the point of going, an interval of terrible collection would succeed. I felt in my very soul how I was left alone-perhaps not to be discovered, at any rate for what appeared to me an endless period, in which I should perhaps expire of terror, and I longed for deep deep sleep, or to be as cold and insensate as the things around me. I tried to recollect the courage, that only on one point had ever failed me, but judgment missed her stays, and the whispers of the subterraneous wind, or the stealthy noises I seemed to hear in concert with the audible beatings of my heart, overcame me irresistibly. Sometimes I thought I could feel silence palpable, like a soft mantle on my ear-I figured dreadful hands within a hair-breadth of my body, ready to tear me if I stirred, and in desperation flung myself upon the ground. Then would I creep close to the mouldering fragments at the bottom of the wall, and try to dig with my nails, from the hard rock, something to cover me. Oh! how I longed for a cloak to wrap and hide me, though it had been my mother's wind

ing-sheet, or a grave-flannel animate with worms. I buried my head in the skirts of my coat and prayed for slumber; but a fearful train of images forced me again to rise and stumble on, shivering in frame with unearthly cold, and yet internally fevered with a tumult of agonizing thoughts. Any one must have suffered somewhat in such a situation; but no one's sufferings could resemble mine, unless he carried to the scene a mind so hideously prepared. Part of these awful excavations are said to have been once haunted by banditti; but I had no fears of them, and should have swooned with transport to have come upon their fires at one of the turnings in the rock, though my appearance had been the instant signal for their daggers.

In my wanderings I recovered for a moment the path taken by the guides, and found myself in a sort of cell within the rock, where particular specimens of mortality were preserved. My arm rested on the table, where two or three loosened skulls, and a thigh-bone of extravagant dimensions, were lying, and a new fit of madness seized me. My heart beat with redoubled violence, while I brandished the enormous bone, and hoarsely called for its original possessor to come in all the terrors of the grave, and there would I wrestle with him for the relic of his own miserable carcase. I struck repeatedly, and hard, the hollowsounding sides of the cell, shouting my defiance; then throwing myself with violence towards the opening, I missed my balance, and, snatching at the wall round the corner to save myself, I jammed my hand in an aperture among the bones, and fancied that the grisly adversary I invoked had grasped my arm in answer to my challenge. My shrieks of agony rang through the caverns, and, stagggering back into the cell, I fell upon my face, hardly daring to respire, and expecting unimagined horrors or speedy dissolution.

How my feelings varied for a space of time, I know not; but sleep insensibly fell upon me. In my dream, I did not seem to change the scene, but still reclining in the cell, I fancied the skulls upon the wall the same in number, but magnified to a terrific size, with black jetty eyes imbedded in their naked sockets, and rivetted with malicious earnestness on me. A dim re

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