SENSITIVENESS TO CRITICISM.
Hawkesworth and Stillingfleet died of criticism; Tasso was driven mad by it; Newton, the calm Newton, kept hold of life only by the sufferance of a friend who withheld a criticism on his chronology, for no other reason than his conviction that if it were published while he lived, it would put an end to him; and every one knows the effect on the sensitive nature of Keats, of the attacks on his Endymion. Tasso had a vast and prolific imagination, accompanied with an excessively hypochondriacal temperament. The composition of his great epic, the Jerusalem Delivered, by giving scope to the boldest flights, and calling into play the energies of his exalted and enthusiastic genius—whilst with equal ardour it led him to entertain hopes of immediate and extensive fame—laid most probably the foundation of his subsequent derangement. His susceptibility and tenderness of feeling were great; and, when his sublime work met with unexpected opposition, and was even treated with contempt and derision, the fortitude of the poet was not proof against the keen sense of disappointment. He twice attempted to please his ignorant and malignant critics by recomposing his poem; and during the hurry, the anguish, and the irritation attending these efforts, the vigour of a great mind was entirely exhausted, and in two years after the publication of the Jerusalem, the unhappy author became an object of pity and terror. Newton, with all his philosophy, was so sensible to critical remarks, that Whiston tells us he lost his favour, which he had enjoyed for twenty years, by contradicting him in his old age; for “no man was of a more fearful temper.”