[Footnote A: Johnson had originally submitted the plan of his "Dictionary" to Lord Chesterfield, but received no mark of interest or sympathy during its weary progress; when the moment of publication approached, his lordship, perhaps in the hope of earning a dedication, published in The World two letters commending Johnson and his labours. It was this notice that produced Johnson's celebrated letter, in which he asks,—"Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help? The notice you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early had been kind, but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it."—ED.]
"I can make lords of you every day, but I cannot create a Titian," said the Emperor Charles V. to his courtiers, who had become jealous of the hours and the half-hours which the monarch stole from them that he might converse with the man of genius at his work. There is an elevated intercourse between power and genius; and if they are deficient in reciprocal esteem, neither are great. The intellectual nobility seems to have been asserted by De Harlay, a great French statesman; for when the Academy was once not received with royal honours, he complained to the French monarch, observing, that when "a man of letters was presented to Francis I. for the first time, the king always advanced three steps from the throne to receive him." It is something more than an ingenious thought, when Fontenelle, in his éloge on LEIBNITZ, alluding to the death of Queen Anne, adds of her successor, that "The Elector of Hanover united under his dominion an electorate, the three kingdoms of Great Britain, and LEIBNITZ and NEWTON."[A]
[Footnote A: This greatness of intellect that glorifies a court, however small, is well instanced in that at Weimar, where the Duke Frederic surrounded himself with the first men in Germany. It was the chosen residence and burial-place of Herder; the birth-place of Kotzebue. Here also Wieland resided for many years; and in the vaults of the ducal chapel the ashes of Schiller repose by those of Goethe, who for more than half a century assisted in the councils, and adorned the court of Weimar.—Ed.]
If ever the voice of individuals can recompense a life of literary labour, it is in speaking a foreign accent. This sounds like the distant plaudit of posterity. The distance of space between the literary character and the inquirer, in some respects represents the distance of time which separates the author from the next age. FONTENELLE was never more gratified than when a Swede, arriving at the gates of Paris, inquired of the custom-house officers where Fontenelle resided, and expressed his indignation that not one of them had ever heard of his name. HOBBES expresses his proud delight that his portrait was sought after by foreigners, and that the Great Duke of Tuscany made the philosopher the object of his first inquiries. CAMDEN was not insensible to the visits of German noblemen, who were desirous of seeing the British Pliny; and POCOCK, while he received no aid from patronage at home for his Oriental studies, never relaxed in those unrequited labours, animated by the learned foreigners, who hastened to see and converse with this prodigy of Eastern learning.
Yes! to the very presence of the man of genius will the world spontaneously pay their tribute of respect, of admiration, or of love. Many a pilgrimage has he lived to receive, and many a crowd has followed his footsteps! There are days in the life of genius which repay its sufferings. DEMOSTHENES confessed he was pleased when even a fishwoman of Athens pointed him out. CORNEILLE had his particular seat in the theatre, and the audience would rise to salute him when he entered. At the presence of RAYNAL in the House of Commons, the Speaker was requested to suspend the debate till that illustrious foreigner, who had written on the English parliament, was accommodated with a seat. SPINOSA, when he gained an humble livelihood by grinding optical glasses, at an obscure village in Holland, was visited by the first general in Europe, who, for the sake of this philosophical conference, suspended the march of the army.
In all ages and in all countries has this feeling been created. It is neither a temporary ebullition nor an individual honour. It comes out of the heart of man. It is the passion of great souls. In Spain, whatever was most beautiful in its kind was described by the name of the great Spanish bard:[A] everything excellent was called a Lope. Italy would furnish a volume of the public honours decreed to literary men; nor is that spirit extinct, though the national character has fallen by the chance of fortune. METASTASIO and TIRABOSCHI received what had been accorded to PETRARCH and to POGGIO. Germany, patriotic to its literary characters, is the land of the enthusiasm of genius. On the borders of the Linnet, in the public walk of Zurich, the monument of GESNER, erected by the votes of his fellow-citizens attests their sensibility; and a solemn funeral honoured the remains of KLOPSTOCK, led by the senate of Hamburgh, with fifty thousand votaries, so penetrated by one universal sentiment, that this multitude preserved a mournful silence, and the interference of the police ceased to be necessary through the city at the solemn burial of the man of genius. Has even Holland proved insensible? The statue of ERASMUS, in Rotterdam, still animates her young students, and offers a noble example to her neighbours of the influence even of the sight of the statue of a man of genius. Travellers never fail to mention ERASMUS when Basle occupies their recollections; so that, as Bayle observes, "He has rendered the place of his death as celebrated as that of his birth." In France, since Francis I. created genius, and Louis XIV. protected it, the impulse has been communicated to the French people. There the statues of their illustrious men spread inspiration on the spots which living they would have haunted:—in their theatres, the great dramatists; in their Institute their illustrious authors; in their public edifices, congenial men of genius.[B] This is worthy of the country which privileged the family of LA FONTAINE to be for ever exempt from taxes, and decreed that "the productions of the mind were not seizable," when the creditors of CREBILLON would have attached the produce of his tragedies.
[Footnote A: Lope de Vega.]
[Footnote B: We cannot bury the fame of our English worthies—that exists before us, independent of ourselves; but we bury the influence of their inspiring presence in those immortal memorials of genius easy to be read by all men—their statues and their busts, consigning them to spots seldom visited, and often too obscure to be viewed. [We have recent evidence of a more noble acknowledgment of our great men. The statue of Dr. Jenner is placed in Trafalgar Square; and Grantham has now a noble work to commemorate its great townsman, Sir Isaac Newton.]
These distinctive honours accorded to genius were in unison with their decree respecting the will of BAYLE. It was the subject of a lawsuit between the heir of the will and the inheritor by blood. The latter contested that this great literary character, being a fugitive for religion, and dying in a proscribed country, was divested by law of the power to dispose of his property, and that our author, when resident in Holland, in a civil sense was dead. In the Parliament of Toulouse the judge decided that learned men are free in all countries: that he who had sought in a foreign land an asylum from his love of letters, was no fugitive; that it was unworthy of France to treat as a stranger a son in whom she gloried, and he protested against the notion of a civil death to such a man as Bayle, whose name was living throughout Europe. This judicial decision in France was in unison with that of the senate of Rotterdam, who declared of the emigrant BAYLE, that "such a man should not be considered as a foreigner."
Even the most common objects are consecrated when associated with the memory of the man of genius. We still seek for his tomb on the spot where it has vanished. The enthusiasts of genius still wander on the hills of Pausilippo, and muse on VIRGIL to retrace his landscape. There is a grove at Magdalen College which retains the name of ADDISON's walk, where still the student will linger; and there is a cave at Macao, which is still visited by the Portuguese from a national feeling, for CAMOENS there passed many days in composing his Lusiad. When PETRARCH was passing by his native town, he was received with the honours of his fame; but when the heads of the town conducted Petrarch to the house where the poet was born, and informed him that the proprietor had often wished to make alterations, but that the townspeople had risen to insist that the house which was consecrated by the birth of Petrarch should be preserved unchanged; this was a triumph more affecting to Petrarch than his coronation at Rome.[A]