this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. And therefore is it the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence. Who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new feeling, from the time that he has read Burns's comparison of sensual pleasure
'To snow that falls upon a river,
A moment white—then gone for ever!'"
Biog. Lit. vol. i, p. 85.—ED.]
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I think Sir James Scarlett's speech for the defendant, in the late action of Cobbett v. The Times, for a libel, worthy of the best ages of Greece or Rome; though, to be sure, some of his remarks could not have been very palatable to his clients.
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I am glad you came in to punctuate my discourse, which I fear has gone on for an hour without any stop at all.
July 1. 1833.
MANDEVILLE'S FABLE OF THE BEES.—BESTIAL THEORY.—CHARACTER OF BERTRAM.— BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER'S DRAMAS.—ÆSCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES,—MILTON.
If I could ever believe that Mandeville really meant any thing more by his Fable of the Bees than a bonne bouche of solemn raillery, I should like to ask those man-shaped apes who have taken up his suggestions in earnest, and seriously maintained them as bases for a rational account of man and the world—how they explain the very existence of those dexterous cheats, those superior charlatans, the legislators and philosophers, who have known how to play so well upon the peacock-like vanity and follies of their fellow mortals.