GENIUS.
Self-communion and solitude are its daily bread; for what is genius but a great and strongly-marked individuality—but an original creative being, standing forth alone amidst the undistinguishable throng of our everyday world? Genius is a lonely power; it is not communicative; it is not the gift of a crowd; it is not a reflection cast from without upon the soul. It is essentially an inward light, diffusing its clear and glorious radiance over the external world. It is a broad flood, pouring freely forth its deep waters; but with its source forever hidden from human ken. It is the creator, not the creature it calls forth glorious and immortal shapes; but it is called into being by none—save God.—Women in France during the Eighteenth Century.
[From Household Words.]
FRANCIS JEFFREY.
Jeffrey was a year younger than Scott, whom he outlived eighteen years, and with whose career his own had some points of resemblance. They came of the same middle-class stock, and had played together as lads in the High School "yard" before they met as advocates in the Court of Session. The fathers of both were connected with that court; and from childhood, both were devoted to the law. But Scott's boyish infirmity imprisoned him in Edinburgh, while Jeffrey was let loose to Glasgow University, and afterward passed up to Queen's College, Oxford. The boys, thus separated, had no remembrance of having previously met, when they saw each other at the Speculative Society in 1791.
The Oxford of that day suited Jeffrey ill. It suited few people well who cared for any thing but cards and claret. Southey, who came just after him, tells us that the Greek he took there he left there, nor ever passed such unprofitable months; and Lord Malmesbury, who had been there but a little time before him, wonders how it was that so many men should make their way in the world creditably, after leaving a place that taught nothing but idleness and drunkenness. But Jeffrey was not long exposed to its temptations. He left after the brief residence of a single term; and what in after life he remembered most vividly in connection with it, seems to have been the twelve days' hard traveling between Edinburgh and London, which preceded his entrance at Queen's. Some seventy years before, another Scotch lad, on his way to become yet more famous in literature and law, had taken nearly as many weeks to perform the same journey; but, between the schooldays of Mansfield and of Jeffrey, the world had not been resting.
It was enacting its greatest modern incident, the first French Revolution, when the young Scotch student returned to Edinburgh and changed his College gown for that of the advocate. Scott had the start of him in the Court of Session by two years, and had become rather active and distinguished in the Speculative Society before Jeffrey joined it. When the latter, then a lad of nineteen, was introduced (one evening in 1791), he observed a heavy-looking young man officiating as secretary, who sat solemnly at the bottom of the table in a huge woolen night-cap, and who, before the business of the night began, rose from his chair, and, with imperturbable gravity seated on as much of his face as was discernible from the wrappings of the "portentous machine" that enveloped it, apologized for having left home with a bad toothache. This was his quondam schoolfellow Scott. Perhaps Jeffrey was pleased with the mingled enthusiasm for the speculative, and regard for the practical, implied in the woolen nightcap; or perhaps he was interested by the Essay on Ballads which the hero of the nightcap read in the course of the evening: but before he left the meeting he sought an introduction to Mr. Walter Scott, and they were very intimate for many years afterward.
The Speculative Society dealt with the usual subjects of elocution and debate prevalent in similar places then and since; such as, whether there ought to be an Established Religion, and whether the Execution of Charles I. was justifiable, and if Ossian's poems were authentic? It was not a fraternity of speculators by any means of an alarming or dangerous sort. John Allen and his friends, at this very time, were spouting forth active sympathy for French Republicanism at Fortune's Tavern under immediate and watchful superintendence of the Police; James Mackintosh was parading the streets with Horne Tooke's colors in his hat; James Montgomery was expiating in York jail his exulting ballad on the fall of the Bastile; and Southey and Coleridge, in despair of old England, had completed the arrangements of their youthful colony for a community of property, and proscription of every thing selfish, on the banks of the Susquehanna; but the speculative orators rarely probed the sores of the body politic deeper than an inquiry into the practical advantages of belief in a future state? and whether it was for the interest of Britain to maintain the balance of Europe? or if knowledge could be too much disseminated among the lower ranks of the people?
In short, nothing of the extravagance of the time, on either side, is associable with the outset of Jeffrey's career. As little does he seem to have been influenced, on the one hand, by the democratic foray of some two hundred convention delegates into Edinburgh in 1792, as, on the other, by the prominence of his father's name to a protest of frantic high-tory defiance; and he was justified, not many years since, in referring with pride to the fact that, at the opening of his public life, his view of the character of the first French revolution, and of its probable influence on other countries, had been such as to require little modification during the whole of his subsequent career. The precision and accuracy of his judgment had begun to show itself thus early. At the crude young Jacobins, so soon to ripen into Quarterly Reviewers, who were just now coquetting with Mary Woolstonecraft, or making love to the ghost of Madame Roland, or branding as worthy of the bowstring the tyrannical enormities of Mr. Pitt, he could afford to laugh from the first. From the very first he had the strongest liberal tendencies, but restrained them so wisely that he could cultivate them well.