memoir of Laplace had been thrown into that muck-heap of Fraser's
Magazine, who would be the wiser? But this has too much wit and
imagination not to strike a class who would not care for it as a
faithful mirror of this very Hour. But you know the proverb, "To
be fortunate, be not too wise." The great men of the day are on
a plane so low as to be thoroughly intelligible to the vulgar.
Nevertheless, as God maketh the world forevermore, whatever the
devils may seem to do, so the thoughts of the best minds always
become the last opinion of Society. Truth is ever born in a
manger, but is compensated by living till it has all souls for
its kingdom. Far, far better seems to me the unpopularity of
this Philosophical Poem (shall I call it?) than the adulation
that followed your eminent friend Goethe. With him I am becoming
better acquainted, but mine must be a qualified admiration. It
is a singular piece of good-nature in you to apotheosize him. I
cannot but regard it as his misfortune, with conspicuous bad
influence on his genius, that velvet life he led. What
incongruity for genius, whose fit ornaments and reliefs are
poverty and hatred, to repose fifty years on chairs of state and
what pity that his Duke did not cut off his head to save him from
the mean end (forgive) of retiring from the municipal incense "to
arrange tastefully his gifts and medals"! Then the Puritan in me
accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he. We can tolerate
vice in a splendid nature whilst that nature is battling with the
brute majority in defence of some human principle. The sympathy
his manhood and his misfortunes call out adopts even his faults;
but genius pampered, acknowledged, crowned, can only retain our
sympathy by turning the same force once expended against outward
enemies now against inward, and carrying forward and planting the
standard of Oromasdes so many leagues farther on into the envious