This same comparison between the body politic and the body human
occurs in the essay of 1719, and even the author's chief analogy
drawn from musical harmony bears with it some of the flavor of an
older system of universal correspondences. His comparison of the
force of genius to the pull of gravity, however, evokes a newer
picture. Yet it is a picture no less orderly and one from which
the preordained function of each individual could be just as
logically derived. And his rhapsodic praise of the infinite
diversity of human temperaments is based on that favorite
comparison with natural scenery and that familiar canon of
neoclassical esthetics: ordered variety within unity, whether it
be in nature or in art.

The author of the pamphlet of 1719 introduces another refinement
on the idea of an inborn bent or genius. A man is born not only
with a peculiar aptitude for the vocation of writing, but with a
peculiar aptitude for a particular _style_ of writing. Some such
aptitude had presumably resulted in that individuality of style,
that particular "character," which 17th-century Biblical critics
were busily searching out in each of the writers of Scripture.

Individuality or originality in the form or plan of a work of
art, however, was quite another thing, and praise of it far more
rare. Yet there had always been protests against the imposition
of a universal classical standard, and our author's insistence
that some few geniuses have the right to discard the "Rules of
Art" and all such "Leading-strings" follows a well-worn path of
reasoning. His scientific analogy, drawn from those natural
philosophers who had cast off the yoke of Aristotle and all