Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions by Isaac Disraeli
page 70 of 636 (11%)
page 70 of 636 (11%)
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he afterwards abhorred. The tender author of "Andromache" could not have
been discovered while exhausting himself in running after _concetti_ as surprising as the worst parts of Cowley, in whose spirit alone he could have hit on this perplexing _concetto_, descriptive of Aurora: "Fille du Jour, qui nais devant ton père!"--"Daughter of Day, but born before thy father!" GIBBON betrayed none of the force and magnitude of his powers in his "Essay on Literature," or his attempted "History of Switzerland," JOHNSON'S cadenced prose is not recognisable in the humbler simplicity of his earliest years. Many authors have begun unsuccessfully the walk they afterwards excelled in. RAPHAEL, when he first drew his meagre forms under Perugino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal beauty which one day he of all men could alone execute. Who could have imagined, in examining the _Dream_ of Raphael, that the same pencil could hereafter have poured out the miraculous _Transfiguration?_ Or that, in the imitative pupil of Hudson, our country was at length to pride herself on another Raphael?[A] [Footnote A: Hudson was the fashionable portrait-painter who succeeded Kneller, and made a great reputation and fortune; but he was a very mean artist, who merely copied the peculiarities of his predecessor without his genius. His stiff hard style was formality itself; but was approved in an age of formalism; the earlier half of the last century.--ED.] Even the manhood of genius may pass unobserved by his companions, and, like. Æneas, he may be hidden in a cloud amidst his associates. The celebrated FABIUS MAXIMUS in his boyhood was called in derision "the little sheep," from the meekness and gravity of his disposition. His sedateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juvenile amusements, his slowness and difficulty in learning, and his ready submission to his equals, induced them to consider him as one irrecoverably stupid. The |
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