in life, tall, and of a form that might once have been
commanding, but it was a little bowed by time--perhaps by care.
He had a noble Roman style of countenance; a a head that would
have pleased a painter; and though some slight furrows on his
brow showed that wasting thought had been busy there, yet his eye
beamed with the fire of a poetic soul. There was something in his
whole appearance that indicated a being of a different order from
the bustling race round him.

I inquired his name, and was informed that it was
ROSCOE. I drew back with an involuntary feeling of veneration.
This, then, was an author of celebrity; this was one of those men
whose voices have gone forth to the ends of the earth; with whose
minds I have communed even in the solitudes of America.
Accustomed, as we are in our country, to know European writers
only by their works, we cannot conceive of them, as of other men,
engrossed by trivial or sordid pursuits, and jostling with the
crowd of common minds in the dusty paths of life. They pass
before our imaginations like superior beings, radiant with the
emanations of their genius, and surrounded by a halo of literary
glory.

To find, therefore, the elegant historian of the Medici mingling
among the busy sons of traffic, at first shocked my poetical
ideas; but it is from the very circumstances and situation in
which he has been placed, that Mr. Roscoe derives his highest
claims to admiration. It is interesting to notice how some minds
seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every
disadvantage, and working their solitary but irresistible way
through a thousand obstacles. Nature seems to delight in