How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this
charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavoured to show,
supported by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult
solution. In whatever country literature is widely diffused, there
will be many who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation
of poetic genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which
constitute it. But men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects
wholly out of their own power, become in all cases more or less
impatient and prone to anger. Besides, though it may be paradoxical to
assert, that a man can know one thing and believe the opposite, yet
assuredly a vain person may have so habitually indulged the wish, and
persevered in the attempt, to appear what he is not, as to become
himself one of his own proselytes. Still, as this counterfeit and
artificial persuasion must differ, even in the person's own feelings,
from a real sense of inward power, what can be more natural, than that
this difference should betray itself in suspicious and jealous
irritability? Even as the flowery sod, which covers a hollow, may be
often detected by its shaking and trembling.

But, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of
literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the
world of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no
means to justify, the contempt with which the best grounded complaints
of injured genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter
of merriment. In the days of Chaucer and Gower, our language might
(with due allowance for the imperfections of a simile) be compared to
a wilderness of vocal reeds, from which the favourites only of Pan or
Apollo could construct even the rude syrinx; and from this the
constructors alone could elicit strains of music. But now, partly by
the labours of successive poets, and in part by the more artificial