characteristic of genius.

It might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of readers, to
suppose a Review set on foot, the object of which should be to
criticise all the chief works presented to the public by our ribbon-
weavers, calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and china-manufacturers;
which should be conducted in the same spirit, and take the same
freedom with personal character, as our literary journals. They would
scarcely, I think, deny their belief, not only that the genus
irritabile would be found to include many other species besides that
of bards; but that the irritability of trade would soon reduce the
resentments of poets into mere shadow-fights in the comparison. Or is
wealth the only rational object of human interest? Or even if this
were admitted, has the poet no property in his works? Or is it a rare,
or culpable case, that he who serves at the altar of the Muses, should
be compelled to derive his maintenance from the altar, when too he has
perhaps deliberately abandoned the fairest prospects of rank and
opulence in order to devote himself, an entire and undistracted man,
to the instruction or refinement of his fellow-citizens? Or, should we
pass by all higher objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence,
and even that ambition of lasting praise which is at once the crutch
and ornament, which at once supports and betrays, the infirmity of
human virtue,--is the character and property of the man, who labours
for our intellectual pleasures, less entitled to a share of our fellow
feeling, than that of the wine-merchant or milliner? Sensibility
indeed, both quick and deep, is not only a characteristic feature, but
may be deemed a component part, of genius. But it is not less an
essential mark of true genius, that its sensibility is excited by any
other cause more powerfully than by its own personal interests; for
this plain reason, that the man of genius lives most in the ideal