It offers a narration or a description; a conversation or a monologue; an incident or a scene.
Perhaps I have sometimes too warmly apologised for the infirmities of men of genius.

From others we may hourly learn to treat with levity the man of genius because he is _only_ such.

Perhaps also I may have been too fond of the subject, which has been for me an old and a favourite one--I may have exalted the literary character beyond the scale by which society is willing to fix it.

Yet what is this Society, so omnipotent, so all judicial?
The society of to-day was not the society of yesterday.

Its feelings, its thoughts, its manners, its rights, its wishes, and its wants, are different and are changed: alike changed or alike created by those very literary characters whom it rarely comprehends and often would despise.