In the allegorical picture of the School of Design, by Carlo Maratti, where the students are led through their various studies, in the opening clouds above the academy are seen the Graces, hovering over their pupils, with an inscription they must often recollect--_Senza di noi ogni fatica e vana_.
The anxious uncertainty of an author for his compositions resembles the anxiety of a lover when he has written to a mistress who has not yet decided on his claims; he repents his labour, for he thinks he has written too much, while he is mortified at recollecting that he had omitted some things which he imagines would have secured the object of his wishes.
Madame DE STAEL, who has often entered into feelings familiar to a literary and political family, in a parallel between ambition and genius, has distinguished them in this; that while "ambition _perseveres_ in the desire of acquiring power, genius _flags_ of itself.

Genius in the midst of society is a pain, an internal fever which would require to be treated as a real disease, if the records of glory did not soften the sufferings it produces."-- "Athenians! what troubles have you not cost me," exclaimed DEMOSTHENES, "that I may be talked of by you!" These moments of anxiety often darken the brightest hours of genius.
RACINE had extreme sensibility; the pain inflicted by a severe criticism outweighed all the applause he received.

He seems to have felt, what he was often reproached with, that his Greeks, his Jews, and his Turks, were all inmates of Versailles.

He had two critics, who, like our Dennis with Pope and Addison, regularly dogged his pieces as they appeared[A].
Corneille's objections he would attribute to jealousy--at his pieces when burlesqued at the Italian theatre[B] he would smile outwardly, though sick at heart; but his son informs us, that a stroke of raillery from his witty friend Chapelle, whose pleasantry hardly sheathed its bitterness, sunk more deeply into his heart than the burlesques at the Italian theatre, the protest of Corneille, and the iteration of the two Dennises.

More than once MOLIERE and Racine, in vexation of spirit, resolved to abandon their dramatic career; it was BOILEAU who ceaselessly animated their languor: "Posterity," he cried, "will avenge the injustice of our age!" And CONGREVE'S comedies met with such moderate success, that it appears the author was extremely mortified, and on the ill reception of _The Way of the World_, determined to write no more for the stage.