It was to support the drooping spirit of his friend Racine on the opposition raised against Phaedra, that Boileau addressed to him an epistle "On the Utility to be drawn from the Jealousy of the Envious." The calm dignity of the historian DE THOU, amidst the passions of his times, confidently expected that justice from posterity which his own age refused to his early and his late labour.

That great man was, however, compelled by his injured feelings, to compose a poem under the name of another, to serve as his apology against the intolerant court of Rome, and the factious politicians of France; it was a noble subterfuge to which a great genius was forced.

The acquaintances of the poet COLLINS probably complained of his wayward humours and irritability; but how could they sympathise with the secret mortification of the poet, who imagined that he had composed his Pastorals on wrong principles, or when, in the agony of his soul, he consigned to the flames with his own hands his unsold, but immortal odes?
Can we forget the dignified complaint of the Rambler, with which he awfully closes his work, appealing to posterity?
[Footnote A: See "Quarrels of Authors," p.

403, on the confederacy of several wits against D'Avenant, a great genius; where I discovered that a volume of poems, said "to be written by the author's friends," which had hitherto been referred to as a volume of panegyrics, contains nothing but irony and satire, which had escaped the discovery of so many transcribers of title-pages, frequently miscalled literary historians.] Genius contracts those peculiarities of which it is so loudly accused in its solitary occupations--that loftiness of spirit, those quick jealousies, those excessive affections and aversions which view everything as it passes in its own ideal world, and rarely as it exists in the mediocrity of reality.

If this irritability of genius be a malady which has raged even among philosophers, we must not be surprised at the temperament of poets.