CHAPTER VIII.
The spirit of literature and the spirit of society .-- The Inventors.
-- Society offers seduction and not reward to men of genius .-- The notions of persons of fashion of men of genius .-- The habitudes of the man of genius distinct from those of the man of society .-- Study, meditation, and enthusiasm, the progress of genius .-- The disagreement between the men of the world and the literary character.
The Inventors, who inherited little or nothing from their predecessors, appear to have pursued their insulated studies in the full independence of their mind and development of their inventive faculty; they stood apart, in seclusion, the solitary lights of their age.

Such were the founders of our literature--Bacon and Hobbes, Newton and Milton.

Even so late as the days of Dryden, Addison, and Pope, the man of genius drew his circle round his intimates; his day was uniform, his habits unbroken; and he was never too far removed, nor too long estranged from meditation and reverie: his works were the sources of his pleasure ere they became the labours of his pride.
But when a more uniform light of knowledge illuminates from all sides, the genius of society, made up of so many sorts of genius, becomes greater than the genius of the individual who has entirely yielded himself up to his solitary art.

Hence the character of a man of genius becomes subordinate.

A conversation age succeeds a studious one; and the family of genius, the poet, the painter, and the student, are no longer recluses.
They mix with their rivals, who are jealous of equality, or with others who, incapable of valuing them for themselves alone, rate them but as parts of an integral.
The man of genius is now trammelled with the artificial and mechanical forms of life; and in too close an intercourse with society, the loneliness and raciness of thinking is modified away in its seductive conventions.