was an easy, off-hand production, which cost him no labour. No! They are very much deceived who fancy, that there is any intellectual JunoLucina to facilitate the birth of these conceptions of Genius. In the instance before us, the Poet wished to exhibit, pictorially, an object firm, elevated, serene, and partially obscured. These, after perhaps a thousand abortive resemblances, he found in the tall cliff, midway enveloped in clouds, with its top illumined by the uninterrupted radiance of the Sun. The Genius of the simile consisted in the novelty of combination: it was not the offspring of any innate, or peculiar talent of mind, but the reward, the honest reward of industry; of industry which no one can properly estimate but the author himself. To confirm this by a fact recorded of the same ingenious writer, we are told that the first line of his Deserted Village, cost him twelve months in its gestation. No very flattering proof of the toils of Genius, except in the sense in which they are received in this Essay. And had men of Genius given a faithful history of their silent labours, we should have seen, in every one of them, that perfection has been a slow and gradual work; produced, as Newton declared of his own, "by little and little;" and as Cowper has told us of himself, by "blotting out and revising" with unwearied application.

I stated, in a former part of this Essay, that "invention" owed every thing to accident and cir

cumstance. Let us now proceed to consider the verity of that statement.

If Genius were a peculiar property of mind, which conferred upon its possessor superior powers, it ought to manifest those powers in a peculiar manner, and not according to the ordinary modes of common minds. "Invention" should be the result of a priori reasoning: or at least the proposition and demonstration should spring up together. The slow processes of tentative experiment should be despised; and the profound truths of philosophy, and the brilliant imagery of the Poet, appear as emanations only of its powers. Genius should march before observation: should be several days in advance of the senses; and call them in for no other purpose than to confirm its conclusions, and admire its labours. But is this the fact? Did not the declaration of Newton, already quoted, deny it? And is there one instance upon record to support it? Not one. Even those shrewd guesses, or if any one choose to call them so, those happy anticipations, which certain great men, at different periods, have published to the world, were either founded upon strong analogies, a mode of reasoning not confined to Genius; or were random conclusions, which unexpected coincidences, have rendered remarkable. Thus, the notion of Newton, that water and the diamond were combustible; that of Swift respecting the Brobdignagian Telescope, which discovered a multitude of stars too remote

to be seen by the best instruments; that of Capel Loft of a planet between Mars and Jupiter. The first of which has been confirmed by recent chemical discovery; the second realized in the telescope of Herschel; and the last completely established, in the new celestial bodies, denominated Asteroids. But all these were, as has been just observed, mere guesses founded upon analogy; and in no respect better than the singular guess of Seneca, in one of the choruses of his Medea, that another continent existed; which the subsequent discovery of America by Columbus, has amply confirmed.

Though, from the last line, it may, perhaps, still be considered prophetical; and to wait a fulfilment in the arctic explorations now prosecuting under Captain Parry, Having thus excluded Genius from this her high perogative, let us turn our attention to the accidents, and circumstances, already alluded to, upon which it depends.

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Thus, Archimedes, whilst entering the bath to refresh himself, (no idler it seems) had his mind so

occupied with philosophical speculations, that he

no sooner saw the water overflow its sides as he entered it, than the solution of the problem respecting Hiero's crown immediately rushed upon him; or, in other words, the mode of determining the speci-: fic gravity of bodies. Genius had before failed to assist him, and accident here stepped in to remove the difficulty. Surely there was nothing marvellous in the conclusion he drew from that simple fact ; nothing that required Genius. Who would not be ashamed to be told, that when a body is put into a vessel full of water, it will displace as much of that fluid as is equal to its own bulk? And yet this was all that Archimedes discovered; or at most the general conclusion deduced from it, was a simple corollary. It is true, I once thought corollaries the greatest efforts of Genius: and when I first read the Principia of Newton, had almost fallen a victim to the doctrine of Genius; for, after passing from a demonstration of a proposition, easy enough to be understood, I frequently met with three or four corollaries, without any demonstration whatever, which for some time perplexed me exceedingly; and for a long time led me to think, that there must have been some peculiar power in the mind of Newton to see conclusions so appa rently remote. I afterwards discovered, and New ton also confessed, how these things happened to, be; and Genius was banished as a cheat. The commentary of Emerson would have divulged the secret, and removed the mystery at once. But why,

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you will ask, does not the same inference rush upon you? I answer, because your minds are not engaged in speculations upon this subject, as his was. It was the accidental concurrence of the fact, and the train of reflection existing in his mind, that led him to the inference.

In like manner, Newton was led to the theory of universal gravitation by the fall of an apple. Not because his Genius elicited from that simple circumstance such a conclusion. No such thing. He had, in his own language, "by patient industry, by keeping the subject always before him," (and mark! it was before him when the apple fell) prepared his mind to be conducted to that conclusion. Most men, and, perhaps, even Newton himself, under other conditions of mind, might have been exposed to a shower of apples as thick as hail, without deducing that, or indeed any inference from it. And why? Because they wanted Genius? No! But because the fall of the apple, would then have happened at a moment when it served not so strikingly to illustrate the reasoning of the mind. The two would not have been simultaneous.

So Galvani was pursuing a course of experiments upon animal magnetism, when his Lady observed, and reported to him, the unaccountable muscular contractions which had presented themselves to her, in some prepared frogs, when brought in contact with certain metals. The coincidence led to the discovery; Genius had no share in it. And if it