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been a miner from his boyhood. Well did he represent the olden time, when every trade was a mystery and had its own guardian saint; when the sense of self-importance was gratified at home, and ambition had a hundred several lotteries, in one or other of which every freeman had a ticket, and the only blanks were drawn by sloth, intemperance, or inevitable calamity; when the detail of each art and trade (like the oracles of the prophets, interpretable in a double sense) was ennobled in the eyes of its professors by being spiritually improved into symbols and mementos of all doctrines and all duties, and every craftsman had, as it were, two versions of his Bible, one in the common language of the country, another in the acts, objects, and products of his own particular craft. There are not many things in our elder popular literature, more interesting to me than those contests, or eclogues, between workmen for the superior worth and dignity of their several callings, which used to be sold at our village fairs, in stitched sheets, neither untitled nor undecorated, though without the superfluous cost of a separate title-page.

With this good old miner I was once walking through a corn-field at harvest-time, when that part of the conversation, to which I have alluded, took place. "At times," said I, "when you were delving in the bowels of the arid mountain or foodless rock, it must have occurred to your mind as

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a pleasant thought, that in providing the scythe and the sword you were virtually reaping the harvest and protecting the harvest-man." "Ah!" he replied with a sigh, that gave a fuller meaning to his smile," out of all earthly things there come both good and evil;-the good through God, and the evil from the evil heart. From the look and weight of the ore I learned to make a near guess, how much iron it would yield; but neither its heft, nor its hues, nor its breakage would prophesy to me, whether it was to become a thievish pick-lock, a murderer's dirk, a slave's collar, or the woodman's axe, the feeding plough-share, the defender's sword, or the mechanic's tool. So, perhaps, my young friend, I have cause to be thankful, that the opening upon a fresh vein gives me a delight so full as to allow no room for other fancies, and leaves behind it a hope and a love that support me in my labour, even for the labour's sake."

As, according to the eldest philosophy, life being in its own nature aeriform, is under the necessity of renewing itself by inhaling the connatural, and therefore assimilable, air, so is it with the intelligential soul with respect to truth; for it is itself of the nature of truth. Γενομένη ἐκ θεωρίας, καὶ θέαμα θεῖον, φύσιν ἔχειν φιλοθεάμονα ὑπάρχει.* But the occasion and brief history of the decline of true speculative philosophy, with the origin of

* Plotinus. Ennead. III. 1. 8. s. 3. slightly altered.-Ed.

the separation of ethics from religion, I must defer to the following number.

NOTE.

As I see many good, and can anticipate no ill, consequences in the attempt to give distinct and appropriate meanings to words hitherto synonymous, or at least of indefinite and fluctuating application, if only the proposed sense be not passed upon the reader as the existing and authorized one, I shall make no other apology for the use of the word, Talent, in this preceding essay and elsewhere in my works than by annexing the following expla

nation.

I have been in the habit of considering the qualities of intellect, the comparative eminence in which characterizes individuals and even countries, under four kinds-Genius, Talent, Sense, and Cleverness. The first I use in the sense of most general acceptance, as the faculty which adds to the existing stock of power and knowledge by new views, new combinations; by discoveries not accidental but anticipated, or resulting from anticipation. In short, I define Genius, as originality in intellectual construction; the moral accompaniment, and actuating principle of which consists, perhaps, in the carrying on of the freshness and feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. By Talent, on the other hand, I mean the com

parative facility of acquiring, arranging, and applying the stock furnished by others and already existing in books or other conservatories of intellect.

I

By Sense I understand that just balance of the faculties which is to the judgment what health is to the body. The mind seems to act at once and altogether by a synthetic rather than an analytic process: even as the outward senses, from which the metaphor is taken, perceive immediately, each as it were by a peculiar tact or intuition, without any consciousness of the mechanism by which the perception is realized. This is often exemplified in well bred, unaffected, and innocent women. know a lady, on whose judgment, from constant experience of its rectitude, I could rely almost as on an oracle. But when she has sometimes proceeded to a detail of the grounds and reasons for her opinion, then, led by similar experience, I have been tempted to interrupt her with "I will take your advice," or, I shall act on your opinion; for I am sure you are in the right. But as to the fors and becauses, leave them to me to find out." The general accompaniment of sense is a disposition to avoid extremes, whether in theory or in practice, with a desire to remain in sympathy with the general mind of the age or country, and a feeling of the necessity and utility of compromise. If genius be the initiative, and talent the adminis

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trative, sense is the conservative, branch in the intellectual republic.

By Cleverness (which I dare not with Dr. Johnson call a low word, while there is a sense to be expressed which it alone expresses) I mean a comparative readiness in the invention and use of means, for the realizing of objects and ideas-often of such ideas, which the man of genius only could have originated, and which the clever man perhaps neither fully comprehends nor adequately appreciates, even at the moment that he is prompting or executing the machinery of their accomplishment. In short, cleverness is a sort of genius for instrumentality. It is the brain in the hand. In literature cleverness is more frequently accompanied by wit, genius and sense by humour.

If I take the three great countries of Europe, in respect of intellectual character, namely, Germany, England, and France, I should characterize them in the following way;-premising only that in the first line of the first two tables I mean to imply that genius, rare in all countries, is equal in both of these, the instances equally numerous ; not, therefore, contra-distinguishing either from the other, but both from the third country. We can scarcely avoid considering a Cervantes and Calderon as in some sort characteristic of the nation which produced them. In the last war we felt it in the hope, which the recollection of these

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