tried various callings and occupations, till, being hired at the theatre to assist in the procession in the tragedy of Alexander the Great, he scraped acquaintance with a journeyman tailor: his genius developed itself in a moment; and before Alexander could well get into Babylon, he drew a pair of scissors from his pocket, and made a desperate effort to cabbage the skirt of his royal mantle. I am told that at this day there is nothing in the whole trade so capital as the cut of Ben Bodkin's coats. 24th of December.-As Bob Furbish was turning the corner of a street, his hat was blown off into an auctioneer's pulpit: he followed it close, and mounted the rostrum just as they had begun to bid for it. The moment he saw the crowd below him, the workings of his mind were prodigious; he declared himself inspired, and hurried down without his hat: the next day he entered into the profession; and no man handles the hammer like Bob Furbish at this hour. 2d of January, 1673.-Paul Puff had acted as pedlar, puppetshow-man, and quack-doctor, till being tempted on the evening of this day to take a hot mutton-pie in exchange for a box of pills, all the pastry cook was lighted up in his soul, and his shop is now the most considerable in the city. But I must drop these drolleries of Mr. Isaac Olive-Branch, my great-great-grandfather, in order to leave room for the following letter. SIR, "I am a constant reader of the 'Looker-on,' and confess I am pleased with your manner of treat ing those diseases of the mind which have fallen under your contemplation. I have not yet, however, had the good fortune to find in it a sufficient remedy for my own. In order therefore that my case may be taken into consideration, I will give you as accurate an account as I can, both of the symptoms of the complaint, and of the methods I have used towards its cure ; requesting that whatever may appear to promise relief to your distressed patient, may be published in your paper as soon as possible. "I am a bachelor of about fifty years of age, and am a prey to a passion that consumes me. I can rest neither night nor day for the rage I feel for authorship and the honours of genius; the trophies of some Miltiades or other are for ever disturbing my peace. How early this passion gained possession of my mind, I cannot accurately inform you; but to the best of my remembrance I perceived the first intrusions of it about fifteen years ago, when I was admitted a member of the Royal Society. My whole distress arises from my inability to discover whether I am a man of genius or not. is a discovery which I am extremely anxious to make, before I either entirely resign the thoughts of becoming an author, or determine to enter upon this toilsome career. This "Various are the means which I have pursued, and laborious are the researches which I have made, to convince myself of a truth so necessary to the establishment of my peace or the increase of my fame: among others, I collect from all quarters the lives and anecdotes of great men; and according as I find a similarity between their habits and my own, I judge of the extent of my capacity. The consequence of this is, that when I discover in myself a congeniality of thought or coincidence of be haviour with them, I am elated above measure, consider such an agreement as an undoubted proof of my genius, and feel my soul expand with secret assurances of immortality on earth; but if no points of similitude discover themselves, I am thrown at once into despondency, and feel myself sinking to the level of those who have lain long forgotten in their tombs. As I look upon superiority of genius to be the highest felicity here below, and dulness as a terrible visitation, my mind is continually bandied between hope and despair, dejection and pride. "All the night before last I passed in waking dreams of greatness, occasioned by my having somewhere read, that, after the ordinary attendance at college, the great John Locke had, like myself, been judged unqualified to take his degrees. But this happiness was only of a night's duration : in the morning my hopes were at once blasted, by reading in Plutarch's Lives, that Cæsar was afflicted with an epilepsy; a disorder from which I unfortunately found myself free. The melancholy impressions produced by this discovery were very soon removed by overhearing my landlady tell one of her neighbours, that during the paroxysms of a violent fever I had acted as dean Swift used to do in his periodical fits. "My manners also are as variable as my happiness is uncertain; for when I can detect no traces of similitude between my ordinary habits, and those of the great man whose life I am reading, I take violent pains to accommodate myself to the model I so much admire. I have suffered, however, greatly in the course of this laudable ambition; for having heard that Ben Jonson used commonly to write without his coat, forgetting to inquire at what time of the year, I sat at my desk all January last in my doublet and hose, till I caught a rheumatism that nearly cost me my life. Hence the different lives I read have as great effect upon my conduct as the passions of the cameleon upon the colour of its body. At one time I am silent and sober, like Addison; at another, convivial and loquacious, like Steele: this day I assume the sternness and incivility of Johnson; again, I am all submission, like Gay: now, I am proud and imperious, like Swift; then, like Thomson, modest and unassuming: in short, I constantly carry along with me the spirit of the author whose life I am perusing. "In the pursuit of this great object of my life, I have often pushed my inquiries very far into the profundity of natural causes, but have been as unsuccessful in this as in my other attempts. My escapes, however, from a total discovery of dulness on the one hand, and my disappointments in not attaining to a complete confirmation of my ingenuity on the other, have been narrow and numerous. All hopes of immortalizing my name were very lately almost entirely cut off, by reading an account of giants and pygmies in Goldsmith's Natural History. Here in opposition to my favourite theory, that the minds of men are great in proportion to the size of their bodies, that author attempts to prove, that the middle stature is best fitted to nourish intellectual powers; and that any great deviation from this size, whether above or below it, argues in general an imbecility of intellect. "I was more than relieved from the depression of mind occasioned by this senseless theory, when I found that Fenton the poet was six feet two inches high, which is precisely my size. I recovered from a similar dejection, that arose from reading somewhere that the powers of the mind begin to decay from the age to which mine is approaching; when I recollected that Milton was older than I am when he began his Paradise Lost. "But the question which has given me the greatest trouble to investigate, is, whether my head be of that particular shape which is necessary to constitute a man of genius. I have been the more intent upon this object, as I thought it offered the most promising appearance of a complete demonstration. Lavater I have perused with great attention, as also a number of other famous physiognomists; but though I do not suppose myself deficient in point of mathematical genius, I have never been able to perform the mensuration according to the rules they lay down. "I would recommend it, as well worthy the attention of some person who has arrived at a due estimate of his abilities by the aid of this criterion, to construct a machine of such a nature, that, upon its admitting or excluding the head, the extent or weakness of the capacity may be ascertained without further trouble. I should consider it, too, as a great improvement of such a machine, if, since some are fitted by nature to excel in one branch of literature and some in another, it could have the additional property of pointing out a direction of our talents conformable to the design of nature. "This would be one of the most solid inventions with which the genius of man has yet been inspired. Its utility would diffuse itself over all professions, trades, and degrees: agriculture would recover her sons, of which the pulpit, the bar, and the senate, had robbed her; and many a Cincinnatus would be recalled from the plough, to the bench and the cabinet. I cannot help being surprised, that in this age, in which a spirit for the improvement in manu |
