We are not at all surprised at the intoxication which seizes the literary men and artists whose genius procures for them the favour or admiration of women. Everybody knows it is the most fascinating and transporting flattery which the mind of man can receive. But we confess we are surprised, and that too not a little, at the _want of sense_ which so frequently makes men even of the highest abilities mar the influence of their own genius, and detract from the well-earned celebrity of their own productions, by the indiscreet display of this vanity, which the applause they have met with has produced in their minds. These gentlemen are charmed with the incense they have received, and of course desirous to augment it, and extend the circle from which it is to be drawn. Well, that is their object; let us consider what means they take to gain it. These consist too often in the most undisguised display of vanity in their conduct, manner, and conversation. Is this the way likely to augment the admiration which they enjoy so much, and are so solicitous to extend? Are they not clear-sighted enough to see, that, holding this to be their aim, considering female admiration as the object of their aspirations, they cannot in any way so effectually mar their desires as by permitting the vanity, which the portion of it they have already received has produced, to appear in their manner or conversation? Are they so little versed in the female heart, as not to know that as self-love acts, if not in a stronger at least in a more conspicuous way in them than in the other sex, so there is nothing which repels them so effectually as any display of that vanity in men which they are all conscious of in themselves, and nothing attracts them so powerfully as that self-forgetfulness, which, estimable in all, is in a peculiar manner graceful and admirable when it is met with in those whom none others can forget? Such a quality is not properly modesty--that is the retiring disposition of those who have not yet won distinction. No man who has done so is ignorant of it, as no woman of beauty is insensible to her charms. It is more nearly allied to good sense, and its invariable concomitant--a due regard for the feelings of others. It not unfrequently exists, in the highest degree, in those who have the strongest inward consciousness of the services they have rendered to mankind. No man was more unassuming than Kepler, but he wrote in reference to his great discoveries, and the neglect they at first met with, "I may well be a century without a reader, since God Almighty has been six thousand years without such an observer as me." Yet is this universally felt to have been no unworthy effusion of vanity, but a noble expression of great services rendered by one of his most gifted creatures to the glory of the Almighty. Such men as Kepler are proud, but not vain, and proud men do not bring their feelings so prominently or frequently forward as vain ones; for pride rests on the