but that they are flowers which bloom in their season, and charm with their fragrance the passers by of one generation, then disappear, and are remembered no more. This is the order of Providence, and it is wise and good; for were the Almighty less liberal of his gifts, though the possessors being "few and far between" might be more admired and longer, the world would be less benefited than by that perpetual succession and supply (according to the demand for literature) of minds worthy, perhaps, of any age, but formed peculiarly to suit the taste, the manners, and the society of their own. Among Chalmers' "English Poets," for example, how many names, once illustrious, now merely catalogued, are prefixed to works, unread though unforgotten, on which talents as diversified and as well cultivated as the circumstances of the times would allow were painfully expended, to delight and improve mankind; each of whose possessors hoped, besides serving his own generation, to leave something behind which the world would not willingly let die. Yet it may be questioned whether some of these, had they lived in other periods, or under different orders of things, might not have taken far higher rank among the candidates for fame, and established permanent claims to the veneration of posterity. Is not great genius, as we call it, when fortunately developed, and favoured by many contingencies, without which it never would have been so developed, more common than is generally imagined? Is there not at all times and every where a class of intelligences which may be trained up to become generals and captains in literature, in comparison with the rank and file out of which they may be called by peculiar events in their own or their nation's history, and without which they could not have risen above the ordinary state of their less distinguished, but, perhaps, equally capable companions; as the working bees in a hive, as some naturalists tell us, when their queen is lost or taken away from the little community, by a particular regimen, may be nourished up into queens, and from labourers become perpetuators of the race? There seems some probability for this hypothesis, fanciful as it may be deemed, because in all extraordinary emergencies, whether in the world of politics or of literature, minds of the first order are invariably brought into activity from the motives, the means, and the opportunities then afforded to them, though they could never have risen above the depression, mediocrity, or neutral indifference to which they were born, in which they had long lived, and must assuredly have died, had it not been for those apparently accidental opportunities which gave them distinction and pre-eminence, by a change in themselves resembling a new creation, but in reality only an awakening of latent powers.