That poets (using the word comprehensively, as including artists in general) are a _genus irritabile_, is well understood; but the _why_, seems not to be commonly seen. An artist is an artist only by dint of his exquisite sense of Beauty—a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying, or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Deformity of disproportion. Thus a wrong—an injustice—done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets _see_ injustice—_never_ where it does not exist—but very often where the unpoetical see no injustice whatever. Thus the poetical irritability has no reference to “temper” in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness in respect to Wrong:—this clear-sightedness being nothing more than a corollary from the vivid perception of Right—of justice—of proportion—in a word, of το καλου. But one thing is clear—that the man who is _not_ “irritable,” (to the ordinary apprehension,) is _no poet_. 23. Let a man succeed ever so evidently—ever so demonstrably—in many different displays of _genius_, the envy of criticism will agree with the popular voice in denying him more than _talent_ in any. Thus a poet who has achieved a great (by which I mean an effective) poem, should be cautious not to distinguish himself in any other walk of Letters. In especial—let him make no effort in Science—unless anonymously, or with the view of waiting patiently the judgment of posterity. Because universal or even versatile geniuses have rarely or never been known, _therefore_, thinks the world, none such can ever be. A “therefore” of this kind is, with the world, conclusive. But what is the _fact_, as taught us by analysis of mental power? Simply, that the _highest_ genius—that the genius which all men instantaneously acknowledge as such—which acts upon individuals, as well as upon the mass, by a species of magnetism incomprehensible but irresistible and _never resisted_—that this genius which demonstrates itself in the simplest gesture—or even by the absence of all—this genius which speaks without a voice and flashes from the unopened eye—is but the result of generally large mental power existing in a state of _absolute proportion_—so that no one faculty has undue predominance. _That_ factitious “genius”—that “genius” in the popular sense—which is but the manifestation of the abnormal predominance of some one faculty over all the others—and, of course, at the expense and to the detriment, of all the others—is a result of mental disease or rather, of organic malformation of mind:—it is this and nothing more. Not only will such “genius” fail, if turned aside from the path indicated by its predominant faculty; but, even when pursuing this path—when producing those works in which, certainly, it is _best_ calculated to succeed—will give unmistakeable indications of _unsoundness_, in