Secondly, real genius has not always received its due meed from the world. Like real religion, it has found itself in an enemy's land. Resisted, as it has often been, at every step, it has not been able uniformly to maintain the dignity, or to enjoy the repose, to which it was entitled. Men of genius have occasionally soured in temper, and this has bred now the savage satisfaction with which Dr. Johnson wrote and printed, in large capitals, the line in his "London"-- "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed;" and now feelings still fiercer, more aggressive, and more destructive to the moral balance of the soul. It is a painful predicament in which the man of genius has often felt himself. Willing to give to all men a portion of the bread of life, and unable to obtain the bread that perisheth--balked in completing the unequal bargain of light from heaven with earthly pelf--carrying about fragments of God's great general book of truth from reluctant or contemptuous bookseller to bookseller--subject even after his generous and noble thoughts are issued to the world, to the faint praise, or chilly silence, or abusive fury of oracular dunces--to the spurn of any mean slave who can find an assassin's cloak in the "Anonymous," and who does not even, it may be, take the trouble of looking at the divine thing he stabs, but strikes in blind and brutal fury; such has been and is the experience of many of whom the world is not worthy; and can it be wondered at, that some of them sink in the strife, and that others, even while triumphing, do so at the expense of much of the bloom, the expansive generosity, the all-embracing sympathy which were their original inheritance? Think of Byron's first volume, trampled like a weed in the dust--of Shelley's magnificent "Revolt of Islam," insulted and chased out of public view--of Keats's first volume and its judicial murder--of other attempts, less successful, such as the treatment of Carlyle's "French Revolution," at its first appearance, by a weekly journal (the "Athenæum"), which _now_ follows his proud path with its feeble and unaccepted adulation, and then speak with more pity of the aberrations into which the weaker sons of the muse have been hurried, and with more respect of the stern insulation and growing indifference to opinion and firmness of antagonistic determination which characterize her stronger children.