infections of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected, to visit the forsaken, and to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries." In persons of genius, defects sometimes appear to take the place of merits, and weaknesses to act the part of auxiliaries. The "plastic nature of the versatile faculty" is such that common laws do not govern it, nor common standards judge it. "Men of genius," says an acute historian and critic of literature and literary men, "have often resisted the indulgence of one talent to exercise another with equal power; some, who have solely composed sermons, could have touched on the foibles of society with the spirit of Horace or Juvenal; Blackstone and Sir William Jones directed that genius to the austere studies of law and philology which might have excelled in the poetical and historical character. So versatile is this faculty of genius, that its possessors are sometimes uncertain of the manner in which they shall treat their subject, whether to be grave or ludicrous. When Brebeuf, the French translator of the Pharsalia of Lucan, had completed the first book as it now appears, he at the same time composed a burlesque version, and sent both to the great arbiter of taste in that day, to decide which the poet should continue. The decision proved to be difficult." Hence it is that men of genius and their productions are often enigmas to the world. "The hero," says Carlyle, "can be poet, prophet, king, priest, or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. The poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a heroic warrior too. I fancy there is in him the politician, the thinker, legislator, philosopher; in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is, all these.... Shakespeare,--one knows not what he could not have made in the supreme degree."