However the personal character may contrast with that of their genius, still are the works themselves genuine, and exist as realities for us--and were so, doubtless, to the composers themselves in the act of composition. In the calm of study, a beautiful imagination may convert him whose morals are corrupt into an admirable moralist, awakening feelings which yet may be cold in the business of life: as we have shown that the phlegmatic can excite himself into wit, and the cheerful man delight in "Night Thoughts." SALLUST, the corrupt Sallust, might retain the most sublime conceptions of the virtues which were to save the Republic; and STERNE, whose heart was not so susceptible in ordinary occurrences, while he was gradually creating incident after incident and touching successive emotions, in the stories of Le Fevre and Maria, might have thrilled--like some of his readers. Many have mourned over the wisdom or the virtue they contemplated, mortified at their own infirmity. Thus, though there may be no identity between the book and the man, still for us an author is ever an abstract being, and, as one of the Fathers said--"A dead man may sin dead, leaving books that make others sin." An author's wisdom or his folly does not die with him. The volume, not the author, is our companion, and is for us a real personage, performing before us whatever it inspires--"He being dead, yet speaketh." Such is the vitality of a book! CHAPTER XXI. The man of letters.--Occupies an intermediate station between authors and readers.--His solitude described.--Often the father of genius.--Atticus, a man of letters of antiquity.--The perfect character of a modern man of letters exhibited in Peiresc.--Their utility to authors and artists. Among the active members of the literary republic, there is a class whom formerly we distinguished by the title of MEN OF LETTERS--a title which, with us, has nearly gone out of currency, though I do not think that the general term of "literary men" would be sufficiently appropriate. The man of letters, whose habits and whose whole life so closely resemble those of an author, can only be distinguished by this simple circumstance, that the man of letters is not an author. Yet he whose sole occupation through life is literature--he who is always acquiring and never producing, appears as ridiculous as the architect who never raised an edifice, or the statuary who refrains from sculpture. His pursuits are reproached with terminating in an epicurean selfishness, and amidst his incessant avocations he himself is considered as a particular sort of idler.